Dear Friends,
Welcome to the second major update to GrowRilla. We’ve slowed down one bit creating new content for the game and fleshing out the core experience. Our first update featured the new City Area. With Update 2, we've massively improved the city and a whole lot more:
- Tons of new city content: More blocks, a huge building tower and improved AI
- Military bases and outposts now have new variations
- Gameplay improvements: Large objects have durability, improved particle effects and feedback
- Gameplay balancing: food appears in batches, values have been tweaked
Fleshing Out The City
In the last update we introduced the city. In this update, we’re fleshing it out further, adding new areas and new opportunities. First we’ve added a couple new city blocks for you to unlock. In the 3rd and 4th map, bigger cities are generated, with a wide variety of city blocks. One is a construction area, with construction workers, a house being built and some storage containers.
The other city block is the new skyscraper, a massive new building for you to climb and explore. Wanna really feel like King Kong? Now’s your chance!
We’ve also improved the market area and the food carts. MORE FOOD VARIATIONS. The local market sellers have received a huge delivery of food and the carts are now full!
Finally, we’ve generally improved the AI and behaviors of the NPCs. Citizens flee when you cause violence. Police respond to gorilla crime reports. Sellers react when you steal their wares. Plan accordingly!
Military Outpost and Bases Revamped
The first iteration of our military outposts and bases were a bit bland and repetitive. We’re excited to release a whole bunch of variations to both the military outposts and military bases. We’ve leveraged the systems we built for the city variation to create new military base components as well as different military base layouts altogether. Each time you play a map, you’ll experience a different variation.
The hardest (4th) map also has its own unique variation extra special soldiers. Also we added some revamped military hardware, like this ridiculous artillery truck.
Gameplay Balancing and Improvements
We’ve been improving various aspects of the core game to improve the difficulty balancing. As we mentioned in the last update, we’ve now implemented a proper object durability system for the large objects. This means the barn roof, the trees and other large objects are no longer invincible shields. They get destroyed if you abuse them too much.
We’ve tweaked the amount of growth you receive from food at the smaller levels and we’ve also made food a bit more plentiful (and in batches). We’re curious to see how these changes are received.
We’ve added a few more feedback effects. For example there’s a clear particle effect when you’ve grown a full level.
We also improved how you grow when under a tree. Previously you could get permanently stuck with your head in the tree. Now your head gets pushed down so you’re no longer stuck. You still have to duck to exit from under a tree, but permanent clipping causing a need for a restart should no longer happen. We’re still experimenting with a more elegant fix for this situation. Dynamic physics in VR is HARD!
Changelist - Build 194
Improvements
- New variations of military base using same system as city, building the base from components and dynamically generating the walls
- Add new military blocks for new base generation (Barracks, Tents, Container, Gastanks)
- Added Military watchtowers
- Added bananas on top of military towers
- New variations of city layout
- New city blocks (construction, skyscraper)
- Improve park (new benches, fountain)
- The food on the food cart is now procedurally generated and can be picked up
- Added more food to objects (trees, carts, trash etc.)
- Added new fast-food variations
- The artillery has received a new model
- Large objects are now destroyed if they take too much damage
- AI: The police attacks you when you attack ordinary citizens
- AI: Ordinary citizens flee from you when you attack them
- AI: Units recognize when their friends are being eaten
- Food now spawns in batches instead of randomly throughout the map
- Slightly decreased the spawn rate of apple trees
- Added version number to chalkboard / menu
- Added seed to menu
- The general will now run for his life if a giant gorilla approaches him
- Steaks from big animals give more growth value
- Improved death behavior when going into the water to avoid giant gorillas not dying of water
- Increased difficulty due to objects disappearing after damage (it's harder to beat the final level now)
- Improve random generation for items (min/max count)
- Vehicles do a raycast check slightly to the right only for vehicles to detect incoming vehicles on crossings
- Trees spawn tree particles instead of generic particles on destruction
- Tweaked number of occurences for city blocks
Fixes
- Special locations, such as military bases, farms etc, are now not spawning on top of / too close to each other
- Special locations no longer spawn too close to the water
- Food stands now have proper collision
- Windows no longer light up during nighttime, if their respective building is destroyed
- The game is slightly less dark during nighttime
- Fixed gentleman hunter attacking you from anywhere
- Set delta time to low value instead of 0 when win/lose happens.
- Fixed Gorilla that has grown too big for the tree
- Fixed objects with food (hover bug)
- Fixed collider issues
- Fixed "Out-Of-Range" bug in random generation script
- Fixed double spawning of military blocks in military base
- Fixed pavement
- Fixed shadow flickering issue on walls
- Add security check for gravity, no more floaty objects
- Fixed window glow on picked / damaged buildings
- Fixed post processing in day / night cycle to bright up night
- Fix objects sometimes spawning into military base and city or onto water, e.g. a military hangar
- Fixed glitching into an object on growth
- Fixed spawning right outside military base within large number of enemies
- Fixed false detection of being on an isolated island
- Fixed mushrooms floating in air on bushy tree variation
- Fixed issue where nav mesh would not recognize path to military base due to tent nav mesh collider
- For city generation, fixed min num occurences of objects and added max num occurences option
What’s Next
Thank you for your continued support and feedback. As always, we really appreciate if you would leave us a review on the game, it helps so so so much.
What’s next? Well, you can expect a decisively spookier update very soon. We’re also pretty happy with the content pipeline we’ve set up so far, so expect continued regular content updates to various parts of the game. We’re having so much fun adding new funny content. If you’ve got a funny idea, let us know!
We’re also continuing to work on improving the visual quality of the game. For example, the island edges look pretty boring right now. We’re experimenting with new ideas for future updates
Finally, we’re thinking a lot about how to make the overall maps feel more different from each other and how to leverage all the procedural generation systems to create a dynamic roguelite-ish campaign (or perhaps spelunky-like would be more accurate). We’re still in the experimental stages on this topic. Expect more details over the next couple months.
As always, please keep an eye on our public roadmap (https://trello.com/b/2C7yr6Xn/growrilla-public-roadmap) for more details. And let us know what you want to see!
Cheers,
Salmi Games