Grindstone: Creeps, Jerks, Slobs, Oh My
As a hulking papa StoneGrinder, Jorj, you’ll have to work your way up Grindstone Mountain by smashing creeps, grabbing treasure, and taking down bosses.
But before you clock in, learn about how the team at Capy created some of the mountain dwellers that you’ll come up against.
Grindstone: Of Creeps and Slobs
“Hi! We’re Kelly Smith and Ben Thomas, animators at Capy. Grindstone is about creating attack chains through colorful creeps and jerks, so we thought it’d be fun to talk about our process designing two of those enemies.”
Creeps
Kelly: This game went through many revisions and was touched by many hands. Vic Nguyen, Mike Nguyen and Ben Thomas all had a role in the final look and feel of Grindstone.
In the very infant stages of this prototype, we played around with a lot of very weird monster styles. There were a lot of disparate ideas but eventually we found a through line with the lips and mouth designs on every creep. At this stage we put the prototype on the backburner for a while.
When we picked it up again we tried it as a free roaming brawler style game. I felt that the earlier looks were too heavy on shadows, and the line-less style would be too difficult to animate by hand. So I focused on a line based style with simplified shadows. At this point there were 3 classes of creep types, so it was important that all creeps of the same class had very similar body types and sizes.
Again it was put on the backburner.
This time we came back to the grid-based puzzle game. Now that every creep had to fit within a square it was necessary to pare them down again, simplifying all their features and changing their proportions to read at a smaller scale.
Can you believe we put it on the backburner?
In this last iteration, artist Vic Nguyen took over and gave the creeps their final look, giving them adorable half-moon eyes and finalizing their colours.
Jerkameleon
Kelly: The Jerkameleon enemy was originally called “Jerksquito” and was modeled after a mosquito. I played with the idea of having two distinct states. The first state was very small and shriveled with big, sleepy eyes due to being so anemic without life-giving creep juice. The second was after it had engorged itself on the color juice from a nearby enemy.
We were racing to make the launch so we actually held back a great deal of entity prototypes that we either couldn’t solve visually or just hadn’t spent enough time with to identify bugs, etc. This guy (the Jerkameleon, formerly the Jerksquito) was one of the entities on that list. Once we were able to come back to it, its final behavior changed to killing all adjacent creeps. Because it now needed to attack eight spaces, I dropped the mosquito aspect and focused the concept around eating. In the final design he exists only to eat, so his entire body is a massive mouth and a stomach.
Slob
Ben: The prototype version of the Slob Jerk was just called the Royal, and was originally simply a regular-color creep scaled a little larger and adorned with a gold crown. Chaining through this version of the Slob rewarded you with the Crown, which made it through to the final game. But we wanted to give this enemy more flavour, both visually and mechanically. This led us to making them into a distinct enemy (so no longer just a slightly bigger Creep) who chained through colours like Jorj.
My initial instinct for the Royal Slob was to go full Henry VIII, complete with the frilly robe, puffy sleeves, and ornate scepter. Older designs featured a grindstone pendant as a reward for the player. I found the Renaissance elements a bit too removed from the Iron Age feel of Grindstone, however. I didn’t want the Slob to feel out of place, and edited some of the fancier elements out. The scepter idea remained, with a grindstone reward in the scepter itself.
Next, we explored the idea of connecting the Slob to a random chain color. Programmer Ken Yeung wrote “palette swap” code that would change the robe color from bright fuschia, (#ff00ff for you color nerds) to a chainable creep color when the Slob appears. This helped us keep the memory footprint low and fulfill the design requirements of the character.
One last change we made to the Slob was to put the reward focus back onto the Crown. So instead of a grindstone, the Crown itself was the resource the player needed to unlock the next area of the Mountain. And voila, we’ve arrived at the final look for the Slob, ready to be mercilessly pummeled and robbed at your leisure!
(Note: A shorter version of this retrospective was originally posted on Nintendo Switch’s News channel)
