Hello everyone! I am so glad you are enjoying the game, and here is the slightly belated Gnorp News.
For those of you who don't know, leading up the release I wrote a weekly newsletter every Saturday. That newsletter will continue, at least for now. And here is #8. On my website, gnorp.dev, or down below.
(the) Gnorp Apologue has been out in the world for over 48 hours now. Surreal. (the) Gnorp Apologue is my first game released to the public, and I couldn't have asked for a better reception.
The Game
The game started out as a little toy game for my girlfriend. Months after I decided to learn a new programming language for fun, Rust, and I decided to pull up that old project and turn it into something better. Something better turned out to be quite fun, and I showed it to some of my friends. They thought it looked interesting, and so I made a playable version, and the the feedback from that was really positive. I made a reddit post on /r/incremental_games with a short clip of the game, and there seemed to be real excitement there. I decided that I wanted to turn the game into something fully realized, and here we are.
I could talk a lot about the development process itself. I have a notebook filled with my ideas on units, talents, upgrades, etc. Something for another day perhaps. The below image was the process of creating the drone sprites.
Release
Releasing the game actually went really quite well. There was a whole bunch of stress, of course, and the final build was only done 20 minutes before release, but it in the end it was all good. I am so pleased that so many people are playing and enjoying the game, in fact there are almost 2600 of you right now in-game.
I am really proud about the fact that there have been zero in-game crashes reported, but there have been other bugs. To that end I have pushed 6.5 hotfixes to game in the last 48 hours, but there is still work to be done, and my first goal for the future is to ensure that game is really, really solid.
A loose to-do list:
- A very minor Yule update, that changes mountaineers to be more festive
- Implement another mode, a hard mode of sorts, the details of which are not a 100% nailed down yet. The overall goal for the mode is to provide a twist to the core gameplay, and offer an increased challenge.
- Give some love to talents and upgrades that are not oft used, either because they are too finicky to effectively utilize, or because they are too weak
- General fixes and improvements, some of which include: Mute while in background options, tooltip when hovering over the meters, more dynamic tooltips (especially for statuses), drone consumption tracking, etc.
- Steam Cloud support
- Bar chart for the meters
There are loads of things that can be improved upon, but overall I am so pleased to have finished and released a complete game. It went so well, and I am still stupefied.
So thank you to my wife and friends who playtested the game on several occasions. Thank you to the people on /r/incremental_games who encouraged me to make the game as good as possible. Thank you to the playtesters on the 25th of November.
And thank you for playing the game now, on release, and providing me with so much great feedback and sharing your experiences with the game.