Secrets of Grindea News

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!
  

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



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

Summary

The feature everyone's been waiting for since day one has arrived (in a somewhat limited form): Player Housing! Also a potentially very significant bug fix.

Details

HOUSING

Alright, so here it is! The beta of the housing system! It's quite a big addition so I'm expecting there to be some bugs lurking around.

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

What you can do right now is furnish the house with the ~150 items that are available right now, you can resize the room, you can save & load houses and you can adjust lighting.

What's there is just some polish and more content away from being what we would consider an acceptable housing system. In other words, where we go from here is kind of up to you guys! We did have plans to let players design much larger houses, with multiple rooms, or have some different layouts players can pick from, but then we felt we might be overscoping a bit too much on a feature that might already be at the point players expect.

Do you feel this version gives you sufficient freedom to goof around, or do you want to be able to furnish multi-room houses (as promised by Kim)?

POSSIBLE MAJOR BUGFIX

Alright, so this is a bug that's been eluding us for quite some while now... we've seen it before on computers our school lent us when going to a few events in Sweden, but could never replicate it ourselves. Then, a few weeks ago, Fred's computer broke down and we had to get him another one. Lo and behold, there it was!

By the look of things, there's a bug in XNA (or a bug on some computers, if you will), that makes XNA misinterpret the time. Basically, XNA believes time is running about 15 % slower than reality. Now 15 % slower is a lot and this has probably affected the feel of the game for a bunch of people. How many we can't tell.

By using some diagnostic classes that most certainly do have a firm grasp of time, I've made an alternate FPS-counter for the game, and the bug can be identified by the game itself by comparing that FPS counter with XNA's, and if they diverge, the game switches to counting time via my system (which itself is rather unproven, and so is only used on problem computers).

It will be quite interesting to see if anyone on the forums notice a difference! It will be quite huge, if so.

This bug might also explain some of the more aggressive lag complaints: if one player is running the game at 85 % speed, then it's a tough task for the other clients to sync correctly with that player.



Hotfix June 1, 2017

• The game is now saved when a house is saved
  
• Shroomies once again dies when you kill them
  
• When using a controller, carpets are now placed with A instead of X
  
• Carpets can no longer be expanded onto other carpets, causing them to disappear into the void
  
• The carpenter no longer upsets the space-time-continuum by existing on two places at once
  
• Fixed a bug where you could rotate a bonsai tree in certain positions to break its hitbox and then crash the game
  
• Although she deserves vengeance, Miki's ghost no longer crashes the game if the ball is placed right after getting your house
  

Additions

• The carpenter has arrived in Evergrind and will now sell you a piece of land with your own house!
  
• Player replies to NPC questions can now be translated
  

Bug Fixes

• Added a potential fix to a bug that might've caused severe slowdown on an unknown number of machines
  
• The protective cubes of the Winter Wizards can now damage the players multiple times
  
• Jumpkins and Shroomies now lose their target on loss of sight, and shouldn't teleport through walls
  
• Jumpkins and Shroomies now get pacified for a moment when hit by attacks
  
• The Second Wind talent should now work properly for clients in multiplayer
  

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!



Depending on what your feedback is, we'll either wrap up the housing system and ship it to Stable and continue down the list of non-story content, or we'll spend the next couple of weeks expanding the housing to allow for building your own housing layout (or choosing between presets).

The current list of non-story content:

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

Summary

The stable is finally updated! Tai Ming is now available in all its supposed splendor, together with a bunch of quality-of-life changes for stable users, like updated world map and damage numbers.

Details

For Frontline users, the only things that have changed are an added shield built from Thorn Worm parts, as well as Kinton's arm being healed and Sizou being a bit more vague on the subject of how long Zhamla has been gone.

Frontline users might notice that their version now also says Stable, and that's because they are currently one and the same! When new Frontline content comes out, the version will be called Frontline again.

As for DRM free Humble Builds, these will come in about a week! The reason for this is that there is no automatic updates or even update notification system on Humble, meaning if there's some major bug that slipped through, or is caused by getting all the major changes all at once, the game would have to be redownload and reinstalled. Thus, we like to treat the DRM-free version as an "extra Stable" build to save everybody potential extra headaches.

Also, for those of you who have bought the OST, it has now been updated with all the new tracks found in Tai Ming! (Though at the time of writing this it's stubbornly refusing to download for me inside Steam)

Patch Notes

For Frontline users, it's just the above changes!

For Stable users, it's the combined content of several patches, and the best way to get it all listed is to go into the game, view the patch notes and press TAB to aggregate them into one giant set of patch notes. There might be some spoilery stuff in there, though!



It's been a long time now since we've put our full focus on anything but the story. Me and Vilya had a short stint of it while waiting for Fred's boss animations, and this resulted in the updated World Map and the various new gameplay options (damage numbers, hp bars, etc).

This moment after Tai Ming is a good place for us to do more base game additions and balance changes. At this stage, players have finally unlocked the gold charges on their skills, and there is only one regular dungeon/temple left, so if we want to get proper testing done on the changes we make, we can't wait any longer!

Also, since core- and mechanics changes are usually most intensive on code, and least intensive on animations, it's a great opportunity for Fred to get a head start with the next set of enemies! He's already started working on the foes you'll meet in the next area.

A while ago we toyed with the idea of having the community vote for what features we should focus on before continuing on with the story. However, when we listed all the things we wanted to do, we realized we had such a large web of feature dependency that there wasn't as much room for change as we had hoped. The plan as of now is to implement these things before moving on with more story again:

Player Housing, Support Skills, Major Rebalancing of Combat Skills, Potion Rework, Arcade Mode Revamp, Quest Skipping After Multiplayer Completion, and Some Quests, Secrets and Treasure Maps

For more information on each of these, please have a look at this post from the DevBlog!

These things combined will likely take so long that when they are in the game, both we and you probably want us to get on with the story!

Oh, and we'll also poke a bit at the process of potentially porting the game to OSX and Linux with FNA, both for the obvious cross platform benefits, and also to combat a certain set of bugs within XNA and .NET that's causing trouble for some players.



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!

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: 21-23 for the intended experience

Summary

Praise be, the sounds have arrived! This update is mostly to find any new bugs before the Stable update hits this weekend, but also adds a couple of crafting items and some new items for the shops!

Details

Fark, our sound guy, has finally slogged through the last Tai Ming batch and thus the zone is basically complete! This Frontline update is just an extra net to catch stray bugs that might've slipped through. Also, one quite rare crash bug in particular has gotten some extra diagnostics.

Apart from the sounds, two new weapons can be crafted, and a new shield will be added as the update comes to Stable this weekend! Also, the Tai Ming shops have gotten a few new items.

If you want to replay the patch, you can reset the entire zones or parts of it by using the following commands (contains spoilers, so don't read until you've finished the patch):

/taiming3reset - Resets the entire last area and puts you back in zone2
/zhamlareset - Resets the battle against Zhamla
/mimicreset - Resets the battle against the Mimics




Additions

• The whole of Tai Ming now has its sound effects!
  
• Added a couple of craftable weapons made of Tai Ming ingredients
  
• Added some new items to shops in Tai Ming
  

Changes

• Thrown Thorn-Worms now land with a bang instead of just meekly going into their digging action
  

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could soft-lock clients in the first zone of Tai Ming if teleporting away before completing it
  
• Fixed a bug that could make clients jump too far into the future and disappear during the mimic battle
  
• If getting a card with the Angel's Thirst equipped, the new card's ATK bonus is now added properly
  
• Other players now move correctly on clients when bouncing around during Phase Shifting
  
• Not-yet-living enemies should no longer display their HP-bar even with the setting Always On
  
• Enemy HP Bars appear and disappear with a bit more grace with the Always On setting now
  

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, the Stable branch should get the entire Tai Ming arc in one big, fat blob. Until then we'll squash any new bugs that get reported, and continue the preparations for the non-story content that lies up ahead!

Examples of non-story content:

• Player Housing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Support Skills
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

We'll provide more info on what's going to come after Tai Ming when the Stable has been updated!

Frontline only! Click here for Frontline instructions



Recommended Level: 21-23 for the intended experience

Summary

Protip: if you ever want to make a game that takes a billion years to finish, make only bosses and cutscenes. So without further ado, here's a patch full of almost only bosses and cutscenes!

Details

Copypaste disclaimer: This is one of those real Frontline updates, meaning the polish level is at maybe 80 % or so. Place holder sounds, some missing effects, etc! Old timers know what to expect!

Also note: Just like with the crafting recipes, the items sold by the shop NPCs will be changed a bit later on! We'll definitely add some new baseline equipment, and some new hats.

Finally, finally, the third zone is done and the temple is "complete" in the story sense. The playtime vs. dev hours for this patch is low, but we hope you enjoy the story advancement and "cool stuff" enough to make up for it. For those of you who feel it's totally not worth it, you can take comfort in the fact that there will likely be nothing that even remotely compares to Tai Ming when it comes to the level of work required per gameplay hour, until the very end of the game!

This update contains two bosses, one of which is rather weird, and we'd really appreciate feedback on both of them, because while we have a bunch of ideas on buffs and nerfs we're really unsure if they are too ez pz or too difficult!

In other words, we're super interested in hearing what you guys thought of them, and also what level your character is, and what primary skills you used when battling through the patch!

Please provide your feedback as a comment to this announcement!

If you want to replay the patch, you can reset the entire zones or parts of it by using the following commands (contains spoilers, so don't read until you've finished the patch):

/taiming3reset - Resets the entire last area and puts you back in zone2
/zhamlareset - Resets the battle against Zhamla
/mimicreset - Resets the battle against the Mimics




0.681a Notes (04/04/2017)
Additions & Changes:

• A rather easy to reach chest has been added to the final zone of Tai Ming
  
• The first cutscene and the Mimic battle has received their sound effects
  
• Solving the puzzle in the mimic room during the battle now grants the puzzle reward immediately
  
• Jumpkins should now function better in multiplayer with high latency (100+ ping)
  
• Shroomies should now function better in multiplayer with high latency (100+ ping)
  

Bug Fixes:

• A certain timed boss encounter's HP Bar should now render properly even with custom fonts
  
• Fixed a bug where certain dead enemies would leave their HP bars behind when HP Bar setting was set to Always On
  
• Shroomies should no longer get knocked out of the map on death by powerful skills
  
• Insect Swarm can now target the second Mimic stage properly
  
• If Shadow Clone is active during a certain cutscene where the player is lifted into the air, the shadows no longer stand on the ground
  
• Angel's Thirst now properly applies its ATK bonus if equipped when loading a character
  
• Player pets (slimes, rabbys etc - not summons) should now properly fade out on clients when watching cutscenes
  
• Rolling barrels should no longer be able to get stuck in walls
  
• Rolling barrels now have smaller hitboxes (roughly half, placed towards the direction they're rolling)
  
• Moving dead Living Puzzle Blocks (wait wat) should now be synced correctly between server/client
  
• The caged statue in Puzzle World no longer becomes invulnerable if caged again after being incapacitated
  
• If forced into IP network option due to Steam being down, the game now changes back automatically when the game is restarted (if Steam is up)
  

Hotfix 03/27/2017

• Angel's Thirst now actually gives the ATK bonus it says it does
  
• Shiidu no longer lets itself be manipulated by the style slot
  
• Standing behind the second mimic as the time shifts no longer leaves the player stuck inside the wall
  
• Saving Shiidu during the fight now correctly stops additional enemies from spawning when it's over
  
• You no longer become trapped in the arena after completing a challenge inside
  

Hotfix 03/26/2017

• Game no longer crashes if returning to second zone
  
• Game no longer crashes if you try to talk to Bishop, or the priests chanting
  
• Enemies should once more respawn in the second zone of Tai Ming
  
• A certain boss name is no longer Giant Thorn Worm
  
• You now get the enemy entry of the temple boss after defeating it
  
• Missing cards should now be back
  

Additions

• The third and final part of Tai Ming is now playable!
  
• The first two parts of Tai Ming now have most of their sound effects added
  

Changes

• There are no longer any GUN-D4M projectiles that goes through a Perfect Guard
  
• A player stuck inside a slime prison can now wiggle to quicken release
  
• Unique items gained from chests and quests can no longer be dropped (traded), but most can still be sold
  
• Shockwaves (like from the Living Puzzle Block) can now be reflected with a perfect guard
  
• Giga Slime's hammer strike can now be perfect guarded without breaking the shield
  
• Giga Slime (all versions) should now function better in multiplayer with high latency (100+ ping)
  
• The living puzzle block should now function better in multiplayer with high latency (100+ ping)
  
• When farming in the same area, the amount of respawn slots occupied by an enemy now differs between enemies, and if they are Elites
  
• Two Elite Echoes of Madness can no longer spawn at the same time
  
• The Thorn Worm return-damage now has a maximum equal to the power of the enemy attack
  
• There's been a number of minor changes to flavor text/dialogue for better lore consistency - nothing that changes the overall story
  
• For a moment after zoning, Frosty Friends won't block players
  
• Clouds and Frosty Friends now have 'safe zones' in a lot of cutscenes, where they go to not block the view of the action
  

Bug Fixes

• Mundi and the artifacts now have the common sense to flee the scene when the Giant Thorn Worms appear
  
• The Giant Thorn Worms and their appendages now obey the damage number settings
  
• Teleporting away from Tai Ming during the first few introduction cutscenes no longer softlocks the game
  
• Steam Friends playing a different version (Frontline vs Stable) is now marked as such to avoid confusion with failed connects
  
• Using Gold charge Heroic Slams in multiplayer now looks proper for the other players
  
• Killing Giga Slime while it's in the air no longer leaves its shadow behind
  
• Respawning in the past after dying in Tai Ming: Inner City no longer removes player collision
  
• Typing in text prompts with movement bound to letter keys should now work better
  
• The lobby chat scroll bar has been released from the asylum and should now work properly
  
• Exiting the game in the middle of the Santa Fae cutscene no longer soft locks the game
  
• Dead players no longer have superfluous empty healthbars above their heads
  
• In Arcade Mode, having the Pet Fae active while receiving a reward from Bishop should no longer crash the game
  
• Removing stuff from quickslots with a controller now actually removes what you've selected!
  
• Static touch cubes no longer permanently disappear after phase shifting into a barrel
  
• Teleporting into Mount Bloom now properly triggers 'Go to MtBloom' quest objectives
  
• Enemy shield damage will no longer show despite damage numbers being turned off
  
• Summons should no longer try to kill the corpses of certain defeated bosses
  
• Ivy no longers stands up at the table to stare at players if they talk to her after her cutscene
  
• Using certain timerifts in Tai Ming Inner City should no longer deactivate the enemies at the entrance
  
• Elite Echoes will no longer get locked in by the puny barriers of mortals
  
• The Insect Swarm now properly damages the Giant Thorn Worms
  

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 fix any bugs that undoubtedly will appear as this patch gets played through, and await sound effects from the zone from our overworked sound guy! When these two things have happened, we'll finally get to update Stable with the entire Tai Ming "temple" at once!

After that, we'll spend some time on non-story content, such as:

• Player Housing
  
• Arcade Mode Updates
  
• Support Skills
  
• Skill Balancing
  
• ...and other stuff!
  

We're going to compile a complete list of possible non-story features that we want to add, and let the community discuss what priority they should have!