We’re excited to share the first major update to GrowRilla. We’ve been hard creating new content. Today we’re releasing literally a city’s worth of new content! We’ve also added a 4th map to the progression. We’ve worked on the difficulty balancing.
We’ve also spent the past two weeks watching and reading your feedback and absorbing the reception to the game. Two things are clear to us: the game is fun and you want more content.
New City Area
We built a small city for you to explore. It’s first unlocked in the 2nd map, but bigger versions of the city appear from the 3rd map on. We’ve been working on this content for a while, it includes new buildings, vehicles, NPCs, food and opportunities for a gorilla to cause mischief. We haven’t even managed to include all the content we wanted to in this update so expect further updates to the city over the next few weeks as we polish, add new content and balance the gameplay.
The city offers a new challenge. The content is a lot more concentrated and it’s full of goodies but the threat level is also much higher for you as a gorilla. Many more eyes to spot your misdeeds.
The city will offer some additional goodies, mainly for when you are smaller. However the police officers won’t take kindly to you stealing the residents food.
Just look at those dashing cars! You can even use them as bombs if you’re big enough.
The market is a great way to pick up food and weapons. Just make sure the sellers don’t see you stealing their wares.
The local police will also do their best to stop any rabble rousing gorillas.
Finally, we have a variety of city blocks for you to unlock as you gain XP.
New Map
Some of you absolutely flew through the game’s three maps. We’ve just added a 4th map which should present a tougher challenge to the more advanced player. It includes new enemies and a tougher military base.
We have also given a lot of thoughts on the overall progression of the game. Early Access is a great opportunity to receive feedback and improve these systems. You can expect to see more maps as we continue to improve our progression and mission systems.
Gameplay Balancing and Improvements
We have been fixing bugs and addressing the most glaring balancing issues in this first update. You can expect further improvements to all the core systems over the coming months. For now, we’re disabling the ability to pick up the largest indestructible objects (like the barn roofs). Down the line we want to implement a general “durability” system so that no object becomes an invincible sword of destruction and death.
We added some new super tanks (in the 4th map) that should present a bigger challenge.
What’s Next
Thank you for your early support and feedback. As always, we really appreciate if you would leave us a review on the game, it helps so much.
We are hard at work on GrowRilla and you can expect further major updates, including:
More new content for the city (NPCs, city blocks) and balancing
New areas
New maps
More weapons and enemies and vehicles
As always, please keep an eye on our public roadmap for more details. And let us know what you want to see!
Cheers, Salmi Games
Changelist - Build 174
Improvements
Added particle effects - Now all objects ingame have particle effects for when you smash them into something
Added a tool for localizing the game more efficiently. No supported languages yet, but hopefully soon we’ll have a few new languages for you to play in
Improved the experience bar and item unlock screen. Now you have a cool radioactive fluid bar that shows how far you’ve progressed
The voiceover now only plays on the lowest difficulty
import suburban house variations
add more details/variations to city blocks
improve city parts
improve city park block
improve city market block
add zoo city block (still WiP)
add suburban block
import more food (e.g. fish, crabs, burger)
improve variations of different objects (e.g. trashcan, bench, food stand)
added first draft of very hard map
added super tanks and stationary cannons to very hard map
add translation system for all texts in menu screen
add Google Sheet Plugin
add import/export of translation CSV
add translation for Tutorial
add first Iteration of unlock shelf
Fixes
Added a threshold for damaging objects when you are big. Now you should no longer kill things on accident if you try to pick them up
Fixed a bug where controllers were vibrating on rotation
Tanks now properly create a splash effect when you throw them into the water
Added the sound effect for trees smashing against trees back into the game
Grenades and weapons should no longer stick to your hand on Vive
prevent spawning on different islands
fix bomber prefab (wrong materials)
fix splash animation for some objects (e.g. tanks)
Update 1 Preview
Dear friends,
GrowRilla has been out for one week and we are overwhelmed by the great reception. Thank you all for your feedback and please keep it coming. This is a teaser for our first big update. Let’s have a look at what you can expect for the future of GrowRilla:
Thank you for your great reviews on steam, on youtube and on twitch. It’s a lot of fun (and useful) to see how you’re playing GrowRilla, which surprises you’re enjoying, what is too challenging or too easy, what is broken and what do you want to see more of.
We are hard at work on our next update which will feature bug fixes, new features and a lot of new content! Let’s take a brief look at what’s ahead.
The City District: A New Area to Explore
Our first update will feature a whole new area, the City District. You may have already seen hints of it in our trailer. We’ve been working on this new area for a while now, adding new content, new buildings (to climb?), new characters and behaviors (hello police officer!) and new secrets. We can’t wait to unveil this new section of the game. We think it’s going to add a lot to the overall experience of the game with a more compact area full of little surprises.
The city district also offers us new opportunities to expand the game’s world. There are a lot more ideas down the pipeline to make this area even more interesting. It’s clear you want to see more content. We’re really looking forward to this update and your reactions.
Bug Fixes and Requests
We’ve already received some great feedback for our game. As a reminder, if you have feedback you want to share with us, please post in the Steam Forums or jump into our discord: https://discord.gg/salmigames
We’ve noticed a few issues some players have experienced and we are going to make sure the most annoying ones are going to get squashed ASAP. We’ve also constantly refining our roadmap based on your suggestions and how we see you play our game.
Harder Difficulties, Progression
We thought we had made the game hard enough but with our first wave of reviews, it’s clear that there are certain situations where the game gets surprisingly easy if you learn a few tricks. We’ve also identified a few issues that make the gorilla super OP (like indestructible large structures you can use to “sweep” up an entire military base.
We are working on difficulty balance and adding new content and challenges to keep things interesting for even the most seasoned GrowRilla masters.
We’ve also been giving our whole progression and unlock system a lot of thought. Our maps are procedurally-generated but the diversity of each play through is not coming across effectively. We’re working on a number of ways to surface the depth of content in the game (and the content we’ll be adding). We are considering adding more varied missions, a campaign progression and a whole bunch of challenges.
For this update, you’ll see mainly the new content above and some difficulty balancing. But for future updates, you can expect bigger changes. Here’s a little tease of what’s to come.
You can expect the update to go live in the next two weeks. Also if you haven’t done so yet, we would humbly ask you to leave us a review. Even a short review help us out so much to get the word out. Your honest opinion on the game let’s us better gauge what we should focus on for future updates.
Cheers, Salmi Games
Early Access Launch - Patch Notes
Hey friends,
We're excited to launch GrowRilla in Early Access today and finally share our new game with you. Thank you for checking it out. We're a strong believer in Early Access as an effective medium to develop VR games.
As part of our release, we've also updated our screenshots, posted a new gameplay video (embedded below) and reworked our store description. [previewyoutube="bD6Wt31_HGc;full"]
We also released at what we think is a very fair price (without a launch discount). Please consider that this will be the cheapest price you can buy the game (standalone). We will increase the price in the near future. This is our way of tipping our hats to the players who invested in our games early.
Finally, here are our patch notes of the changes from the build that our beta testers tried out last week.
New Features
stonehenge rocks are properly pickable now
mafia dons only appear in medium or hard difficulty
do not allow to open menu in win screen or loading screen (as this could cause issues, for example if selecting a new level in the win screen you do not get the points from this round)
disable distant units before activating the map (to reduce load time after pressing the start button, reduces hard map activation time in editor from about 5 seconds to 1 second. Might need more performance at runtime though when activating units for the first time)
add new trees
added new sound assets
make static rocks pickable
bears and dogs are animated when attacking now
add animations to score board
Added subtle sound when falling down
Added option to define percentage of max speed at which units move depending on the behaviour. This allows e.g. the rabbits to move slower when just strolling around but move at full speed when they flee.
Added a particle effect every time the animals land when at full speed.
Red eyes glow stronger to indicate their progress in preparing the attack
Added particles on weapon when firing
Added force-feedback on shot
Added bunkbeds
Bug Fixes
improve/fix level progress board
fix all food preview items
Fixed issue where objects would snap to the bottom of your hand instead of the palm center.
Fixed objects flying off into the distance at times when you hit them while moving (usually experienced this with the flowers) by limiting their velocity for a short time when they get knocked off.
If you move without holding an object in your hand or climbing your visual hand model is placed at the target position to prevent jitter (which I simply cannot figure out how to avoid in this case, it's related to the fairly high movement speed).
fixed tank explosion bug
Fix map generation issues
place objects based on exact triangle position including offset (avoids grass being spawned slightly above water)
improved physics collision resolve
cat shouldn't spawn in farm when not unlocked
add military hangar foundation (in case part of the landing area is on water) and use a proper street ending
fix trail particles getting destroyed as soon as bullet gets destroyed
replaced tank bullets with properly modelled bullets
fixed weapon shoot info appearing every time
Ignore movement on throwing to avoid weird behaviour
fixed hand not opening properly when climbing using the triggers
fixed tutorial issues (like start rotation)
fixed gentleman not changing color on death
fixed nav meshes for new trees
fixed broken quality settings change
went through debug log and removed spam
reduced warnings in editor. Either marked them as ignored or fixed the issue. May seem minor but it's actually a good way to find bugs you haven't noticed before, fixed one or two bugs with this.
