Sometimes spreading happiness takes some extra determination and lucky rolls. Based on 2020 so far, we would wager to say most of the time it is an uphill battle. Heroes can now find Gems in every chest which will boost your Grit (a last stand mechanic to help you resist defeat) and Dodge (which helps you avoid negative effects). Turns and Max Turns now also appear as Gems for better readability.
Besides - collecting Gems is just plain fun :D
We also sped up the victory screen and our turn tally system to propel you towards you next room faster. We grew up feeding quarters into arcade machines back in the 80s, so as gamedevs we have an ingrained urge for speed :D
Under the hood, we also upgraded Game Maker 2.2 to 2.3 which... turned out to be a pretty big deal actually. At first, it created lots of bugs to smush. BUT the good news is that the performance of the game has gone UP. And the updated dev environment has lots of fancy new dials to turn and buttons to press for extra gamedev goodness down the road.
Like any good update, we also tweaked a bunch of little things and cleaned up after ourselves too:
- The Shopkeeper was giving away her keys for free. We explained that while this was a very generous act, it made the game too easy. She agreed to sell her keys again for 10 turns.
- Renamed "Grit" Trinket to "Champion" and reduced down from 50% to 25% to balance the new ability to find extra Grit along the way.
- Renamed Hunter to Thief because it made more sense thematically
- Rebalanced chest rewards and removed some turn rewards to make gameplay more... um... rewarding!
- Updated the HUD again because HUDs are hard.
- Fixed a bug with Turn Tallies not reseting between worlds
- Fixed a bug where Collector said "Free" instead of "Sold" after purchasing your trinkets.
- Set Info Box default to true so that new players have more information (experienced players can still toggle this off for less visual clutter).
Thanks for playing Happy Grumps! We'll be in touch soon <3
- Glenn & Drew