200k, Saves Update & Wiki
Welcome back to Gnorp News! Today we're going to talk about the Saving Update, and the Wiki.
1th Apr, 24
First off, the game has reached 200,000 copies sold! The success of the game was something I was wholly unprepared for, and it has taken time to adjust this new reality. My plans for the future have been upended (in a good way), and I am now working on three Gnorp-related projects: Gnorps in Space, a secret project, and most importantly: the base game.
Today I released a new update to the game, which is a foundational update that includes improvements to saving and adds support for cloud saving. Here are the patch notes:
- Added cloud saving
- Gnorp saves are now saved in a new location! Your old saves will still be loaded, but new saves will be saved in the new location. This prevents a permissions-related issue, where saving could silently fail. Your settings are also saved in the new location.
Gnorp save location: %APPDATA%\Gnorp\Apologue
- Gnorp saves are now much smaller — a prerequisite for cloud saving, and a general improvement to loading and saving performance. This change comes at the cost of fidelity, however, as some information is no longer saved — projectiles and shards are among the game data that is not fully stored to disk.
- A new option menu has been added, which I call "the outgoing menu"
- Added several links to the outgoing menu, including links to the Wiki and the Discord.
- Added a quit button, which you'll also find in the outgoing menu.
- Added a new toggleable option: Save on quit. This option is enabled by default.
- Added a new button in the Save menu: Recover save. If you have lost your save data, either by error, mistake, or regret, this button will, based on your Steam achievements, grant you a number of talent points representative of the progress made when the achievement was unlocked. Speedrun mode remains unlocked if you delete your save.
- Laptop users rejoice: Horizontal scrolling with a trackpad has been enabled. Let me know if you encounter any issues with this.
- Removed the requirement to have Steam running to launch the game
- Gnorp saves are now saved in a new location! Your old saves will still be loaded, but new saves will be saved in the new location. This prevents a permissions-related issue, where saving could silently fail. Your settings are also saved in the new location.
Gnorp save location: %APPDATA%\Gnorp\Apologue
- Gnorp saves are now much smaller — a prerequisite for cloud saving, and a general improvement to loading and saving performance. This change comes at the cost of fidelity, however, as some information is no longer saved — projectiles and shards are among the game data that is not fully stored to disk.
- A new option menu has been added, which I call "the outgoing menu"
- Added several links to the outgoing menu, including links to the Wiki and the Discord.
- Added a quit button, which you'll also find in the outgoing menu.
- Added a new toggleable option: Save on quit. This option is enabled by default.
- Added a new button in the Save menu: Recover save. If you have lost your save data, either by error, mistake, or regret, this button will, based on your Steam achievements, grant you a number of talent points representative of the progress made when the achievement was unlocked. Speedrun mode remains unlocked if you delete your save.
- Laptop users rejoice: Horizontal scrolling with a trackpad has been enabled. Let me know if you encounter any issues with this.
- Removed the requirement to have Steam running to launch the game
Next up is the Wiki. The wiki for the game started out as a simple Google Docs, maintained by Discord member and moderator Frogie, but it is now a real website: https://gnorp.wiki.gg. The wiki has been a community project from the start, and I was so pleased to see it go live. The wiki.gg staff was extremely helpful to the maintainers in setting up the wiki, and they even styled the wiki according to the user interface of the game itself.
A thousand thanks to everyone involved in the project, and I am looking forward to seeing the wiki grow with updates to the game and the eventual release of Gnorps in Space.
What's next?
- Hat-preview update
- Hard mode + Hats update
- General improvements to UI, balance, etc
- MacOS support, pending some issues with building universal binaries
- Gnorps in Space
- Secret project
Thanks for reading!