Legend of Grimrock Blog

The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111201032539/http://www.grimrock.net:80/

Beta

Nov 282011

We’ve got some big news this time! Let’s get started with the most important one: Legend of Grimrock has reached beta! This means that every feature, all enemies and all levels that are going to be in the final game are now in place, and we can now fully concentrate on polishing and balancing the game and fixing bugs until everything is perfect. If we get cool new ideas we might still add them to the game but improving existing features has now higher priority. And before you ask, at this point we are not looking for additional beta testers!

Secondly, many of you have been asking if we’re on time for launch at the end of this year. Looking at the game we have now we could do it but that wouldn’t be the best game we can deliver. We want to make this game really shine so that’s why we have decided to push the release to early next year. With the extra time we can hopefully fix all the bugs, make the level flow better, tweak item attributes to perfection and adjust the balance to be just right. These are the things that really matter to us, and hopefully to you as a player too! We are not ready to give an exact release date yet, because when we give a date we want to keep the promise too. But don’t worry, we won’t take too long!

We also need to start looking more closely at our distribution options. We would really like to release first on Steam because it’s simply the biggest digital distribution service on the PC and we want to make the game available for the largest audience possible. For that to happen we need to pass their evaluation process, so we really hope that the guys at Valve like our game!

So the next steps are:
* Get the distribution channel sorted out.
* Get the preorders working.
* And of course finish the game!

Check out the new shiny video and screenshots from the beta build:

Weekly update from Grimrock Prison

57 Responses »

Nov 182011

Another extremely busy week behind us and even more busier times ahead! Generally we have been tweaking, bug fixing and polishing many aspects of the game this week. Some highlights:

First pass of story related content has been added to the game. This will continue as we work towards the beta.
Juho has finalized end cinematic graphics.
We have all monsters now in place and animated. Olli is still going to add more detail to animations and keep improving them.
First batch of performance optimizations have been implemented. The game is now playable in 1080p with decent frame rate even with our relative old and cheap PCs!
We’re in the middle of redoing the gui so that it scales to higher resolutions nicely. This work should be complete sometime next week.
Related to the gui changes we have a new font rendering system which is capable of rendering vectorized true type fonts (previously all fonts were bitmap based), so text look much sharper now, especially in higher resolutions.
Groundwork for “secrets found” statistics has been done, i.e. we have a mechanism of marking and tracking secrets in the game. The game has already 45 secrets and I think we’ll still add a bunch!
Antti has been generating a gallon of mucus and has also been adding new items to the game.
Work on tutorials has been started.

To celebrate our 4000 Facebook fans we presented them with a riddle. Here’s what the encoded message contained:

Weekly news, post alpha edition

98 Responses »

Nov 112011

Phew, another busy week behind us! Oh, and a big thank you for all the support and well wishes you have sent to us regarding reaching the alpha! It really means a lot to us in these times of intense crunch!

The alpha playthrough resulted in a hefty todo-list (or perhaps more accurately, a todo-pile) and we decided to do the biggest changes first so that they would have plenty of time to settle so that they can be iterated as much as possible and so that we have more opportunities to encounter any possible bugs with them before reaching beta. Here’s a selection of the things we’ve been working on:
Continue reading »

Alpha!

189 Responses »

Nov 022011

As I said in the previous post, our alpha milestone was pending only a complete playthrough. Petri worked on it for the last three days and we’re happy to announce that he passed through the game so now we can proudly proclaim that Legend of Grimrock is officially in alpha! Now that we have a working full length game on our hands, we have a good vantage point where we can see what aspects of the game still need to be refined the most and luckily there were no big glaring issues or features we would need to drastically change. Regardless, the smaller things added up to a rather hefty todo-list but worry not, we are already working on it!
Continue reading »

More weekly news!

76 Responses »

Oct 282011

Another week nearing completion and, as usual, we’ve been working our assess off! The focus of the work is already shifting towards improving what we already have made instead of concentrating on adding new stuff in the game so it’s quite possible that filling out a nice long list of new things in the game for these weekly updates gets a little more tricky from this point on since our attention is shifting towards an innumerable count of smaller tasks rather than clearly defined big features. But anyways, let’s recap what we’ve been up to this week:
Continue reading »

Weekly update from Goromorg Temple

110 Responses »

Oct 212011

Another week and another update (despite the fact that we forgot to do one last week, oops)! The game is really starting to feel like a complete game, we are this close on having a game that you could install and then play all the way through! And the whole thing would feel pretty much like a real, complete game as well, instead of some strange unfinished prototype. I think next week is the week we can proudly call it alpha. But the real work is about to start: after alpha we can start concentrating on improving all the aspects of the game and put in some extra polish and implement all sorts of new fun little things! More spells, skills, monster special attacks, some new monster variants, level and puzzle improvements but, most important of all, a lot of testing and balancing!
Continue reading »

Magic and runes

155 Responses »

Oct 142011

Spell casting is an integral part of the diet of any healthy fantasy setting and there have been numerous different approaches to it in computer role playing games. To us, the systems where you pick a spell from a list have always felt very mundane: invoking magic should feel like you’re messing around with mystical forces instead of a spreadsheet! Runes are true and tested vessels for arcane power and they certainly make your imagination run wilder than text printed with Arial, size 12, so using them was a pretty obvious choice for us from the get go. And despite them being more abstract than writing, they still have the opportunity of having a logical underlying structure that prevents the spell casting system from turning into a bewildering mess where the player doesn’t have a chance to figure out what he’s actually doing. I’m here to explain a little bit of how we handle that logic and what our runes are.

Here’s our spell casting panel that you might have seen earlier:

How the runes are laid out in a 3 by 3 grid is already a major part of the logic since the placement of the runes bear a meaning. The pattern has a center rune and that center is surrounded by other runes along the outer edges of the pattern. The outer runes always have an opposite: the opposite of the rune in the lower left hand corner is the rune in the top right corner and so on. But maybe I’m getting a little ahead of myself now, it’s probably just better to go through the individual runes first and then we’ll get back to this.
Continue reading »

Weekly news from Grimrock dungeons

131 Responses »

Oct 072011

We have been working on the end game this week and the whole thing has grown a lot bigger and cooler than we initially thought. First we had the idea that there should be a chamber with a boss fight at the end but we quickly scrapped this as it didn’t feel epic enough. We want to make the ending really memorable to you as a player and we want it to explain some aspects of the mountain and tell you some of the background lore we have. So, instead of just a big fight, the game will climax in an intense multi-level combat and puzzle solving episode with a surprise at the end. We don’t want to spoil the experience by giving too much details, but just want to say that it’s going to be awesome!
Continue reading »

Weekly news from Mount Grimrock

67 Responses »

Oct 012011

We have been extremely busy again working towards alpha. Here are some tidbits from this week:

+ Created 2 new dungeon levels with emphasis on puzzles
+ Olli has been polishing animations for three monsters (or do the “in-betweens” as they say in animator jargon)
+ Antti has been adding new melee weapons and armor.
+ Added a new special melee attack mode for a “secret super-aggressive enemy type” (sorry, we want to keep details about enemies pretty vague so the monsters will be more scary and mysterious when you encounter them)
+ We got the first draft of the Grimrock theme music from our composer. It rocks!
+ We had a long brainstorm session about the end game which we are starting to work on next week. That should be fun!

With the work starting on the end game, I expect us to reach the alpha milestone (i.e. game playable from start to end) in a few weeks. After that, maybe a month more to beta… The end of the year is shaping up to be really hectic but exciting!

Weekly update & new screenshot!

104 Responses »

Sep 232011

Some highlights from this week:

+ Character generation (wohoo!)
+ New character race.
+ 4 new talents.
+ 2 new monsters but they need more love before they are in alpha quality.
+ 8 new harmful conditions to make our prisoners’ lives even more challenging.
+ about 20 new item graphics.
+ 6 new portraits.
(+ Juho has generated about a gallon of mucus.)

EDIT:
+ Implemented right-click stack merging and splitting for stackable inventory items.
+ Added 5 new herbs.

Older Entries

Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha