It’s been a month, so it’s time for another Post-Release recap!

Balance and Difficulty Changes

Like mentioned in April’s blog post, we’ve been working on balance and difficulty changes: The first part of this was “Chill Mode” (aka Easy Mode). This mode gives the player damage resistance that increases as their HP gets lower, easier boss patterns and also a lifeline where health orbs can randomly spawn nearby when a player is low on health! We hope this mode will suit players who wants to go on an adventure but not necessarily be under a lot of pressure skill-wise.

Conversely, we’ve realized that the gap between Normal and Hard is very big – especially considering Zhamla’s moves of disabling the Health Potion and Barrier; two tools that a lot of players feel forced into when playing the mode. For some, Normal feels like a cakewalk and Hard like a punishment.

To better serve this crowd, we will adjust the difficulty of Hard Mode, where Zhamla will allow you to use HPot and Barrier, and the mode will generally be made slightly easier across the board. It is basically equivalent to Catalyst 2 in Arcade Mode, with some adjustments.

We will at the same time introduce a fourth difficulty: “Expert”. This mode is slightly harder than current Hard, mostly due to the Health Potion and Barrier being weaker right from the start. Overall, though, the experience will basically be the same as current Hard.

The Hard Mode-achievement will be rebranded as an Expert Mode-achievement, and everyone who has unlocked it will keep it but under the new name!

Shield Training

The shield is overlooked by a lot of players, and its importance isn’t really made clear enough in the game today. To introduce players to the shield in a more formal way, and hopefully instil its many uses, we’ll be adding a short shield-training sequence to the Collector’s Trials in the beginning of the game! This sequence will be hosted by Master Ji of the dojo and one of his pupils, who will demonstrate and have you try your shield out a couple of times before you begin the battle part of the arena.

We’ve wanted to add some sort of shield training to the game since really the beginning of the development, but never found a good spot to squeeze it in during the rather hectic development. Our main focus was always to get as much content out as possible, which – as you know – was occassionally a bit of a struggle due to our perfectionism. However, now that the game is released and we see how difficult it is for some people to remember the shield at all, we feel it’s time to finally add it in.

Here’s a couple of animations made by Fred in preparation for this:

The Production Booklet

The creation of the production booklet, or the behind-the-scenes book that will summarize this 13 year long journey, is well under way. 33 pages have been written and designed so far, though we expect it will be at least two to three times longer before all is said and done. Here’s a few sneak peeks (note that this is a WIP with missing pictures and adjustments, and the text is yet to be edited):

Next Time…

Before the next update on June 1, we hope to have the new difficulty settings properly tested and implemented along with the shield training! Stay tuned for that :)

It’s been a while since release and it’s time to get back to the office after a short break! I have to say it still feels pretty surreal that Secrets of Grindea has finally been released – although the development will continue on for quite a while.

In this first ‘real’ update since the release, I thought I’d share with you what our plans are for the game in the near future:

Rebalance

One of our prioritites going forward will definitely be to take a look at the overall balance, especially late-game. We’ve already made some decisions in regards to this, such as:

* Giving the Evil Eye’s laser and barrage a slightly longer delay, which should give players a bit more time to position themselves accordingly.

* Giving Luke’s explosion sprites smaller colliders, which means you can be closer to them without taking damage.

* Giving Luke’s whirlwind spin-across-the-screen an improved indicator, which should make avoiding it easier.

* Keeping the Furious (Red) Giga Slime at the same level it was when the player first encountered it, rather than having its difficulty scale with the player’s level.

* Adding “clarity options”, making it possible to hide pets and summons belonging to other players.

* Finding some way(s) of pointing players to the support skills when needed.

* Not having to complete all of the more difficult phase shift challenges in Mount Bloom in order to get the true ending.

New Game +

We do know that we want a New Game+ mode. What that entails exactly we haven’t decided exactly yet, but our idea so far is that:

* You’ll keep your character and all of your gear and loot.

* You’ll be able to collect every card again, increasing their stats and bonuses.

* You’ll need to have gotten true ending to unlock New Game + by talking to a character (probably Bishop).

Other Game Modes

Along with New Game + we intend to release two new difficulties: Chill Mode and Hardcore Mode. Chill mode will be the equivalent of an Easy Mode, for those who would like to enjoy the story without the hassle of too challenging gameplay, while Hardcore Mode challenges you to finish the game with only one life – when you die you die.

Misc

Other than that, we’re also looking at:

* A new options for full screen resolutions, where black borders will make sure the pixels remain intact instead of getting too mushy.

* Making it possible to easily swap between a quick-slotted weapon and your previously equipped weapon.

* The option to bind a potion slot to a separate button, instead of having to use your “potion-belt”.

* A prompt that will let you copy a previous multiplayer session’s world state rather than having to go through every quest separately when you enter your world in single player.

* giving translators a top credit spot and the option to add their own credits at the start of the game

What About Console Ports?

This is something we’d like to do, but we’re not yet certain exactly how much work it would entail. We’re gonna look into it and make a decision in the near future.

The Blog Update Frequency

As the game has been released and a lot of our work going forward will be balancing and things that don’t generate too much visual output, the blog updates will go from being posted once a week to once a month.

That means that the next blog post will be available on May 1st, and at that point you’ll get another recap on what we’ve been working on since last time. Until then, have a good April! :D