Hello friends,

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

• 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