Vilya's Workblog

Time to take a look at the General Talents!

We don't have any formal rules when it comes to icon design, but I've made some basic guidelines when it comes to the color scheme too keep things easy to navigate (hopefully). Basically, I use Purple to indicate magic, Green to indicate health, Blue for shield & defense talents and Red for combat.

General Talents

As always, these talents are subject to change, and there will definitely be more added later on! Also, all titles are working names only, and while they all seem to be maxed out at lvl 5 on the screencaps, this will not be the case in the actual game.

Quick Reflexes
Increases perfect guard window by 10% per level.

Shield Bearer

Decreases the movement speed penalty when shielding by 15% per level.

Multitasking
Decreases the movement speed penalty when charging a skill by 10% per level.

Adaptable
Increases ATK and MATK by 1% per level.

Tenacious
Increases max HP by 2% per level.

Last Stand
When under 20% HP, your DEF will increase by 20% per level.

Surgeon
Increases crit chance by 3% per level.

Brutality
Critical hits do 5% more damage per level.

Endurance
Increases max EP by 3 points per level.

Fine Taste
Potions last 10% longer per level.

Today I'm gonna show you the basics of the interface we're gonna use for leveling your talents. There will be three categories: General Talents, Melee Talents and Magic Talents.

General Talents are for talents that affect your character in general. For example, health and defense talents will appear here, as well as talents that affect your shield or bow. The header for this page is a shield and banner:

Melee Talents are for talents that affect your normal attacks and weapon skills, basically all close range combat! The header for this page is a sword:

Finally, Magic Talents are for talents that affect your magic spells in different ways! The header for this page is a magic wand:

As you can see in the screenshots, once a talent has been maxed out it will receive a fancy golden frame. Until then, it'll be purple with numbers indicating how many points you've spent on the talent, as well as at which level it's maxed out.

When all of this has been implemented into the game, only the talent you're currently hovering over will be this bright, the others will be darkened slightly to let you know where you are on the interface. Basically it's the same system that we use in other parts of the menu, so if you've played the game you probably know what I mean! :)

Next up: General Talents!

Lately we've been discussing how and when to add a feature to Secrets of Grindea which lets you improve different aspects of your character, like stat points tend to do in other games. We want everyone to be able to build the kind of character they want, rather than picking a pre-built package with enforced stats and skills. Our first step to achieve this was to allow you to pick whichever skills you wanted at whatever time you wished, but so far we haven't really given people too many options outside of combining different abilities. Time to change that!

We'd like to see more diversity in actual character types, such as certain characters having more hp, attack speed, magic damage, crit chance, etc - depending on what you like. What we've come up with is a system where you'll be able to level a bunch of "Talents" with a separate currency called Talent Orbs. The talents won't all be 'boost stat x', but those will be there as well.

Here's a screenshot of a document in which we're currently brainstorming different types of perks you could level:

One guideline we use is that every improvement should increase by a percentage, so that it doesn't matter if you level the perk now or in 10 levels: it'll still be just as useful to you!

Here's a couple of suggestions we have so far. There's no guarantee we'll be using any of them yet, as we haven't really discussed them in detail so far, but it gives you an idea of how we want to use these perks to encourage a diversity of character types and playstyles:

Wit - After using a combat skill, the next magic skill charges up 20% faster. Can be leveled 3 times.
Prismatic - After using a magic skill, it will cost 15% less to cast another magic skill if it's of another element. Can be leveled 3 times.
Tenacious - Increases max HP by 2%. Can be leveled 5 times.
Brawler - After each normal attack that hits an enemy, your DEF will increase by 5% for 3 seconds. Can be leveled 5 times.

Leveling the talents will cost one orb per level (so far). We expect to have quite a lot of talents in the end, so hopefully everyone will be able to build a character that suits their playstyle!

One of the fun things with being a small team of indie developers is that you get to do so many different things. One day I might be doing portraits all day, another its GUI all the way, a third it's hat spriting... And some days, it's just a bunch of totally different things!

Today was one of those days. I started off recoloring the slime hat, so there's now a red version. Then I had to make an additional expression for the Bag, your ridiculous sidekick. Then I went on to crop 24 different portraits using the system mentioned in yesterday's post. Then I went on to resize and redesign parts of the Fae village, Santa Fae, which you'll be visiting soon if you're in the Secrets of Grindea beta:

We're much happier with this version of the fae village. It's feels more compact, with the space being used much more efficiently. It's no fun just running and running without ever getting anywhere, after all (do ignore the trees overlapping eachother - they are cropped in from a .png and won't take distance into consideration like in the game)!

Lastly, I started sketching and trying out ideas for what the new Skills & Talents interface should look like. We haven't mentioned the Talent system anywhere yet, but it'll basically work like stats but with more advanced options. I'll make a more detailed post about it tomorrow!

Here's a sneak peek of how far I've come with the rendered version:

Just a very basic WIP, as you can see - still lots of work to be done. If you have a keen eye and play the game a lot, there's a couple of changes here that you may notice. The biggest one is of course that we've completely removed the bronze points. The reason for this is that we felt like we had too many charge levels with very little change between them. Before it would look like this:

1. Uncharged - Basic version of the spell. Triggered by simply tapping the skill button
2. Bronze Charge - Small bonus to the spell, no visual upgrade. Triggered by holding down the skill button a short while on any level (unlocked with your very first skillpoint)
3. Silver Charge - Additional bonus to the spell, visual upgrade. Triggered by holding down the skill button a little longer than Bronze Charge (unlocks with your first silver point).
4. Gold Charge - Bigger bonus to the spell, with a bigger visual upgrade. Triggered by holding the button even longer (unlocks with your first gold point).
5. Final Charge - The spell's ultimate, basically the Gold charge but with some additional effects (unlocks when you max the spell)

By removing the bronze points, we can also remove one charge level and in doing so save you some charge-up time and focus on making the charged versions of the spells more interesting. In this case, we're basically removing the Final Charge, since we felt it would be more epic that your final charge is the one with the biggest visual upgrade. Therefore, what is the silver charge today will now unlock with your first gold point, and the gold charge will unlock once you've maxed the spell completely.

Typically, when I've completed a portrait, I upload it to our shared workfolder (we use Dropbox, by the way - which I totally recommend for anyone trying make a game with multiple people working on it simultaneously) and ask Teddy to add it to the game.

Now, one thing that happens a lot of the time is that when I start the game to check that everything looks OK we end up with something like this:

Uh-oh. The shoulders are too big!

Previously we've solved this by taking screenshots of the shoulders in the game and cropping them afterwards, but today we decided to try something different. I asked Teddy which pixel the portraits use as a central point on the dialogue box, and he let me know that it's 55px to the right.

I created a new PSD document in Photoshop and marked the 55th pixel with a red line:

I also added the white line in order to mark where the actual dialogue appears: no portrait is allowed to go past this line. Now, when I add the portrait of the Blacksmith I can easily calculate where he will appear in the dialogue box by matching his center to the red line:

I'll now be able to correctly crop bigger portraits before they're added to the game!

This little trick can also be used to modify where I want the portrait to appear. For instance, if I wanted to have a portrait appear further to the left, I could simply move the portrait to where I want it to appear and add the difference between where its center is now and the original center (55) times two to the finished sprite's right side as white space. This will automatically make the portrait appear in the same place as the PSD once Teddy adds it to the game, and the whole business of screenshotting will finally be out of the way!

There's probably better ways of solving this problem, but at least this works out for now..!

Time to look at another portrait, this time of the blacksmith! His original portrait was one of the first ones I made (every RPG needs a blacksmith, right?), which you might be able to tell:

He kind of looks a little crazy, doesn't he? For the remake, I wanted him to look a bit less like a madman and more like the friendly, carefree guy that he is in our game. Here's the progress, which is pretty much the same as what I talked about yesterday:

And here's the finished sprite:

As you can see, I changed his shoulders (and the hair) a little between the rendered version and the in-game sprite . As I work on things for the game I ask Teddy and Fred for feedback, and they give me pointers on what to edit or improve. Usually these changes happen while I'm still sketching or rendering the bigger version of the portrait, but sometimes things are more obvious once everything is done.

In this case the shoulders had some funky perspective issues. I personally have a really hard time understanding what shoulders look like from certain angles, and I swear I've had to change the shoulders of almost half of all portraits because of this. Even reference images fail to help me with this issue! You'd think I'd learn eventually, but no. Apparently I have some kind of shoulder-blindness or something, haha! :)

This is just one of the many things I wish to improve upon, and hope to have a better grasp of before we're done with the game!

To start off there will probably be a bunch of portraits here (there's currently 96 characters in the game, and all of them need portraits)!

The portraits are probably what I've been struggling with the most. Starting out I thought they would be my strong suit, because faces were pretty much all I ever drew back in the days - but I quickly realized it was a lot harder to make them fit into the game. The results were pretty horrifying, but thanks to a lot of practice and trial-and-error, we've come closer to a style and quality that actually works.

Here are some of the first portraits I did:

And here's a batch of the newest ones:

So, yeah - a lot of things have changed, and so the old portraits need to be updated to match the new style. Since I've been working on this for quite a while before starting this blog there's actually only 24 portraits left to remake, not counting their additional expressions. Today we'll take a look at one of those!

(By the way, I kind of expect to redo all characters least once more before release, because I could still improve on them quite a bit, but it'll probably have to wait until everything else is done...)

Time to introduce Belmont, the owner of the over-priced café in Evergrind City. Here's what he will look like in the game as well as his old portrait:

Not my best work, though perhaps not as bad as some of the older ones.. Anyway, time to upgrade!

Above you can see my progress with this portrait. Typically, I'll begin sketching until I end up with some basic line art drawing of the character, usually supported by a couple of reference images on. I didn't look at reference images as much when I made the first portraits, and I'm pretty sure you can tell from those odd-looking shoulders.

After the line art is finished it's color block-time, where I fill in the basic colors where they're supposed to go (and change hues about a bazillion times until everything looks OK).

The third step is to render his features in more detail as well as adding different colors to the line art so it matches the color blocks. Finally, in the fourth step I simply added his signature items (the fake nose and a chef's hat) on top of what was already done!

Throughout the process I ask Teddy or/and Fred for feedback to make sure they like the way it looks. Fred commented halfway through that this version of Belmont kind of looks like a Disney prince. I guess that may be true! Maybe he likes singing duets in his free time as well, who knows?

Here's the finished sprite:

I'm actually quite happy with this portrait, but as always I wish I could do better, and know I will - in the future. For now I'm just glad that I've at least managed to improve upon his old look! Cause it's a little bit better at least, isn't it..?! :D

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