Summertime in the city! Summertime is a pity. Cause you should be outside... but then you won’t be playing our game.

Hell it’s nice here in Helsinki, which we sometimes call Hel. That said we certainly want to be outside. And we will be soon. Just after we make another update to A Giant Problem for you!

To entice you in we’ve got a summertime treat for you. A big tasty update! And this update has lots of goodies. Such as:

• A Progression System
• Game Save System
• A New Level
• New Music and some Additional Sounds
• A Rebalanced Difficulty
• And some minor bug fixes.

Progression

Being a giant is great. You’re big. You’re powerful. You’re good looking. Because of the first two no one is going to say otherwise on the third. But we recognize that you want more, you want to work towards something. So we’ve introduced our progression system, and as a requirement for that a game save system.

In terms of progression, we’re only starting with three aspects to upgrade across two abilities. Those are the amount of time magical effects remain, how quickly the club recharges, and how many hits the club can deal before it breaks. Because this is early access, don’t get too tied to these upgrades. They may change in terms of effectiveness or price. They may even be replaced.

If you’re concerned about your progress that’s fair. But we do plan on resetting everyone’s progress upon launch. We want to be clear with you about this from the start. You’re helping us develop this game, and we’re taking all your feedback into account. Resetting is something that we’re firm on, given the changes and developments we have planned for the rest of early access.

Game Save System

With the launch of the progression system we’ve had to add a game save system. It’s purely a background thing, and you don’t need to do anything. But as part of this we’ve enabled Steam Cloud saves. This is in part to make sure all your upgrades are stored correctly. 

Lost Ziggurat

It’s hot, it’s muggy, mosquitoes are buzzing, and the sun is streaming down. And that’s just in the real world. And so it is too in the world of A Giant Problem, especially on the new map, Lost Ziggurat. It’s the first map that you can move vertically on, and we will be refining this feature in future updates to make it more apparent where you can and cannot move. If you’re using smooth locomotion then you need to use Stomp to climb to higher levels of the ziggurat. 

New Music and Sounds

Lost Ziggurat means new music! We’ve got a lovely new track from our composer Jonathan. It’s very in keeping with the other music already in-game, while being fantastical and moody that’s perfect for this new map. In addition, we’ve fixed the crystals on The Cauldron so they now sound appropriate when they shatter. 

Rebalance

We’ve been playing A Giant Problem for a while… so we’re kinda good at it. Which means we fail to see the difficulty or flaws in the game. It’s part of the reason we entered early access. And that’s why the feedback we’ve gotten from you has been great. We’ve seen that play sessions are quite short, and people are losing quite quickly. So we’ve set out to remedy that. 

It’s not that we’ve made the game easier. We’ve made it a more gradual curve, so the beginning is smoother and helps you get into the flow of things. But like all things, this too could change based on feedback. And of course it’ll change as we add more features and content to the game that change the balance by their very inclusion.

Bug Fixes and Known Issues

We’ve dealt with some other minor issues related to the characters’ navigation. We wanted to ship something significant to you this month so here are some known issues, that we’ll work as quickly as possible to resolve, none of them are game breaking so don’t worry. Those issues include - decals not always conforming to terrain, and some other minor UI problems. 

As always, we have more in store for A Giant Problem. But for that we need your feedback. Please be sure to reach out to us on the Steam Forums, on our Discord or via our support email.