Secrets of Grindea News

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: Everyone's invited

Summary

Support Utility Skills yo!

This is one of those real Frontline updates! All the sounds are either placeholder or missing, and some effects aren't final etc, but the functionality should be enough for testing!

Details

The Utility Skill prototypes have arrived! There are nine of them: three defensive, three offensive and three regular ol' buffs!

The utility skills differ a bit from regular skills in two ways: first off, they have no charge levels, meaning they will cast at full power with a tap of the button. Second, they only need three skill points to reach max level. We did this to make each level a bit more worthwhile, since unlocking charge levels is no longer the main goal with leveling. Also, it makes it so it's a bit more viable to skill for full support playstyles. It makes the support skills a bit less of a "silver point dump", but we're considering other mechanics for that instead!

Our hopes with these skills are not only to allow for people to go for supporting playstyles (buffing friends, debuffing enemies, crowd control, etc) but also to add more options for tweaking play styles in single player.

Now we'd love to hear your feedback on all sorts of things! Please share both if you dislike something, or if you enjoy a skill! Is the skill satisfying to use? Is it nice visually? Is it confusing? Does it seem too weak or too powerful?

For us to be able to evaluate the feedback properly, remember to add the circumstances when you played! Such as if you played alone or with friends, where you were fighting and if you were under- or overleveled compared to the enemies!

Something to note: This patch does not include some of the Utility-related talents we've planned. These include talents that heavily reduces EP cost when casting many buffs in a row, for example, and they will primarily make it more viable to play a full support. Right now managing EP for such play styles is a bit too tough!



Additions

• The real Utility Spell Page has been added! (formerly known as 'Support')
  
• Most importantly, you can now do a new emote by typing /annoyed
  

Changes

• The Haste and Protect spells have been removed (if you've put points in them, they've been refunded)
  
• If Marino runs through a player during the chase sequence, the player will get shoved away instead of just run through
  
• Santa Fae now counts as a safe zone and entering it refills HP and arrows
  

Bug Fixes

• Naniva's introduction banter with Bag is back after disappearing a few patches back
  
• Quinton no longer keeps his quest update icon if you don't talk to him when returning with Amalet
  
• Tai Ming's second zone's farming spot now properly counts statues as active enemies when deciding whether to add more respawns
  
• When defeating Freddy and Teddy on the bridge, the fist one defeated no longer 'bonus twirl' when the other faints
  
• Housing: You can no longer confuse the Carpenter to give you a couple of billion lumber and some pocket money to go with it
  
• Housing: Entering and exiting the housing menu quickly while moving Miki's ball no longer create multiple copies of her
  

If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!



We'll see what we'll do with the Utility spells based on all of your feedback! I imagine we'll be tinkering some with effects and numbers based on what comes up during testing. Whenever the spells are ready, we'll move on to the giant balance overhaul (called "Skill Balancing" in the list below)!

The current list of non-story content:

• Player Housing Done!
  
• Support Skills (< Here we are!)
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Skipping quests completed in multiplayer Done!
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

Recommended Level: anyone who's gotten past the first dungeon can build a house

Summary

This patch brings the housing stuff (and some other changes) to Stable! For Frontline players, there's nothing new to see - this is basically 0.708b.

Details

Carpenter and Kim, now bringing not-very-affordable housing for everyone!

The housing system ended up with the following features: ~150 items to decorate with, you can expand the house to be roughly four times the size of Evergrind City (if you've got a million gold or so to spare), you can save & load houses and you can adjust lighting for each room.

While the housing tools are feature locked for now, we'll of course keep adding furniture to fill up your houses with!

To get the house, talk to Carpenter and Kim in Evergrind City (they're next to the school).



If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!



The current list of non-story content:

• Player Housing Done!
  
• Support Skills (< here we are)
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Skipping quests completed in multiplayer Done!
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

Support skills!

Or, as we'll most likely call them... Utility Skills! We've already had a meeting at our local burger joint where we went through forum discussions and outlined what we wanted to achieve with the skills, and we also picked out 8 skills to create prototypes for.

We'll give a more thorough rundown of the skills before the next Frontline patch, but here are some key points:

* No skill should be useless in single player, meaning no ally-only spells

* The skills should be powerful enough to make an impact matching the EP investment

* The skills should not be more powerful with 4 allies than with 2 allies (or no allies)

* I'll rip this bandaid off right away: there will be no healing spells, but for the protective supports we'll experiment with a barrier spell that can block damage

* Utility skills will have 5 levels, and no charges - they are made to be cast quickly. This helps both solo players, who can incorporate utility spells easier in their gameplay, and also "full supports" who can cast the spells quickly on multiple friends

As always, nothing is set in stone and we'll see what changes and additions that are made based on feedback from you guys! Stay tuned for more detailed info on the skills!

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: everyone who's gotten past the first dungeon

Summary

A final touch has been added to the housing system: the ability to add, delete and move doorways as you like! If things are working properly, Stable will get the housing in a couple of days.

Details

A rather vexing limitation to the house expansion system came to light when you guys started using it: the inability to add new doors (to connect more than one room to each other), and also to move a doorway to an existing room without deleting the entire room.

To address this, we've added a new tool (Doors) that allows you to add new doors, and added the functionality to select doorways and move/remove them using the hand tool!

This is the last Frontline housing update before Stable gets it, and, uh, this time we mean it!!



Additions

• Housing: You can now add doors to connect existing rooms
  
• Housing: You can now delete doors and move doors around using the hand tool
  
• Housing: Made a totally brand new wallpaper for y'all, for sale at the carpenter!
  

Changes

• Housing: Weapon displays can now be rotated
  

Bug Fixes

• Hopefully fixed a bug that would cause the audio to disappear randomly in Arcade Mode
  
• The game will now properly identify if it's on the Frontline beta, even when the version is identical to Stable
  
• Housing: The game will no longer crash when reaching the room width limit of 127
  
• Housing: Canceling a wall decor move no longer turn the selected item invisible
  
• Housing: It's no longer possible to 'swallow' furniture by resizing reshaped walls into them
  
• Housing: Fixed a bug where new rooms would sometimes inherit the connected room's light settings
  
• Housing: Fixed a bug where sometimes black boxes would appear around rooms with low light settings
  

If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!



If the new stuff doesn't break things, we'll patch Housing into Stable in a couple of days (Tuesday) and then we will really start working on the long overdue support skills (we pinky promise)!

The current list of non-story content:

• Player Housing (Nearly there!)
  
• Support Skills
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Skipping quests completed in multiplayer Done!
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: everyone who's gotten past the first dungeon

Summary

Say goodbye to your gold and hello to Quantum Lumber and the housing layout tools!

Details

HOUSING

As promised, here are the housing layout tools! Considering the relative complexity of this update, I'm expecting about one bazillion bugs, so brace yourselves!

Anyways, you can now purchase Quantum Lumber from Carpenter and use it to expand your house (by adding rooms and/or resizing your current one). You can also drag down or push up walls to make the shapes of rooms a bit more interesting.

These tools aren't 100 % polished, mostly because we don't know what people will get instantly and where we'll need to add visual feedback to make things easier to understand. We want the tools to be clear in what they do, so if you have any feedback on that front, feel free to share!

All in all, we hope this addition will enable you to create a more personal house for your characters! We won't add more house shaping tools for the foreseeable future, but we'll keep adding lots of new housing items as the game progresses, so feel free to keep suggesting those!

When the bugs have been ironed out and some polish applied to the interface, we'll send the housing update to Stable and we can finally get on with getting those support spells into the game once and for all!



Additions

• Housing: You can now purchase Lumber and use it to expand your house!
  
• Housing: You can now pull down and push up walls to change the basic shape of rooms
  

Changes

• The Housing Settings menu is no longer designed by me (hi, I'm the programmer)
  
• Weapons that glow will now have a light effect when placed on a weapon stand
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug causing the Collector's Exam-quest to stop updating if skipping the Giga Slime cutscene
  
• Fixed an out-of-bounds bug in the room to the left of the lobby in Temple of Seasons
  
• Fixed a bug causing the game to crash when dragging out carpets in long rooms
  

If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!



As soon as the new housing tools have been polished up and any bugs related to them have been fixed, we'll patch the whole shebang into Stable and start working on the long overdue support skills!

The current list of non-story content:

• Player Housing (Nearly there!)
  
• Support Skills
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Skipping quests completed in multiplayer Done!
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: everyone who's gotten past the first dungeon

Summary

This update contains a bunch of minor fixes and additions to the housing system! Also, there's now a prompt allowing you to skip quests you've completed in multiplayer. This weekend (we hope) there should be a slightly bigger housing update, which is probably the last before Stable gets it all.

Details

HOUSING

We've changed the size of a few items that had very large, annoying gaps of empty space around them, and also added a few new items! Most notably the weapon displays, allowing you to place a weapon and display it in your home.

Hidden is also the ground work for a pretty extensive addition which was mentioned in yesterday's weekly recap - adding rooms and adjusting their shape! This functionality still isn't quite ready, though, so you'll have to wait for the next update to expand your house (if things go as planned and don't get too bugged out, we aim to release that patch during this weekend).

SKIPPING QUESTS

People who've played large parts of the game with friends will know that when they return to their own character, world progress such as completed quests will not carry over! Considering the game has now reached a pretty decent number of hours of content even for the main story alone, this realization might be quite annoying.

With this patch we introduce a basic version of content skipping, which specifically allows you to skip past quests that you've finished in another player's world. Whenever you receive a quest, a popup will appear asking if you want to skip it, and choosing yes will alter the world state to match. This system allows for quickly skipping through content you don't want to play again, and play through things again if you want to be more thorough in single player (like reading dialogue you skipped because of your infuriatingly impatient pals).

Since the system is tied to quests, as these are one of the few world related things that get saved with characters, an additional quest has been added for when the player reaches the Evergrind Arena for the first time. On old saves, this quest will be added automatically.



Hotfix June 13

• Fixed a bug that could delete or duplicate items if the game was exited immediately after placing or retrieving a weapon from a display
  

Additions

• Added a system that lets you skip quests you have already completed as a client in multiplayer
  
• Housing: Added a new craftable item for the house (ancient statue)
  
• Housing: Added a few new housing items available in the carpenter shop (wallpaper, weapon displays, toy train)
  
• Housing: Chairs can now be rotated in all four directions
  
• Housing: The basic bookshelves can now be rotated
  
• Housing: The large statue of a woman now has a skin where it's clean from moss
  

Changes

• Patched an attack speed exploit involving switching weapon to cancel a charge animation ;(
  
• The gold drop progression of enemies has been altered to give better rewards to endgame enemies compared to midgame enemies
  
• Housing: Modified the following items to better fit the space they take up: Beer Keg, Flower Crate and Bush of Seasons
  
• Housing: The Hand Tool now has a light attached to it so you can move stuff around more easily in a dark house
  

Bug Fixes

• The player house will no longer get razed for the festival!
  
• Housing: The Temple of Season floor's grass border is no longer rendered above carpets
  
• Housing: Furniture is no longer rendered above the borders of the room
  
• Housing: The long white table is now the same size as the other colors
  
• Housing: Rotating a short black table no longer turns it brown
  
• Housing: Fixed a bug that was giving people a new giga slime chair each time they started the game
  
• Housing: The Carpenter no longer sells two of the same candelabra
  
• Housing: Fixed a bug that crashed the game if placing a table in a corner, moving it, rotating it, and then canceling
  

If you want to follow the progress and get a glimpse of the wonderful hell/heaven hybrid that is game development, you can check out our DevBlog! Be warned that it contains spoilers, though!



This weekend (we hope), we'll release the system for expanding the house. If it's well received and works as it should, we'll patch housing into Stable and start working on the long overdue support skills!

The current list of non-story content:

• Player Housing (In Progress)
  
• Support Skills
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Skipping quests completed in multiplayer Done!
  
• ...and other stuff!