Those of you who paid attention to the text screens in the Phase Puzzle course in Mount Bloom should be familiar with Tonee, who wrote about the course in some detail!

Well, here she is, visiting Tai Ming with her engineer friend from yesterday:

What they're doing there? Showing off the latest Phase Shifting technology of course! These things don't fund themselves, you know ;)

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There's just a tiny amount of portaits left to be made for this area now! Of course, I still have to create a ton of expressions, but not a lot of new characters. This guy is the engineer that helped design the phase shift puzzle elements that are used in the course in Mt: Bloom. 

I know gave a lot of people a headache (at least the more difficult, optional stage), so perhaps this is the guy you should blame? :)

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Today is my birthday! Wohoo! To celebrate, here's the ancient HQ background, which I've been working on lately :)

When designing this place, I wanted it to resemble the Collector's HQ in Evergrind City, only smaller since it doesn't make sense for it to be as big gameplay wise (you won't really do anything in here except fetch a quest or two). So let's take a look at what the Evergrind City HQ looks like:

Okay! Next up, I made a sketch of what I'd like the layout to look like (as always, true AAA sketching here, very detailed etc (nope not really) ;))

And then I just started adding stuff! A GIF of the process can be seen here, but it's really mostly addinng previous props from various places and adjustim them as I go. I also changed the size of the room to be smaller, as it felt kind of huge when I added the game's camera to test the size:

Finally, here's the end result:

I'm considering editing the doors a bit so they'll fit in better with the Tai Ming theme. Also, there will be guards placed outside the doors like in Evergrind City, so you won't be able to enter (though I guess it's kind of rare to be able to walk through closed doors in the game anyway). The doors are only there to make the place seem bigger than it is, really!

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....Aaaand it's high time for another Mixed Bag! 

First up, smoothing out the cave wall edges to create water edges:

Next, as we implemented more and more of the Tai Ming 2nd zone backgrounds, we came to realize we wanted to change some things around. One of those things were the placement of the cave entrance seen below:

Since this cave will be a puzzle cave, we thought it'd be a little bit funny if it was next to the graveyard, in order to illustrate how poor the owner's business choices are. But we found it got a little bit too crowded, so we decided to move the entrance further to the right, and add a small fence to illustrate the end of the graveyard. 

In the present, the puzzle cave has closed since many years, and instead the path to it has been filled with new tombstones:

Another thing we wanted to change was the windows of the monkey lab. Since this building is where a lot of scientific experiments take place, we want to highlight that this building is different from the rest, and in a way, more modern. We already have the more industrialized chimneys, but we also decided to add glass windows rather than the hollow ones from before:

And in the present, as time has passed and worn things down, the glass windows have broken and fallen apart:

Finally, a little sneak peek of our next prototyping business: another 'puzzle' in the puzzle cave. Only it's not a puzzle: instead you're in the present, and the key you need keeps getting snatched away by monkeys:

How annoying!

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Time for another guest post by Teddy, this time on the Housing system! :D

A long time ago, I was working on the Housing systems to keep myself occupied while waiting for some new graphic assets from Vilya and Fred. After a few days I got the graphics I was waiting for, and I left Housing behind to continue working on the story. Now I find myself in a similar situation as back then, and so I decided to go back to tinkering on the Housing systems!

Firing up the old prototype I had made, I remember a grim realization we had made about it: we’d have to scrap the squares.

Take a gander at this perfectly neat and nice 20x20 grid:

Looks like an excellent foundation for a cocobolo desk, right? Well… if the game was viewed directly from above, that might be so. However...

On a 1:1 grid of squares, this is how furniture will look when rotated. The vertical desk on the bottom looks thinner and longer than the horizontal desk, even though they have the exact same surface area: 20x40 pixels! Our brain decodes the drawn perspective on the furniture and decides we’re viewing them at an angle, and when viewed at an angle, surfaces become distorted. The protests of our brain is indeed correct!

Needless to say, the picture above just doesn’t cut it (and trust me - rotating the desks in game felt even worse), so I did some experimenting. First I tried a ratio of 24:15, or 1:0.615, resulting in the exact opposite visual effect:

I was surprised at first, as that is a ratio I’ve used with great results when composing particle effects surrounding players, monsters and NPCs. A short moment later, I remembered that the character sprites are made to be viewed as if they were basically from the side, while our environments are made at a slightly more elevated angle. Mixing perspectives like that might sound weird, but it actually makes both NPCs and the environment look a lot better, and thankfully does not cause any alarm in our brains!

With this in mind, I went for a new ratio of 20:15, or 1:0.75

Behold! The brain is now content, and both desks are perceived to be of a similar size! After finding this superior grid size, I reworked the prototype and added a bunch of things, currently resulting in this award winning home decoration software:

The housing system is still some ways from being done - especially when it comes to user interface and ease of use. We also want to have a solid amount of furniture available, as well as other related game systems to support it (including, of course, being able to visit one another’s houses in online play).

When all is done, we think this addition will make many creative players very happy! Please look forward to it!

The housing system will be made available for player testing during the subsystem fiesta, which we plan to have after we’re finished with Tai Ming.

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The portrait creation continues! This fellow here is the key to a very old mystery: why do the guards in Tai Ming all look alike? The answer is simple - they're all brothers! And their father is non other than this scientist, who currently works in the monkey lab:

When making this portrait I used the guard portrait as a base and recolored and repainted where needed, to make them look similar enough to be related. 

Now, whether there's a similar explanation to why the guards in Evergrind City look the same as well remains to be seen :)

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Over the last year since we launched Early Access on steam, we've received a bunch of recurring questions about the game and it's development. As such, it's long overdue that we update our FAQ on the website, and so, I've gathered a bunch of the questions we get a lot and tried to answer them to the best of my ability:

Why should I buy into Early Access?

If you're asking this question, the correct answer is that you probably shouldn't. 

Buying into EA is mainly recommended for people who wish to be a part of the development: helping us finding bugs, coming up with suggestions or are curious to see how a game develops over time. If you prefer to play a finished game, we highly encourage you to wait with your purchase until it's properly released!

Can you remind me when the game is actually released?

Yes! We have this mailing list for this very purpose. Just add your mail through that page and we'll send you a reminder once Secrets of Grindea leaves Early Access :)

Why is the development so slow? Are you just lazy?

The reason for the development appearing slow is that it's a hand-made RPG made by 3 people who have no interest in rushing the development only to release a subpar product. Instead, we put in the hours we need to make this game as good as we possibly can. 

That means, if we need to add another week of development time to fix some unforeseen bugs, that's what we'll do (and this is why we won't give a proper release date until we're 99% sure we can make it)!

Why don't you have sales?

The most important thing for us during this Early Access period is that buyers are aware of what they purchase in terms of stability, content, etc (which is why we only recommend EA for people who want to be part of the development process in some way). The idea behind a sale is the complete opposite of that philosophy, as it creates an impulse to buy something before it gets more expensive again. Therefore, a sale increases the risk of people buying the game without reading our EA disclaimers, and as such end up disappointed that the game isn't completely finished, or simply not what they expected.

Once we've added everything we want to the game and it's properly released, we will begin having sales, but until then we don't want to lure people into Early Access with time-limited offers. 

For a more thorough answer, see this post on the Steam forums!

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