Secrets of Grindea » Weekly Recap #78: Stuff and Other Things

This week, we have finished up one of the last enemy designs for the Winterland. As of now we call them Frostlings!

Frostling

They are agile little creatures with a taste for mischief. Avoiding to get hit and blocking are preferred when fighting these little trouble makers since they have a habit of stealing gold from Collectors venturing through the Winterland! If they nab some of your cash, you’ll have to whack them with something hard before they escape with your life savings.

These cuties will probably pop up during one of Fred’s streaming sessions in the near future, getting some animation work done together with the rest of the Winterland enemy lineup!

Teddy has spent some time reworking how resetting puzzles work. Instead of our old “instant reset” we’ve implanted a sort of Braid-like system. Besides looking way cooler, this allows players to undo single moves instead of fully resetting the puzzle when caught in a deadlock.

Before:

After:

Click the pictures to view the animated GIFs.

Besides all the secret cool stuff we are currently working on, Fred has been hard at work in the effects workshop. Below is a new animation for when the player receives special items/powers as well as a mixed bag of other effects!

Poof

HitEffect

Explosion

Posted by Secrets of Grindea at 2013/05/21. Tags: animation, Enemies, Screenshot.

Arkantrus wrote at 21/05/2013 03:47:

The new resetting system looks great! So does all the animations! I guess the high quantity of frames (at least more than most games of this genre/graphics) makes them so amazing.

I’d love to be a part of the beta testing, too bad I’m not that lucky :P

Yangna wrote at 21/05/2013 09:48:

Loving the frostlings, yet another great design with some gameplay implications.

Speaking of receiving special items/powers, one thing I’d love to see in Secrets of Grindea is epic moments of progression.
A Link to the Past is kind of the ultimate benchmark for that, with epic introduction of new powers (Master Sword…), of access to traveling system (Travel Duck), or to a whole new and unsuspected part of the world (Dark World).

It’s often more than plot progression, it’s really game changing.
Other games have done it remarkably well and I think these moments are a key part of what makes an RPG / Action-RPG memorable, much more so than epic boss fights.

This is something I’d love the play, and definitely would not want to be told about in the dev blog though.

Keep up the amazing work.

Regards,

Yangna

Sogomn wrote at 21/05/2013 16:59:

I totally agree with Yangna, these Frostling are pretty cool and their gold stealing ability adds some trouble to the game.
The reset-system is something all new! I’ve never seen before something like that! Not even in the old-school Zelda games. Really cool work!
The effects are pretty nice, too!
You never made an update I did not like!

Keep it up!
Sogomn

Pavlos8 wrote at 21/05/2013 22:39:

These animations always are awesome!

Alex wrote at 04/06/2013 06:56:

You guys do amazing work, if there are 2 games you should check out for inspiration puzzle and graphic wise that fit right into this it’s lufia 2 and terranigma.

bingo wrote at 08/06/2013 09:54:

With the animationfor the recieving power ups, where the guys clothes flap, I think it would look a bit more natural if his hair also moved.