Little Reaper Games - Indie Game Development Company Grim Balance

October 2018 Update (Pre PAX Aus)

October 2018 Update

Hello everyone, big spooky October update for you all, First and foremost Grim Balance is now known as… “Little Reaper” we have been contemplating changing the name for a long time now, we felt Grim Balance didn’t suit the game anymore, and found it wasn’t very memorable.
After much thought and discussion we landed on “Little Reaper”.
Secondly, good news everyone Little Reaper will be at PAX AUS again this year! You can find us in the PAX rising area shown on the map below.

We will be showing off a brand new trailer for the game and another little surprise that will be officially announced later in the week on our Facebook and Twitter pages ;). (Below is a snippet of the trailer.)

Finally we have some General game updates:

-We have been refining and lighting the later levels
-The Gallery system has been improved and is getting filled with content
-We actually have a writer helping us out with descriptions and story
-We have started the first round of in depth game testing
-Adam has been doing a tonne of Steam and boring businessy stuff as well as updating the gallery and UI
-Adrian has been tweaking and redesigning some puzzles in the game and working on the final boss
-Dave is exterminating all of the bugs and polishing up the game
-Jeffrey is working on the final boss and squishing gallery bugs
-Josh is updating old particle effects and texturing some final assets
-Jess is currently working on the final pass for the in game cinematics (as seen below)

Including countless other updates here and there.

2017 so far for Grim Balance

May 2017 update.

Hello everyone,

It’s been a while and we thought it was time for a 2017 blog update.
2017 has been a busy year already. We have moved out of our old office space, and are now mostly working remotely.
It’s a big change, but we’re handling it well.

Grim Balance is coming along quite nicely, a lot of progress has been made.
Since PAX we have worked towards polishing up the level design, flow and lighting of all of the levels.

The game has been split up into smaller more digestible levels. which has improved performance, and allowed us to refine certain areas.

We have been hard at work updating the Caves area, nothing is final yet and work needs to be done with the water, but we are happy with how it’s coming along.

The final area is well in motion, with the level layout complete, and modelling and texturing is in its final stages.
The tough part is finding a good difficulty for it, which will require a lot of testing.

Bugs are still popping up now and then though, as to be expected.

Very soon we will be searching for somebody new to join the project and help us push Grim Balance to its finish line.
More info on that coming soon.

We are getting much closer to the games final stages, and are super excited to show you more, so expect to hear from us soon!

Post PAXAus 2016

Hello everybody!

We recently went to PAXAus and wanted to give you all a big round up of our experience this year, and catch you all up on our progress.

PAX was amazing, so well run and so much fun.
We had tons of people come by the booth this year and try out our new demo.

If you missed PAX, this is currently what it’s looking like.

Here’s a few photo’s we took over the weekend.

Our Booth space
The giver of cards
The AIE area
The AIE van
Army man playing
Ollie!
Some Dota 2 cosplayers with Ollie
Adam by the Booth
Pack up

We made loads of new fans, and got a bit of media attention too.

Reset podcast gave us a shining review, and Tegan named Grim Balance in her top 5!
(Top 5, starts at 38 minutes, but they’re fantastic so I recommend listening to the whole thing).

#29 – A massive PAX Aus 2016 Roundup & best of the Indie game showcase

Checkpoint posted a great written review about the game.

PAX AUS Indies 2016: Grim Balance

Adam from our team got interviewed by three separate sources!

He got interviewed by Impulse Gamer about Grim Balance and a little bit about himself.

Adam Robertson Interview (PAX AUS 2016) … Little Reaper Games, Grim Balance

Adam also talked to Clayton from the Sci-Fi and Squeam Podcast about diversity in the games industry.

Conversations in the PAX Diversity Lounge

Finally he also got a small interview on the Checkpoint radio show, about Grim Balance.

(interview with Adam starts at about 48 min)

Post-PAX Rundown

Make sure you go and check out all of the links and support them as well.

The next goal for Grim Balance is to get it to a point where all of the design for the game is fully complete, and only polish is needed.
We hope to reach this point by the end of the year.

Make sure you like our Facebook page and follow us on twitter for more regular updates on the progress.

Mid Year Update

Hello all humans, and non humans with the capacity to internet.

Almost half a year has gone by since our last post, and we know we are terrible.

Quite a lot of stuff has happened in that time.
Grim Balance is coming along nicely we have the Caves level mostly built out and looking pretty,

The next level we’re working on is themed around a Beach, It’s coming along quite nicely.

We haven’t been without a few bugs though,

Ollie learnt to ‘tame the beasts’

Some Bees in the “Atom” formation

Ollie took the ramsoul for a ride.

That looks painful :/

The mummy got denied…

Meanwhile on our Facebook page we finally hit the 500 likes milestone, we are so lucky to have all of your awesome support, thank you all so much.

Until next time.

Farewell.

New Year, New Stuff

Hello followers, and hapless internet wanderers,

We’ve been a bit quiet recently and are sorry for that. We had a good Christmas/New Years break and are hard at work creating new content.

Hope everyone had joyous Holidays and are prepared for the new year.

Our first order of business for the year is getting the third level, “Caves” (working on a cooler name, suggestions welcome) up to scratch, finishing off the textures and implementing water!!

Don’t worry about us making painful ocarina of time like water level, Ollie can’t swim.., Though he can’t exactly drown either having no lungs and all. I think that’s vague enough.

You’ll have to wait and see how he tackles the water 😉

For the visuals in the water we’re aiming for something similar to Doublefines “The Cave”

If you haven’t played it or even heard of it, you should. It’s a really nice puzzle platformer with great art, fun puzzles and awesome narration.

Aside from that we’re also implementing the new mechanic we teased over the break.
Ollie can now throw his scythe and teleport to it at will.

The last thing we’re working on right now is updating the menu’s and getting the gallery in and working,

Here’s an example of what it may end up looking like.

We’re nearly at 500 likes on our Facebook page too, so if you haven’t gone and liked it shame on you.

Here’s to a new and hopefully successful year!

Signing off for now,

Adam

Full ‘Steam’ Ahead and (very delayed) PAX roundup

Happy December all,

In case you haven’t been paying attention, Grim Balance has been successfully Greenlit!!
The amazing news came to me first thing on the Saturday morning of PAX Australia.

The one downside of that is we ordered way too many fliers…

PAX as a whole was an exhausting but wonderful experience. Getting to meet tons of new people and seeing how much you guys like the game warms our hearts, and gives us a huge boost in momentum.
We will definitely do everything we can to be there next year as well.

We also got a couple of media posts about our game!
MOTD media put us on their top 12 Indie Games at PAX list.

Lost Video Games gave a good synopsis of the Grim Balance Greenlight.

You can see all the photos of our amazing PAX weekend here

Since then we’ve been hard at work making the third level ‘the caves’ look pretty.
We’ve also recently upgraded to Unity 5 which will speed up things considerably, because of all the shiny new tools we can use.
We’ll update you with images once it’s at that pretty stage.

For now you can have some sketches of some of the cave enemies.

Something else that has been exciting, is we are currently in the process of bringing on a new programmer to help us finish Grim Balance.
We we’re surprised by the amount of interest, and think we may have found a very valuable team member.

Keep watch for more info soon.

Grim Balance is on Steam Greenlight! (Oh and we are going to PAXAUS 2015)

Hi guys, we have some great news here at Little Reaper Games!

Firstly, Grim Balance is now on steam greenlight and we are very pleased with the results so far. We would like to thank everyone who has voted for us and everyone on our Facebook and Twitter who has shared our posts to all of their friends. If you haven’t voted for us yet please do so by clicking the image below.

Oh and Grim Balance will be playable at PAX AUS 2015 so if you haven’t played it yet now’s your chance. You can find us in the PAX Rising area in a booth with this banner

and wearing these shirts.

We hope to see you there.

Thankyou for your time!

Progress Update!

Hello Little Reapers!!

All of us here at Little Reaper Games would like to show you what we have been up to during the month of September. If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook you would have seen most of these updates already, if you don’t well enjoy, oh and like and follow us :).

First up we announced the super exciting news that we’ll be exhibiting Grim Balance at PAXAUS this year!!

We’ll Be there sharing a booth with some fellow local Indie Devs Atomizer Games and Cognitive Forge. They are really great people and you should definitely check out their games.
Look out for this banner if you’re going to PAX

We’ve been trying hard to keep up with weekly Screenshot Saturday posts and here’s this months round up.

Ollie making his way through the tombs
An early shot of an area in the Caves level
Action shot of the first Boss fight
Promo art for our PAX Booth

But we don’t think that’s enough so we leaked a few more images

The famed Jar of souls right before Ollie happened

The BEES!!

A few pieces from Deaths art collection

And we threw in a couple of GIFS to spice things up as well

Ollie’s flashy new attack

Ollie shattering the jar of souls in a cinematic

Death’s spooky mansion from a cinematic we’re working on

It’s a super exciting time for us right now with development moving forward quickly, and with PAX looming on the horizon we’ll be super busy pumping out work. So you can expect to see much more from us soon.

Until then thank you for all your support,

Bye for now.

September Update

Hello loyal followers,

LOOK AT OUR FANCY NEW WEBSITE!! (Thanks Adam).

As you might have noticed we have been a bit quiet recently the main reason being once again AIE has generously provided us with some office space at their new campus which required us to pack up our home offices and re-establish our headquarters at AIE.

We’re now settled in and things are moving along at breakneck speeds. The second level of the game is now at about 80% completion and we are stoked with how it looks.

Ollie in the tombs outside of the mansion.

The third level is well under way, but it’s not quite pretty enough to show off yet.
Also keep an eye on our Facebook page because this Friday we have some awesome news to share with you all. 🙂

Thanks for popping by.

The year it will all happen

Hello followers,

It’s a bit delayed but Happy new year to you all.

It’s been a busy time for us over the ‘break’.
We’ve had to change to working remotely for the moment, as the building we had our previous office in is going kaboom this year.

That doesn’t mean production has stopped though, far from it actually.
We have been hard at work doing some gardening on the Mansion grounds, and bringing some of it’s inhabitants to life.

Here’s a little guy who loves Turnips but doesn’t like you so much.

Grim Balance Garden Sneak Peek

And as promised a sneak peek at the next level.

This year will be the big one for us, you can expect to see much more from us from now on.

Farewell for now