As you know by now, we’ve been starting to have daily meetings discussing the upcoming final pieces of the game, and today I thought I’d give you a rundown of some of the Arcade things we’ve been talking about!

We’ve mentioned before that it is our goal to shorten to length of Arcade Mode now that all of the floors are being added, as two floors per area is a lot and takes a very long time to play through. Our current idea is that there will be one floor per area, and that we’ll rebalance it slightly so you’ll have come a bit further in the areas before it gets terrifyingly difficult; right now most people die way before even getting halfway through, which is a bit too soon for our liking.

Since we’ll effectively only use half of the floors we have, it means there will be a lot of spare bosses floating around. In order to make each run balanced in difficult, you’ll always meet a set number or the more difficult bosses, while the remaining bosses will be one of those we deem slightly easier. We’ve also discussed the option to have optional bosses out of the remaining pool spawn in their own (clearly marked out) rooms, but we’ve yet to decide exactly how about to go this or if it’s something we wanna do at all.

We’ll also add some gauntlet style rooms, so there will be some rooms where enemies respawn in a couple waves or so, just to mix things up a bit more and make each room feel a bit more unique.

Another Bishop bet we’ll add is one where you have to perfect guard certain enemies before you can deal damage to them, and we’ll make a new interface to indicate when you’re in a bishop bet room; more details on this as I start making it.

There will also be a proper Arcade Mode version of the map, which will give you some indication of how far you’ve come and how far you’ve got left to go. Again, more on this once I start actually designing it.

Finally, we’ve discussed the addition of a special item we currently call a ‘badge’ which is something you can get as a reward or possibly purchase in the shop. A badge will change or your character in some way, such as increasing card drop rate, give new effects for a perfect guard, increase the damage of your next spell based on how many normal attacks you’ve hit, and so on. We might also add ‘mixed’ bags which will give you a stronger bonus in exchange for limiting something else. Such as your spells doing a lot more damage but you’re unable to use the same spell twice in a row.

Our goal with these badges are to make each Arcade run a bit more unique, giving you various options for how you play rather than it always being the exact same playstyle. If it works, we’ll see! We’re gonna play around with it for now and see how it feels :)

As work continues all across the game there are a bunch of smaller things added here and there. One such thing is the ability to now “turn off” the fireplace in your house, which used to be burning all the time! As such, a version of it without the fire needed to be made:

And as mentioned a little while ago, we’re introducing a new interface indicating when you’re in bet room. Here’s the initial sketch:

And the progress/final thing:

We don’t want this to be too much in your face, but a low key reminder of what’s happening. If you fail the challenge, Bishop will teleport away from the interface into the map and perform his punishment as usual :)

And here we have the second maid portrait for the mansion! A dark haired young lady dusting the extensive collections :)

Next, the portrait of Marino’s mom! She’s the lovely lady of the mansion, making lists of all the charities they’re gonna contribute to:

And finally, a look at what’s happening in Fred’s department! With us deciding to finish up a bunch of random things, it’s time for start looking at some of the many loose ends and one of the most asked such things is when you’ll be able to grow those pesky little plants into something you can climb to reach certain places. Well, the answer is soon! And here’s the first step on that way, namely Fred making some graphics for it:

There are also more mansion inhabitant to make, among them a chef to make a fancy dinner for Marino’s family:

We’re back from our little Easter holiday (spent at home)! Did you guys have a nice holiday? We hope you did try to find some peace even in the midst of this crisis the world is facing!

We’ve recharged our batteries and were very excited to get back to working properly. We started off the week with a long meeting discussing the mails we’ve received from a lot of the people who are to design items for the game! As I mentioned before we went on holiday, we would start sending out requests for the designs, and have since received quite a few replies which we’ve discussed and answered accordingly.

If you bought one of the tiers which allow you to design an item, please check your mail and get back to us whenever you can! :)

In order to make it easier for us to read and remember what needs to be made for each item and where to put it in the game, I was then tasked with sorting out a document that includes all of the most recent and relevant information given for each design. As this involves around 30 unique designs made by 30 different people, it’ll be a lot of info to make easily accessible!

We also managed to discuss some more end game things that have been on our mind for a bit; mainly regarding the Bishop’s role in the later parts of the game. I believe we will end up having several more conversations around this topic, and I think the specifics will be better saved for later on… But stay tuned!

Finally, we talked about the fact that a lot of people seem to misunderstand how best to farm in the game, with people often thinking you need to reset an area to farm most efficiently. The way it actually works is that the more you clear out an area, the quicker the respawn gets, so after clearing an area completely and killing the newly spawned enemies for a bit, the respawn rate will accelerate and get quicker and quicker (up to a point). To make this easier to know we’ll add a loading screen tip hinting at it, as well as some info about it in the school (that once it’s properly up and running will feature a lot of random mechanical information about the game).

And now, onwards to continue work on that mansion! :)

Taking the mansion on its first step to completion, starting with the hallway:

We’ll still improve on some things. To start off with, I’ll be making new decorations for the fountains, making them look a bit more luxurious and unique to the mansion. We’re also gonna replace the bottom pools and put some sort of statues and plants around them, and maybe add some paintings on the wall. But that’s for next time!

First, a portrait of one of the inhabitants of the mansion, namely one of the maids! There will be more of these later on, but here’s a start:

And here’s Fred’s work on the maids so far!

In order to get a finalized and proper view of everything left to do for the game and to check in with each other a bit more frequently, we’ve recently decided we’re gonna have (more or less) daily meetings over voice!

During these meetings we’re going to discuss at least one of the things we’ve yet to properly establish until we know exactly all that is left to do and what we need to do to finish it up. This time, our main subject was that of books, how to present them, what books we’d like to add to the game, and so on.

In a previous post I made a new interface for books which is in the shape of an actual book, complete with the ability to turn pages. However, due to space limitations, Teddy is worried that there might not be a way to make such a book while still allowing a good amount of space for the text that needs to be in it. After today’s meeting we’ve decided we’ll at least give it a go, since we feel like an interface like that would look so much better than just a box (even if our fallback plan would be to at least make it look like a piece of paper, rather than the regular brown box). I’ll keep you updated with how our testing around works out.

In terms of books to include, we want to keep a decent balance between informative things that might make the player understand the world and how it works better with more flavourful things like tales of collectors from days gone past.

We want there to be a “quest” (not yet sure if it’ll be an official quest with it’s own quest tracker and everything) where you can find books around the world and hand it in it to the library to read it. And of course, once you’ve found all of the hidden books, you’d get an additional reward as well.

We’d also like there to be a series of book by Grindea’s top author Penn Wryte, so that you can find Part 1 early on in the game, and then continue to find parts throughout your journey, until you have the complete story.

Outside of all this book talk, we’ve also started to send out mails to all of you that supported us in the early days and bought one of the tiers where you get to design items or quests for the game! We expect it will take some time to settle some of the designs, and it’ll be easier to find spots for these additional items to be found before everything else has been finished up; hence it’s about time to get going :)

Now, a look at some of those new faces from the cutscenes, including a few that were only included once the Stable patch went life (if you haven’t played table in a while, now might be a good time to check it out!):

Now, for a much longed for update from Fred’s department! Because of the spoilery nature of nearly every animation he’s made for a long time there hasn’t been many updates from him, but you can view all of his progress in the update which should also be on stable in one of the coming days if it isn’t up already!

Now, however, as we move on to less spoiler-y things, such as the mansion in Evergrind South, we can start showing more stuff again! Here we have a few of the inhabitants of the mansion, starting with the butler (as well as a few options for how he’s gonna look in the end):

Our current favorite is the second one from the left! Which one do you prefer?

There’s also the long awaited(?) appearance of Marino’s father, sitting in his solitude on the throne upstairs:

On to the portraits! Marino’s dad is a character we’ve definitely all longed to meet (no? just me?), and for reasons unknown we’ve decided to be inspired by a famous video game character when designing him, with hints being both in the portrait and the sprite itself. Can you guess who?

And a look at the second portrait, that of the Butler:

With Easter now being upon us next week, and the Stable update released and ready, it’s time for us to take a week off to rest and gather energy for the next stretch of work: finishing up all the loose threads in Story Mode and adding some more quests! Final stretch soon, can’t believe it :)

As usual, the blog will be on pause during our holiday, but it’ll be back up and running on Monday the 20th! Happy Easter everyone, and stay safe out there!