Polish, polish and more polish.

The game is getting cleaner, tighter, and better. And that’s because of the hard work the team is putting in. And it’s not just hard work but a lot of work. This patch includes the following:

• Reworked Physics Layer,
• Repair Fixes,
• Reworked Shadow Magic,
• Additional End Conditions and Updated Level End Conditions,
• Updated Characters,
• Map Polishes,
• Polished Magic, and
• Further UI Improvements.

Physics Layers

This is all about optimization, bug hunting, and polish. By making sure that everything is a distinct layer and the correct layer, we ensure that every action has the appropriate reaction. The things we want to trigger when you throw a goblin are exactly those - and not say the UI. No one would enjoy it if you ended up changing the game settings because an errant troll collided with a button. Hence why we took the time to rework all of this and smooth everything out. And if we missed anything we’ll sort it in a future patch.

Repairs

Part of the physics rework was sorting the repair system. Making sure all the correct things were being hit when that hammer was swung. Now it should work without issue. All you need to do is swing that giant hammer at the remains of a wall or house to build it back up. 

Shadow Magic

For a while now dragons have been spitting at the players. It’s something we initially just called goop. But… well… no one likes being vomited on. So we changed it to shadow magic. And with time we’ve developed it further. Not just so it has an all new look, but so you the player can make use of its powers as well. What it does is a surprise.

End Conditions

It was all well and good for Early Access to have some basic end conditions in the campaign - like kill 500 goblins, or survive for 12 minutes, or score 800000000 points. But for a campaign not so much. As much as we love numbers going up it, it makes for a very boring campaign. That’s why we’ve created a slew of additional end conditions to bring much need variation to the missions, and these have been implemented to the already released levels.

Characters

Good or bad our characters are the life of this game. They’re practically everything you interact with. So of course they needed a good polish. In this case it means we’ve got new models, rigs, art, and animations for the Gnomes, Hedgehog and Warriors. With more characters coming soon. Their AI is not quite final as some bugs still need to be worked out, but for the most part it’s all there.

Maps

Every map has had a once over. There’s more life and pop to all of them. Now the lava on The Cauldron is dangerous. In all the maps just look phenomenal. So much so that if you don’t believe us then you’ll just have to see them for yourselves.

Magic Polish

All of the magic is getting visual improvements. Some has been mentioned in the bit about Shadow Magic, but just to reassure you we aren’t forgetting Fire and Ice. They’ve got updated looks, with additional particle effects and shader work coming in the next update beyond what we’ve done in this one.

Further UI Improvements

Like always we’re making changes big and small to our UI. Which is surprising given it’s a game that was meant to have as little as possible. Either way, we’ve streamlined the Credits, taken out the progression system for the moment (more on that in a future post), added some additional features like resetting your save and in general just tried to make for a smoother experience.

All in all there’s a lot that went into this update - things big and small. Just the campaign itself and all the systems involved in that is worth dev diary of its own. But we won’t burden you with that for now. So that’s it for this update. And 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.