New week, new area! We decided to venture underground for this one, but we still wanted to keep the lushes nature of an outdoors area. So we simply decided the combine the two, to create Mount Bloom.

Filled with enormous mushrooms and strange vegetation, the cave system of Mount Bloom is one of the oldest and largest in all of Grindea. Home to both hostile creatures  and friendly crystal miners in need of help, Mount Bloom is a true test for even the more experienced collectors. Poisonous spores act as a natural defense for anyone who ventures to deep and some even say the caves used to be nesting grounds for dragons.

In other news, Teddy and Fred have finally got a proper work station set up! While working on the kitchen table definitely had its perks, it’s nice to have the “office” up and running.

Since Vilya lives all the way down in the Netherworld, we have set up Teddy’s good old Netbook to act as a permanent satellite uplink!

This week we have focused on adding those small details that tend to make an area feel more alive. Often it’s not the way you make the biggest or most important sprites that makes an area nice, it’s in how you decorate and add details. Here’s some examples of the improvements we made:

Here’s another example, where we did not only add decorations, but also changed the layout quite a bit:

In this room we planned to block the way up the stairs to a key until you solve a puzzle using the machine to the right. However, as we thought about it we realized it would probably be cooler if solving the puzzle itself was enough to unlock the door. Therefore we made the room smaller before redecorating it to look a bit more interesting.

Lastle, here’s an animated gif of what the walls will look like in the game:

We’re really excited about how the dungeon is coming together, and we hope you guys will like it as well.

As we’re writing this we’re also well on our way of refining a specific part of the dungeon where we plan on recording that video we talked about in the previous post. Hopefully we’ll be able to include it in one of the coming recaps!

After gaining weight and laziness over the duration of our little break, it’s finally time to start getting back to work.

Vilya’s still trying to keep the spirit of christmas alive by making sprites for our winter area:

There’s christmas trees, snowmen, and lots and lots of snow, as you can see! Of course, no area is complete without hats, so it’s time we started making a few of those as well:

Another piece of development news, which will be very exciting to some, and not-so-exciting to others, is that we’re working on some translation tools! We’ve gotten quite a few offers to have fansub groups translate our game to various languages, and if there are fans out there who want to bring the game to their non-English speaking countrymen, why not let them?

Basically, it’s a set of tools that can be used by anyone to change dialogue (and other texts). You have access to everything you need, like coloring parts of the text, or adding conditional phrases (like having a character say different things depending on character gender, or how many is in your party). By saving it into the game’s language folder, you can then select it in game.

Our hopes are that the tools will be used to make better translations than we’d be able to get even if we hired someone to help us! In their final version, the goal is to have good support for collaboration, with options to merge different language files and keep the best translated lines.

Also, having an approach like this can let players choose between, say, a literal translation by one group and an idiomatic translation by another. Perhaps a fan with a great knack of dialogue writing will even release an improved English version!

What happened to the dungeon? Fear not, it hasn’t been forgotten! We’ll most likely get back to it in the coming week, after discussing how to proceed :)

Like we promised last week, it’s time for a new update for the beta! We introduce the bow, the boar enemy, a few small new areas and a lot of small fixes and minor polish.

For you guys who haven’t received a invite yet, this week we are inviting a whooping 70 new testers to join the others in the  quest of ironing out bugs and giving us valuable feedback. Check your inboxes over at Desura to see if you have received an invite.

Besides juicy beta news, production is moving forward. We’ve added the last layer of polish to the Evergrind South area, with flowing water and doses of wild life. Below is a before and after picture of the area.

Before (Click to enlarge)

After (Click to enlarge)

Vilya has begun creating art assets for yet another new area that’s coming up after we finish up the dungeon. With Swedish viking blood running through our veins, we wouldn’t feel at home without a proper winter landscape to collect away in.

Click to Enlarge

Since we finished school we have all spread out all around the place, Vilya even opted to leave Sweden in favor for the Netherlands.

We haven’t had any proper “office time” since we left, which has made a few things harder to design, the dungeon layouts being one of them.
Luckily, this week Fred will be heading out on a little business trip and stay at Teddy’s place to rap up as much “face to face”-needed design as possible. Day 1 is already coming to an end with a good amount of office hours and unhealthy amounts of caffeine. We’ll keep you guys posted on this grand adventure of ours!

Modeling is always an option if the whole “game development”-thing doesn’t work out. 

Greenlight

First and foremost, thanks to all of you who voted on us over at our Steam Greenlight page. Thanks to all of you, we just got Secrets of Grindea greenlit and ready to be on Steam as soon as it’s finished!

This week it’s finally been time for us to build a new area! It’s a somewhat traditional forest-y area which houses one new enemy, the bowman’s house and a mysterious mansion…

While it’s not in the game yet (soon!), here’s a WIP preview of what it’ll look like:

Yes, as you might guess that means it’s soon time for the bow to reappear in the game! It won’t have its own skill tree like the traditional weapons, but we hope you’ll like it none the less. We’ll talk more about the bow once it’s actually implemented along with the rest of this area.

As for the new enemy, it’s of course the boar that has made an appearance on this blog before! This time, however, it’s animated – and out to get you!

Can you name the Ragnarok Online inspiration? ;)

Now, back to area-building! With some luck, there might be yet another area available soon after this one.. :>

This week we have spent a lot of time on interface stuff, mainly the skill distribution interface and the shop screen! As they’re not fully implemented you’ll have to wait a bit longer to see how it works, but we promise a video of it in it’s full glory(?) once we’re done!

To move on to more interesting things, Vilya has spent some time of the week doing this abandoned temple that will be a main dungeon in the game!

Click it!

Unfortunately we won’t show any more than the entrance for a while, as we still need to backtrack to get the beta ready & polished, but to make up for it we have a few animations from Fred:

This is a powered up version of the move you saw last week: Blade Flurry. By holding the button for longer, you get that high damaging final strike.

And here’s the equivalent for the two handed overhead attack. If you just press the skill button, you’ll just get one hit off, but if you hold it, you’ll get an additional slash during the startup. This will both yield more damage, and make it easier to land.

Not much to say about this week’s post, except that we’re still working on the Halloween Forest! This week, Vilya has been working on some sweet set pieces, while Fred soldiers on with the many animations. Without further ado, let’s dive right into the pixels!

This here is the house of a candy cooking witch! Somewhere down the line, she must’ve realized candy was better for business than potions. Don’t eat her walls though; she won’t like that…

Here’s an old shrine in a small graveyard, tied to the ancient religion of the world.

On the animation side of things the scarecrow has sprung to life, ready to cause trouble for any collectors traveling through the Halloween Forest!

Next Week: You couldn’t guess: more halloween stuff!

As promised, we’ve been crunching away with the Halloween Forest this week! We’ve got the basic color scheme and props down, as well as nearly all of the enemies that will inhabit the region.

Apart from this screen, we’ve iterated the whole forest layout to something we feel pretty confident will work out, so what’s left now props wise is mostly bigger set pieces, like the witch’s cottage, and putting everything together in a nice way!

Here’s the enemy lineup Fred’s been working on

And below are idle animations for a couple of them!

• The pumpkin will be a cannonfodder-type enemy, which means there will be quite a lot of them, and they are pretty straightforward to defeat (but certainly more deadly than slimes and rabbits)
• The flying jack o’ lantern is a ranged type, and fires small projectiles at the players. He also scales with the number of players, shooting more projectiles if there are many players. His flames can be blocked with a shield, or even reflected if timed properly!
• The scarecrow is a tanky, melee type that can withstand several hits before going into hitstun. Using the shield to find openings is a dominant strategy here.
• Finally, the ghost is a harass type enemy, which stays invisible until it is in position for an attack. It appears as it charges, so you have some time to react, but will fade away again soon after the attack is finished. You’ll want to dispose of these buggers as soon as you see them! They are trickster ghosts of sorts, waiting around for unwary travelers to play with.

We’ll also be adding a plant enemy called Halloweed, which is an upgraded version of the flower you might’ve spotted in our videos. We’re still trying to nail his color scheme though, hence his absense in the lineup! He’ll use his vines to whack players that are close to him, but unlike his less agile brother, this guy will burrow and chase you underground if you’re out of his reach for too long!

Encountering all of these enemies all at once would certainly be a daunting (and frustrating) challenge, so we’ll spread them out a bit and try to make sure the spawn compositions are varied and well balanced!

Next Week: Even more halloween stuff will see the light!

Used to Monday updates yet?! You better be, ’cause here’s another!

For Vilya, this week started off with the return to Pillar Mountains (one of the first areas of the game). We decided that we wanted the mountains to look a little different from the ground levels, so she made new trees (birches!) and huge rocks to fill out the open areas (just like the bushes from the previous post do on the ground level).

Here is a screen of the result:

After this it was time to return to one of our (least) favorite subjects: Menu systems! Because it’s almost time for the first people to try the game out, we thought cleaning up and actually creating a main menu would be a good idea.

This is what it looks like at the moment:

The clouds pass by in the background, and in the future (when Fred has some space in his schedule) we plan on adding birds flying by as well. As for now, only the main screen and character select sections are in place, so our work on this continues this week with character creation, multiplayer hosting and the like!

Freds major task this week has been working out sprites and animations for our multiplayer death/resurrect system. The main focus was on this little ghost fellow, which is what you turn into if you die during a co-op session.

Once you die you can move around freely and while you can’t engage in combat, you can use some sweet ghost exclusive emotes and flavour animations to cheer on your surviving pals! It’s up to them to resurrect you, which can be somewhat hectic if you’re in the middle of an epic boss fight. If all players die and turns into ghosts, it’s game over and you will have to restart from the latest check point!

On a closing note, we’ve submitted the game to the Swedish Game Awards, which is a nation wide student competition here in Sweden. Wish us luck!

Next Week: Menus, menus, skills and more menus!