Beyond the Grove News

Hello Future Grove Keepers!

In Beyond the Grove, every time you venture out of your grove, you have the opportunity to earn experience that carries over from run to run. For every level up, you will get a skill point and possibly an unlock. You can allocate skill points to fuel various upgrades.

After a defeat or victory, your Grove Keeper gains experience based on various factors: how much essence you earned, how many golems you killed, etc. With that experience, you level up. To start with, leveling up allows you to pick certain elements to start your run with - eventually, there will be more unlocks on the leveling path.



When you level up, you also get a skill point, which can be spent on abilities that power you up so that you can be stronger on your run. Skills vary in cost, and their effects can be upgraded once or an unlimited amount of times. NOTE: The screenshot below doesn't have all of the unlocks!



Your Grove Keeper, although strong, is limited in their ability. However, it does seem possible that if a particular challenge is too hard, another Grove Keeper with different abilities could do better… Until next time!

Hello Future Grove Keepers!

In Beyond the Grove, you can grow in power as you travel outside of your grove. This is achieved through the accumulation of Essence and communing with Mother Mushroom to obtain blessings. Below is that process in detail.



You will be awarded Essence depending on how efficiently you win a map. You will always get 50 Essence for winning, but that number can go higher. You can also get Essence via other means, like through blessings and objectives on the map.



After you complete a map, you will convene with Mother Mushroom, your source of power (via the mycelial network). While communing with her, she provides you with possible blessings for you to choose from to power up. These blessings could be new elements, new Grove Keeper powers, power ups for your caps, powers for your golems, and more.



However, if you get overwhelmed, you will teleport back to your grove and Mother Mushroom - and in doing so, will lose all of your blessings. It will not all be for nothing though! You will accumulate experience which you can take with you always - we’ll cover experience and skill points in the next dev update.

Thanks for reading!

Hello Future Grove Keepers!

In Beyond the Grove, one of the core elements of the game is our Golem Crafting system. We’ll have over 50 unique golems to make for launch. This update will cover how it works.

[h2]7 Elements to Mix With[/h2]


There are 7 elements to work with in the game: air, earth, fire, water, light, dark, nature. Every golem has a unique recipe that is some combination of those elements.

[h2]Element Slots[/h2]


The other aspect are Element Slots, which tell you how many elements you can combine at once. To start with, you’ll get 2. Once you get 3 slots, you can combine more elements to make more powerful golems. At 4 Element Slots, you can create Omega golems, which have incredible destructive power and/or utility.

[h2]Glyphstones[/h2]


Finally, there are Glyphstones. Glyphstones are the currency which tell you how many golems you can create at a time. They are earned easily, and can come from upgrades between runs, in the shop, or during battle.

[h2]Examples[/h2]

Let’s say you have 6 Glyphstones and 3 Element Slots. You have fire, nature, light, and earth elements available.

You spend 1 Glyphstone to make fire/nothing/nothing. You make a Cinder Golem. A fragile ranged unit that hurls fireballs.


[You spend 2 Glyphstones to make fire/nature/nothing. You make a Charcoal Golem. A tanky melee unit that smacks units with its branches.


You spend 3 Glyphstones to make fire/earth/light. You make a Volcano Golem. A beefy mountainous unit that randomly throws globs of lava around itself.


All 3 golems are summoned to the map and start overtaking your enemies!


We can’t wait to see what everyone’s favorite golems are!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3516420/Beyond_the_Grove/

Hello Future Grove Keepers!

Today, I want to share why we decided to make Beyond the Grove's game a hybrid of real-time tactics, turn-based strategy, and auto-battling. In short: we love strategy games and the challenges they bring—but we don’t always have the time (or brainpower) for the really hardcore ones.

Over the years, I’ve logged thousands of hours in League of Legends, Starcraft (1 & 2), Warcraft 3, the Total War series, XCOM (1 & 2), and countless other strategy titles. But as I got older and my family grew, my time for gaming shrank. These days, I rarely get the chance to sit down and really sink into a deep strategy game. And when I do, I either get crushed by players with way more time... or I just don’t have the same energy and reflexes I used to.

Don’t get me wrong—there are some amazing games out there (especially from indie devs!) that scratch some of the strategy itch. But nothing quite hit all the marks I was looking for. I wanted something that was:

• Strategic and tactical
  
• Included crafting and discovery
  
• Had roguelite elements
  
• Told a charming story
  
• Not real-time!
  

So, we decided to build it.

The original spark came from my wife, who has fond memories of a game called Golem Wars (or Golem Madness, depending on who you ask). She pitched the idea of a modern, single-player take on it. With some creative theming from my brother-in-law and a few additions based on everything I mentioned above, Beyond the Grove was born.

[h3]But why not make it a traditional real-time tactics with pause?
[/h3]
You might wonder why we decided to have auto-battler-esque sequences instead of making a real-time tactics game with pause? For us, it came down to one thing: we didn’t want the game to matter whether or not you had fast reflexes. There have been countless times I’ve been playing Total War or Crying Suns on 2x or 3x speed, only to pause at the wrong time and lose the match because I barely missed the chance to pause the game at the right time. You might say: "well, get gud" or "play the game on half speed", and then I will say: "give me a break, I only have 15 minutes to play I got 4 hours of sleep last night because my toddler had a nightmare."

This is all subject to change though - we want the game to be fun, and we're willing to make changes to reach that goal.

We hope it becomes something truly special—something that scratches that strategy itch while still being approachable and fun. Thanks so much for reading!