Time for another weekly update on the grind on the final boss battle and the related cutscenes.

This week Fred has been making transitions between different Zhamla animations! Since we want the battle to feel quick and keep you on your toes, it’s important that Zhamla is able to change what he’s doing mid-animation as a response to what the player does. Normally, for any other mob, that just means we cut off the current animation and starting the next, but since Zhamla is one of the biggest sprites in the game that just ends up looking choppy in this case, unfortunately – and with this being the final battle, we definitely don’t want it to look choppy or weird in any way.

Here’s an example of what one such transition looked like before Fred added the bonus-animation:

And here’s what it looks like with his in-between animation added:

Another thing we’ve been working on is editing some of the attack effects to make sure it looks as good as possible. One such example is the spin, which originally looked like this:

Unfortunately we kind of realized it wasn’t nowhere as cool as any of the other spin-animations in the game, so we decided to remake it, using Luke’s spin as an inspiration:

We’ve also received one of the batches with sound effects needed for this final battle, but there’s still a bunch of things we need sounds for so we’re sending those requests over to our awesome sound effect master faRk as we speak.

Finally, we’re continuing to play through the game, adding those final bugs and wonky things to our list of things to fix before 1.0. While we’re finding a ton of stuff, most of them we’re OK with keeping in the game since they aren’t really all that bad, and the rest should be small and easy enough to fix. Onwards!

Another week gone and more boss work finished! This week we’ve been focusing on finishing up the summoning phase during Zhamla’s boss battle, which should (fingers crossed) be done now!

Fun fact, originally we didn’t plan on including Zhamla’s summons at all, but as usual we decided to spice things up by adding some extras to the battle. Also as usual, we’re really happy we did because it’s turned out pretty awesome and, in our opinion, made the battle a lot better.

For now, have a look at some of the recent animations for this phase:

Other than that, we’ve continued playing through the game, catching bugs and discussing what aspects we still want to improve upon. After all, once we hit 1.0 we want it to be the absolute best it can possibly be, a stance we’ve had since we began working on this game some ages past. We’re trying not to polish too much, though – don’t worry! But if there are quick and easy fixes that up the quality of the game significantly we’d be stupid not to consider them.

Okay, time to get back to that final playthrough! See you again soon :D

Hello everyone! It’s me, Vilya, back after taking a few days off to move houses – finally got the keys to a nice old apartment near my hometown. It’s gonna take some time to get it in shape but for now I have a table and a computer and that’s gonna be enough to get back to work :)

While I’ve been away Teddy and Fred have spent their time on two major things: iterating Zhamla’s boss battle and adding a little easter egg for those who explore the game a little bit after beating the final boss and achieving the true ending. Unfortunately this easter egg involves a massive spoiler, so we won’t be able to show any of it here – but I will say it involves a pretty sweet cutscene I think everyone will be excited to see… :)

As for the boss iteration, we have a bunch of videos to showcase what this phase of the Zhamla battle looks like right now:

We’ve basically added of changed a bunch of animations and timings, improved on effects and particles. I personally think this is starting to look pretty amazing! What do you guys think? :D

Eyooo! Fred here, once again standing in for the blogging duties! This time I feel even more unprepared than usual and since I’m not a natural writer in any shape or form, I’m just going to do sort of an animation dump of some random stuff I’ve been tinker with the last few weeks. Some are rendered versions of sketch animations that’ve been posted before, some are freshly made animations straight from the oven. Enjoy!

Frosty with some acrobatic moves! 

Frosty being sent into the shadow realm!

Cloudy doing cloud stuff!

A little lineup of Planty’s attack from first iteration to last!

Finally, some tasty, tasty rock particles!

This week, Vilya is back in action and has continued working on some new backgrounds as well as playing through the game to catch things we’ve forgotten to add. So far she’s written a list of over 50 things, and she’s still only just finished the Temple of Seasons! Not to worry though – most of these things are super small things that will only take a couple of minutes to fix, or optional things we may or may not add. Some may even be added post-release! And some we probably won’t fix at all due to them not being as important as we first thought.

As for the backgrounds, here’s another iteration of one of the puzzle backgrounds:

I think we’re getting to a point where we’re all pretty satisfied with the way it looks now. What do you guys think?

As for Fred, he’s continued working on the summons! Remember the Frosty Fiend smash animation from last week? It’s now officially in the game and looks like this:

Teddy’s been sick for a while yet, but he’s finally getting better and ready to get back into action this week. Stay tuned for more updates next week!

Vilya is still out of commission, Teddy switched out his food poisoning to being sick so I’m once again in charge. In true Fred fashion, I totally forgot to post yesterday as well, keeping up with traditions. Anyway, lesss go!

I think I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive into one of the animations I’ve been working on this weekend; the smash animation for Zhamla’s Frosty Friend. First of all, here is the very first iteration I did of it a few months ago when we began working on all of Zhamla’s summons:

The animation is a bit stiff and lacks impact, but in terms of trying out gameplay this gets the job done and then some. Even if this is intended as a “quick and dirty”-animation, I still spend a decent amount of time at this point to get the keyframes as correct and rendered as possible. I do this because it actually speeds up the rest of the process, I can use does finished frames as a base that I can animate around instead of going fully blind into it. Just diving into it CAN also be useful, it depends on what you’re animating really. For characters doing big movements like this, I almost always end up doing the keyframes first. If it is more of a subtle movement, like an idle, or a more abstract effect or something, I tend to like animating in the order the frames appear instead of jumping to the keyframes.

Oh, keyframes are the frames that contain the most exaggerated poses. So in this case, the keyframes (or poses) would be these three:

So, after this it’s pretty much just, slapping on more frames where I see fit to give it the level of smoothness and bouncyness I prefer. Here you can see I’ve added a bunch of extra frames and smears when his up in the air, preparing to smash!

This looks much better already, but the lack of impact when he lands again is very noticeable and the next thing I’ll fix!

Look at that jiggly little boiiii~ This might even be on the verge of over-animation, but I’m a jiggle addict, what can I do? None the less I really like what this added to the animation. Still feel like there’s some impact missing from the smash, and his “return to idle”-animation is almost none existent. Let’s get that fixed as well!

Ta-daa! Some smoke for that juicy impact and a smooth transition back to idle. In the game, he will recieve some added effects to make him even juicer, but even without them I really like how this turned out. Hopefully, it will feel good in the game as well!

Finishing up with a little side by side comparison of the first and last iteration:

Aaaand, yeah, I think I’m gonna wrap up here. Time to head back to the dungeon to finish up the final animations for the chilly boi! Baaaiiiiii, love you all~

So, Vilya is down with the flu. Teddy was supposed to step in and take care of the blogging duties this time, but in a sick twist of fate, HE ended up getting food poisoned and is out of commisson as well. Which means… Fred’s baaaaack b*tches!

Since I’m super unprepared for this I’m just gonna go with the flow and see what this turns into. SO! Last post we showed a bunch of animations I made for Zhamlas Echo of Madness-attack so this week I figured it would be fitting to show how they look in the game:

I think it looks and plays well, the only thing that needs a bit more polish is the “disappear after attacking”-part. I’ve done a very basic flash that we’re going to try to combine with the current effect, along with some color adjustments:
I think it’s going to look pretty sweet!

Other stuff I’ve been tinkering with, Zhamlas little Cloud buddy has gotten a few new animations to give his bigger attack a bit more build-up and visual feedback. Here’s a video Teddy put together showcasing it all in action:

Fun fact that I’m not sure has been mentioned on the blog: The cloud Zhamla is using is actually the original Gold Charge-version of the player’s cloud. We ended up discarding it because it was way too big and got in the way all the time. It also looks hella menacing, which we decided we didn’t like since the other two versions of the cloud looks so happy and dumb. It fits Zhamla perfectly tho so we figured, why not use it? Ending this random trivia note with a little family photo of the two:

Soo, yeah, I think I’m gonna wrap it up here. Missed talking to you guys, but hopefully, Vilya will be back in full force next week. Let’s all send a bunch of love to both Vilya and Teddy and hope for a speedy recovery. STAY AWAY FROM THE SHRAMP TEDDY!

Another week, another recap! This week, Teddy has finished up the final cutscene of Arcade Mode, adding the new background Vilya made a couple weeks back. He’s also made a bunch of adjustments in the way final boss Zhamla’s plant launches its attacks, and started working on GOG support. Some years ago we decided we’ll be available on GOG as well, and with the release drawing ever closer with every week, it’s time to get that support up and running. Of course, that whole process involves some extra bits of programming such as porting the leaderboards and making sure multiplayer connections work properly.

Vilya has been busy playing through the game and making reports on bugs and other smaller things we need to fix, as well as making some further improvements to two of the puzzle backgrounds in the final dungeon:

We’re still not entirely happy with the second one, so another iteration is sure to follow soon.

As for Fred, he’s finished up the animations for Zhamla’s plant and cloud, and put in a lot of work on a special attack Zhamla makes, that’s a bit similar to how the echoes of madness work in Tai Ming. Here’s a little sneak peek of that:

Now, onwards to another week! :D

Happy new week everyone! Here’s our recap of what happened in Grindea development since last:

Teddy has been working on multiplayer across the final dungeon. There’s been a lot of bug fixes needed, but as of now everything including the final boss should work pretty well when playing with friends!

Vilya has continued working on the final bunch of backgrounds as well as playing through the game to catch all of those last minute fixes and bugs we may need to take a look at. Here’s some progress of one of the puzzle backgrounds, where we’ve added more and more details in several iterations:

She also made a version of the third puzzle background, which will probably be iterated with more details as well:

As for Fred, he’s made a bunch of different animations – the attack and spawn animations of Zhamla’s plant summon and a spawn animation of his version of the cloud, a walk animation for the guards walking downwards and an animation for bag flying out of the player.

Here’s a little sneak peek:

A new week has gone by and more backgrounds have been produced! :)

This time, let’s start off with the various variations of the final Arcade Mode background we showed a first version of last week:

Our favourites here are the bottom right one and bottom mid one – we haven’t quite decided which one to pick yet!

Work on the backgrounds for when you finish the puzzles continue as well. Though we showed a bunch of suggestions last week, we ended up picking a version we didn’t even feature in the post! Here it is:

I also started working on a background for the next puzzle. Here’s my first experiment, as well as a video showing it in action:

We’re going to add some more details to this as well, so it’s not quite final yet. This type of workflow, creating a basic version of something first and adding more details once the first concept has been approved is a very common strategy in game development, one we use a lot as well (as you can tell)! This way we don’t end up wasting too much time on something that will be scrapped anyway, and everyone gets to have a part in suggesting details and improvements.

Another background I’ve been working on is the backdrop for the final battle against Zhamla. For this, we currently have three suggestions:

Our favourite among these is the middle one, though we may end up with a merge between the middle and right ones!

Now, as for Teddy and Fred: Teddy continues working on adding multiplayer to the dungeon. Right now, it should work for the whole elevator trip / boss rush and the puzzle floor, and he’s currently working on making it work in the battle against Dad. There were some issues fitting all of the summons on the elevator in some of the cutscenes if you were a party of four with many summoners, but we’ve managed to find a solution that works alright (essentially hiding the summons during these cutscenes).

Fred’s focus has been making animations for Zhamla and his attacks. The bigger the subject, the more difficult the animations are to get right:

Something that’s just a little bit smaller are these lovely flying beasts that will serve as Zhamlas insect swarm! Here’s a bunch of design iterations, as well as an animation of the finished thing:

Enjoy your week, and let’s keep working! :D