Vilya's Workblog

It's Friday, and the Bow and Talent patch is officially live! Go try those things out and let us know what you think. To summarize, the patch includes 21 new talents, sound effects for the utility skills and the revamped bow including a bunch of upgrades! As always, the full patch notes can be found over here~

In Fred's department, there has been three main things going on: making the bow upgrading NPC, continuing polishing the Solem animations..:

...and starting work on our next system upgrade, namely the potion rework! Once the rework is live your character will visually drink the potions, so that had to have a neat animation of its own:

Today I've been finishing up my part of the new and improved bow stuff! First up, a slight edit of the portrait from yesterday, adjusting the eyes somewhat after feedback from my fellow Pixel Ferrets:

Next, it's time to actually make Little J feel at home next to Robin's hut! In order to do this, and make it more obvious that there's something for the player to gain by talking to this guy, we're making a bunch of improvements to the surround area. Starting with some sketching:

First thing we'll do is add a notice board of sorts, where the next bow upgrade available will be displayed. Here I'm using the notice board from the Arcadia rework as a base:

Now that the board is done, it's time to bring in the bows and edit them all slightly so they merge better with the board. The very first bow won't be on display since that will be the one you'll have from the beginning (and the first upgrade will be available from the start):

Next, some ground decorations: a bunch of arrows, and a quiver next to Robin's door:

Finally, Little J's working table, where an old bow and some arrows lie forgotten:

And here's Robin's place after the added stuff! You can kind of see a difference in quality of the props made now compared to the old ones. Maybe someday (when the game is done), we'll go back and touch up old areas, improving the overall graphics. For now, we'll try to steer clear of doing too unnecessary improvements, as we want to finish this game within our lifetime:

As some of you have noticed, we also (finally) made a cover image for Secrets of Grindea on Twitch. It's been on my to-do list for a while, but has been pushed back due to other things being more important - but with this bow upgrade being mostly out of the way, I decided to throw something together before moving back to Arcadia stuff.

So to make the cover image, we wanted to use graphics already available to us, at least for now. Maybe in the future we'll do something more epic. Using the capsule image from Steam and a screenshot of the Arcadia rework, we pieced some graphics together and made a couple of mockups which can be viewed below (pretending to be Path of Exile).

We resized our mockups on top of other games in order to get a feel for what the image would actually look like in the end - you're supposed to provide them with a quite large jpeg file, though for the most part its resized by Twitch as seen below. We felt the best way of trial and erroring this was playing around in Photoshop rather than uploading 500 versions of the image and trying it our in real time:

In the end, we decided to go with the third one. The big version can be seen below! Note that the logo has been resized into a bigger version in a rather crude way, which means it's a little blurry. This is because we didn't want to completely remake it and take more time from doing actual game stuff at this point. Since the image is mostly viewed in a much smaller version where the blur won't be visible anyway, we felt this was OK for now:

In order for you to be able to upgrade your bow, we need someone who can help you do that! While Robin, who first gives you the bow, might seem the obvious choice, we didn't want him responsible for more than one mechanic - and as he's currently in charge of the shooting mini-game, it seemed it'd be a better idea to make another character who can deal with bow upgrades.

Introducing Little John (who might end up with a different name once he's implemented):

This guy will be carving bows either inside or outside Robin's house. Either way, he'll be close. Once he has a new upgrade for your bow you'll be able to purchase it for some gold.

Time for the final batch of talent icons! Final three General talents + the Melee talents!

Alchemist - Potions refill faster. Pretty self explanatory talent, and to make things even easier to understand visually I used the other potion talent icon as a base for this one.

Arrow Scavenger - Increases the number of arrows dropped by enemies. Featuring a bunch of arrows (or the ends of them anyway)!

Quickshot - Shoot arrows faster. For this icon I took one of the bow icons and put some effects behind it that I hope illustrates its increased speed!

Blood Thirst – Killing an enemy grants increased attack speed for a short duration. With a name like this I kind of wanted to make a blood thirsty animal or beast of some sort. Not super sold on the look, so might change it around in the future - we'll see!

Combo Starter – After a normal attack, your melee skills have increased critchance for a short duration. Since we already have a ton of basic looking swords in the old talent icon, I went with a different kind of blade this time!

Knowledge is Power – MATK gives ATK. Using a book from another talent icon as a base, I changed its color around, making this icon's color scheme a mix between magic colors and melee colors.

Riposte – Perfect guarding within x range of an enemy deals some damage to the enemy you guarded against. Bringing back the perfect guard icon to use it as a base once more, I changed the colors around to better work with the melee page.

Sudden Strike - After being out of combat for a short while, your next normal attack will have increased attackspeed. Here we have another regular-looking blade, but dropping from the sky this time!

Final lineup:

As we move on with implementing the Talents, it became clear we needed to finalize some things in the game - namely the bow and the new potion system. It felt like a given that these systems should have their corresponding Talent(s), but we felt we couldn't truly decide what they should do until we knew exactly where we wanted to take these features.

So, we sat down and had a long discussion about how exactly these will change.

Starting with the bow, it will get quite an overhaul! It will get a rather big damage increase, but will have lowered speed (meaning you can't spam arrows as fast), and the droprate of arrows will be decreased. You'll be able to upgrade the bow at a new NPC available where you first got the bow, and new upgrades will unlock about every time you complete a new dungeon. This will unlock new visuals for the bow as well as increased damage. You'll be able to upgrade your quiver multiple times through crafting as well.

There will be two new talents for the bow, one which increases its speed (at max level this should bring it back to its original ultra-fast speed), and one which increases the droprate of arrows.

As for potions, we've talked about the general idea several times before. Basically, you will be able to carry three magical bottles, each of which can be filled with the potion of your choice (however, we've decided you cannot carry more than one of the same kind). After you use a potion, it will start refilling itself when you're in battle: specifically, the refill will start every time you deal damage to something and it will lasts for x seconds after your last damage.

To make using them easier, the three potions will be a single item, meaning a single quickslot. As you press the button to use it, an interface similar to the Frosty Friend/buff interface will appear, allowing you to select which potion you want to consume by pressing up, left or right. The interface will disappear once you drink a potion or release the button.

Potions already have a talent where it makes the effect last longer, but we'll add another that makes them refill faster.

These will be the next things to implement, and should be available along with the new talents in the upcoming patch!

Teddy and Fred have kept busy this week as well! Most of the talents are already implemented in some shape or form, and Fred has for the most part returned to working on completing the desert enemies by cleaning up their animations (specifically the Solem who he had to abandon to make new graphics for a bunch of skills):

He's also been working on new visuals for the bow, each a new upgrade (exactly how much powerful each step will be compared to the last has not yet been decided):

Meanwhile, we've made a decision to make chain buffing easier. Instead of having to bring up the interface again for each new player you want to buff, you'll now be able to cast the buff on all of your teammates in one go:

Just a small thing that will hopefully make playing a support a little easier on your fingers!

Today we continue on with the next batch of Talent icons, focusing on those for the general tree!

In order of appearance, starting from the top and moving to the right:

Unknown - An as of yet unknown armor talent. We had one remaining general talent to come up with, and Teddy half-jokingly asked me to come up with an icon and we'd come up with the talent based on that. I don't know if this will actually end up being a real talent, but I decided to rise to the challenge! Seeing as both the Melee and Magic pages have an armor talent each, I figured it was only fair to have one in general as well, using the icons from those pages as a base.

Our ideas for it range from having increased armor while battling bosses, starting off new fights with increased armor and a bunch of others. But again, this may not even end up being an actual talent, we'll see!

Utility Flow – Chaining Utility skills lower their EP cost (the more utility skills you use in a row the cheaper their cost in EP, up to a maximum percentage). A talent designed with the true support players in mind, who need more EP to buff a full team! This was a bit of a challenge to come up with, but after discussing what kind of icon to use for this talent, we came up with having an increasingly bigger ball to illustrate the chaining of skills.

Efficient Counter – Perfect Guarding lowering the EP cost of the next skill. For this icon, I used another perfect guarding talent icon as base, but changed the colors and details around to better reflect it's EP bonus.

Got You Covered – Increase buff duration. An hourglass with an arrow up. Perhaps one of the more descriptive icons out there!

Health Insurance – Increase healing from health orbs. A bunch of health orbs against a (finally appropriately used) green background!

Kinetic Energy – Get EP from blocking attacks with your shield. Once more, a shield with our signature EP color: purple.

Lady Luck – Introducing a low chance of enemy attacks missing your character. At least for us, the most well-known symbol of luck is a four-leaf clover, and so that became the base for this icon.

Metabolism – Increase EP regen. Not much to say about this icon: some EP against a blue background.

With the layout out of the way, it's time to start looking at creating icons for the new batch of Talents being implemented. First up though, a slight update of the Arcadia perk icon "Smart Start", as you'll now get the wand seen below rather then the green rod:

Okay, onto the Talents. We'll begin with the Magic talents, which I've managed to put into a single long gif with the power of Photoshop (wohoo):

In order of appearance:

Concentration – Increase resistance to having the (magic) spells channeling interrupted by enemy hits. For this icon I made an eye, as it feels like you often focus your eyes when you concentrate. Or maybe that's just me?

Fast Talker – Increases castspeed. And yet I used an open mouth to make a play at the name of the Talent, rather at something relating to speed. To make it more readable I first wanted to show some of the person's face, but ended up changing it around to showing their neck and some clothing instead.

Soul Siphon – Hitting an enemy with a wand projectile will grant the user some EP. My idea here was a slime which oozes of EP. My first version of this wasn't very readable so I changed it to small orbs instead of a crazy ooze.

Specialist – Increase damage depending on how many skillpoints you have in the same magic tree (as an example, the more fire skills you level, the stronger your fire skills will be overall). Supposed to be a magnifying glass on top of four colors representing each elemental skill tree.

Wand Master – Icreased damage from wand projectiles. And here we have a wand, and an arrow pointing upward! Might change the color from green, as green, as always, tend to make people think about healing. We'll see!

Final lineup:

And as always, these are subject to change as we come up with better ideas or hear your feedback!

Okay! Time to take a break from Arcadia stuff and dive into the next big thing (or patch) that we'll get around to in the next couple of weeks. I'm of course talking about those new talents! And you already saw the mockup we made of how we'd like the General talent page to look:

The above design was originally thrown together by Teddy, but it's my job to make sense of it and turn it into something that actually works in reality. To do this, we first need to make a new mockup using the maximized version of each talent, as that graphic is significantly larger then the unleveled ones used above.

Then comes the exciting issue of what to do about the shield! With so much going on in the page, it can't remain exactly as it was before, or it'll be covered by a bunch of talents. As such, we spend a lot of iterations trying out various layout ideas until we found one we liked:

As you can see, the shield is a lot higher than it was before, but though we experimented with reducing its size, in the end we stuck with the large one:

Meanwhile, the Magic and Melee talent pages didn't need as much editing, as their icons were of less height - however they are also quite a bit higher in the layout to match the shield of the General page. These pages will have fewer talents altogether, so there's a lot more whitespace in these layouts compared to the General page as well, but hopefully that won't be too annoying on your eyes as you move between the pages:

One week has passed since we got back to work! Teddy's main focus since then has been bug fixing galore, as the previous patch introduced a bunch of bugs (as they tend to do) and brought some old ones up to light as well.

The talents we decided upon now have names (though some are subject to change):

Knowledge is Power - MATK gives ATK
Riposte - Perfect guarding within x range of an enemy deals some damage to the enemy you guarded against
Blood Thirst - Killing an enemy grants increased attack speed for a short duration
Combo Starter - After a normal attack, your melee skills have increased critchance for a short duration

Fast Talker - Increase Castspeed
Soul Siphon - Hitting an enemy with a wand projectile will grant the user some EP
Concentration - Increase resistance to having the (magic) spells channeling interrupted by enemy hits
Specialist - Increase damage depending on how many skillpoints you have in the same magic tree (as an example, the more fire skills you level, the stronger your fire skills will be overall)
Wand Master - Icreased damage from wand projectiles

Got You Covered - Increase buff duration
Metabolism - Increase EP regen
Health Insurance - Increase healing from health orbs
Lady Luck - Introducing a low chance of enemy attacks missing your character
Utility Flow - Chaining Utility skills lower their EP cost (the more utility skills you use in a row the cheaper their cost in EP, up to a maximum percentage). A talent designed with the true support players in mind, who need more EP to buff a full team!
Kinetic Energy - Get EP from blocking attacks with your shield
Efficient Counter - Perfect Guarding lowering the EP cost of the next skill

We're currently experimenting with a melee talent that increases the attackspeed of your next normal attack(s) when you've been out of combat for a short while. In the general tree, there will also be at least one talent relating to the bow.

We're also considering increasing the number of talents in the general tree to 21 (as opposed to the planned total of 20). The reason for this is that we'd like to fit all talents in a single page, without the player having to scroll down. Our idea is to go for something like this (super early mockup WIP, obviously, we'll have to adjust all of the graphics to make this work):

It's a bit cluttered, but with a few adjustments we hope it won't be too messy on the eye. We believe, at least, it will be better this way than to introduce scrolling. In the Magic and Melee talent sections, things won't get as cluttered either, as they won't have as many talents: at least for now, our max total is 15 each.

And to end things this week, I'll throw in a brand new portrait!

Since I got back I wanted to try a slightly different rendering style for the final sprite (particularly for the eyes), which I think turned out alright:

Moving on to the Arena, we decided to make it larger (and in turn, more detailed)...

...So we made the top part of it higher, and the whole thing wider. For decoration, we added a few posters showing upcoming challenges or fights to take place in the arena. I mean if they don't advertise what kind of stuff goes on there, how will the NPCs of Arcadia ever get interested enough in going? Gotta sell those tickets!

And here's the new and improved, slightly bigger arena:

We're also preparing the Aquarium change(s)! First by moving it and the bank to align with the cinema, and next filling the top part of the Aquarium's roof with water. In the water you'll see fish silhouettes once it's properly added to the actual game:

Finally, increasing the size of the map:

It is rather a lot bigger now, but most of the extra space will be covered in trees and only serve to not make it feel like the map is cut off too close to you. It does feel a little more epic if you can imagine the vast forest expanding around the town, after all!

So, time to begin working on those changes. First up, the clock tower!

As some of you mentioned, it's a little short, so we'll make it slightly longer (though honestly, not by much: we still want the bell on top to be clearly visible when you enter the building). We also wanted to make the clock bigger and more detailed, so that when you change what time of day it is, the clock will change as well. Also, some silly decorations, because why not:

And here's the new and improved, slightly longer version of the clock tower:

Next up, some minor detail additions for the Cinema and Inn, adding some fences and decorations. Proper grass, flowers and further details will be added once this second iterations of town is completed:

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