The Lonely Gorilla News

First of all I would like to apologise for the stop in development that happened shortly after covid 19 hit. We were a micro team of two and the pandemic hit both of us hard. My partner had to change his work patterns completely and could not continue and as my main business was hospitality I had to completely focus on that for my staff and business to survive.

Unfortunately this meant not being able to devout any time to game development. Even with this however, the inevitable has now happened and the hospitality business has been forced to close. The upside to this is I can refocus on game development and with that in mind the plan is as follows.

The Lonely Gorilla has a lot of potential and I intend to work on a new update and getting assistance in key areas to fulfil the vision. While this is the case the game will be reduced to 99p (This should happen from the 13/10/21 as this takes a couple of days to activate) so anyone who feels like supporting this endeavour can do so at minimal cost while providing a little incentive that there is demand for this game if it is taken to where it deserves. As we make improvements we will increase the price steadily until it is a finished and acceptable state. Please contribute if you can or feel it is worthwhile but if not please wait for updates and add to wishlist.

I'm sure this has been a tough time for everyone and completely understand if this is no longer of interest and I can only apologise again for the delay to updating the community.

Andy

Hi all, Now our second game has entered early access The Lonely Gorilla is getting a complete overhaul. The problems we have had with some of the systems has led to us not getting the game into the shape we wanted.

We have had to go back to the drawing board on a few things (Especially AI and the player controller). Both of these things have been completely re written so we can deliver what we set out to do. We are still a little bit off from releasing them but the improvements will be worth the wait and as mentioned on the previous announcement as a thank you for your patience we are gifting our latest game to all current owners of TLG.

Our main priorities are better control with keyboard and mouse and reactive social response for the gorillas but feel free to post any ideas/improvements in the forums.

Andy

Hi all,

Due to the delay on getting some of the bigger updates released for the Lonely Gorilla I have decided to extend the free game offer to all current owners as well the easy access owners.

The updates will still be released for the Lonely Gorilla but due to the delay I hope this is a fair apology.

The next game is an episodic adventure with the store page going live in the next few weeks. This will provide more information on the game itself. The first episode is free to all Lonely Gorilla current owners who wish to try it.

If you own the Lonely Gorilla when the store page is live, we will provide information for how you get the free game. Thanks for your patience and I can't wait to get your feedback on the new title.

Andy

Hi all, We are back with a working updatable game!

The first of the 3-4 updates rewriting the Gorilla AI and social interactions are live. It is now much clearer the effect on the female gorillas of achieving tasks like feeding, making a nest, achieving loyalty.

A couple of important bug fixes have also been added. Branches for making nests were occasionally disappearing under the terrain, this should no longer happen making it much easier to find branches to build nests.
rescaled the minimap so it is less cluttered and easier to see items close by.
Added nest icon (home) so no longer need the smoke signal on nests.

A couple of nice improvements along with the fixes:-

The terrain is now twice the Size at 4 square kilometres.
Certain errors that have fixed have resulted in a huge increase in frame rate along with denser vegetation. My test machine now runs at an average of 90fps from 60fps

Couple of ideas I am testing:-
Adding icons to make even clearer regarding the troop needs.
Adding a sense button which will then add an outline to items of interest within a radius. Potentially, animals, food, branches, nests. to help locate them.

Adding a call button to any nearby female gorillas.

There is still more progress to be made in regard to player feedback and more interactions. The infant gorillas have a lot more work to be done once you have gotten to the mating stage and they will be the focus of the last AI update once the female Gorillas are finished.

Andy

Thank you all for your patience first of all. I have rolled back the project and finally got a version that works on steam servers. Unfortunately it is a little bit behind the last live version some I am now in the process of getting it back to where it was with the new update.

The new updating version should be live within the next 24 hours. Sorry again I lost a few days in complete meltdown but now I have the ability to update again we should be making strides.

Andy