This week our main focus has been the final cutscenes for the true ending! It’s pretty incredible to finally see the first iterations of the very very very last scenes of the game. There’s still a bunch of polish and animations needed for them to be complete, but the base is all there.

Here’s an early sketch of one of the final scene designs I’ll be making a proper background for as well:

Pretty exciting, huh? Stay tuned! :)

A while back we had supporter tiers where you got to design an item or a quest for Secrets of Grindea as a reward. Now, with the game nearing release, I’ve been going through our lists of these purchases, and the emails our backers sent with instructions to make sure we’ve gotten everything right.

For the most part the items we’ve received designs for have already been put into the game, but there’s a couple we’ve yet to finish. Unfortunately, quite a few haven’t gotten back to us at all yet, meaning there’s a whole bunch of items yet to be designed! While it’s always possible to add items after the game is released, I’d very much like to include as many as possible when the gate reaches 1.0.

To that end, we’ve just sent out another reminder that it’s time to get back to us with your requests. If you know you’ve backed one of the tiers where item design was a reward – please check your mail!

Honestly, I have to say that overall it’s been great collaborating with our supporters to make their ideas a reality. I don’t think it’s too common for game developers to have the opportunity to work so “hands on” with their audience, and we’ve certainly enjoyed the chance to involve you guys in the creative process. We hope that the designs created by our supporters will add to the richness of the game and it’s definitely gonna be interesting to see if anyone can guess which items are collaborations with backers and which ones are not!

As for the actual production of the game, this week’s focus has mainly been the cutscene where the final boss dies. We’ve gone through a bunch of iterations in terms of dialogue and timings, and we’re getting close to being satisfied with the whole thing.

We’ve also added some new effects and NPC animations for the final cutscenes:

This week it’s back to focusing on finishing up that final boss fight. As you all know by now, the true final boss is none other than Zhamla, so of course he needs a few more animations to wrap things up!

We’ve also spent this week fixing bugs, working on the “battle won” cutscene for after the fight and doing the foundation work for a small post-credit scene for those that manage to beat the game and get the true ending…. :)

I’ve also completed most of the pages for the production book! I’m going to wait until we have finished the game properly before I write the rest, in order to add some comments on how things went post-release.

In the meantime, I’ll be focusing my time on the visual novel and sketching ideas for possible upcoming projects once this release is all done. Pretty surreal to start to think about what comes next after all this time!

This week we continue on with the very final parts of the game! Certain characters have gotten some new animations, and the credits are in the game (though we’ll keep adding Snowbacca tier names until we close the tier for purchase):

We’ve also gone through and selected a whole bunch of sound effects for the parts that still lack sounds! We’re going to need some more after this (specifically for the last two bosses), but we’re well on our way of having sound effects for the entire game now.

In terms of what remains now, we’re looking at:

* Finishing up the final boss fight
* True Ending, meaning a few more cutscenes
* The post-end state of the world, showing how things have changed after the final battle
* Bug fixing galore!

In other words, not much remaining, but also a bunch of things that are pretty much impossible to guess how long it’ll take (specifically the bug fixes). Let’s cross our fingers things go smoothly from here on! :D