Gravend: Update
I haven't made a post in a while, looks like it's been 3 months? Wow. Since Wanderbots made that video apparently.
What is Gravend?
Gravend is a long game.
A long, incremental RPG.
35 jobs, 220 locations to explore, 250+ abilities, and 250+ pieces of gear.
More abilities are being added every day, which is actually why I’m making this post.
Some players have hundreds of hours now, 40-60 I should say is the barebones minimum to finish your first run.
The incremental aspect of this game might not seem obvious because it's a slow game at first, assuming you don't know exactly what to do.
I promise when you're wondering if you can push to 1e100 Monks, you'll realize that yes, this is an incremental.
It's a game that rewards thinking around corners and being clever.
Gravend is free, eventually we will make it over to Steam but I want to be done before we do that.
It might be a lot longer than that honestly, it's really hard to say and it depends on if you play blind or use guides.
You should probably play blind.
Gravend is somewhat of a puzzle game, and if you look up every answer, it's obviously going to go quicker.
You absolutely do not need to join the discord or look at the myriad of guides players have written over there to play. There's no way to soft-lock yourself at all. You can join the discord, the players are friendly and knowledgeable, and pretty good about spoilers, but I notice sometimes people join to ask for help with just one thing, and end up following guides or asking about a lot of things. The channels are clearly marked and people almost always use spoiler tags, but fair warning.
When we make it over to Steam, theoretically Gravend will remain free, the whole game, for as long as I can afford hosting. Steam will have achievements and cloud saves and whatnot, so hopefully people will support us but I made this game because I wanted it to exist.
Perhaps my wife and I are idealists (she's the artist) but I plan on keeping the full version online so people can play on mobile or on another tab on their work computers. Or so people who can't afford to buy a game can play.
I just had a player publish a video of a run 0 breaking the barrier in under an hour. That was incredible to be honest but that's not how you should play the first time.
One of my players said I should wait until I'm done adding abilities to make another post but I think I need to start getting some fresh players because a lot of the abilities I've added/am adding are geared towards the very very early game again. I really want to both speed up the early game and reward exploration more rather than just following the quest markers. That's how people used to play before I added all the onboarding quests.
I have shipped a daily update every day except 10 since last Halloween. I expect this to continue.
Oh right, Vanity mode is a fairly recent addition. Once you've finished your run 0 and NG+'d once, you unlock Vanity mode which is pretty neat.
In vanity mode you're locked into one job the entire run and you earn points to unlock theme colors (and eventually art, but my poor wife has such a massive backlog.)
Oh that's another thing I guess, all of the art is hand-drawn by my wife, over a thousand paintings, I've honestly lost count. There is still art missing and you'll see "fallback art" on the occasional piece of gear or item.
AI Disclosure:
AI has been used in some of my internal tooling, I actually wrote a response on another post about this today, but AI has been used to write a lot of powershell scripts for me lately to help with the localization into Simplified Chinese (AI was not used FOR the translation, a Chinese player approached me about translating the game and has been painstakingly translating all the thousands of lines of text)
But AI has helped me (help is a strong word here) to crawl all my files for player facing text in UI components so that I can make myself checklists for files that need to have hardcoded strings tokenized.
Actually I guess one more thing, if you HAVE been following the game at all, it's still not done, the story I mean. There's a LOT of story as I realized with the translation efforts, but if you're waiting for the entire story to be done, it's not done. There are just a few more beats for the final endings of basically all the individual storylines. There are quite a few of them to be honest, and tying this all together is a lot but I'm working on it.
My wife and I are also novelists, and we will finish this story in time. I was originally hoping to be entirely done with the game by December but I'm shooting for maybe next spring now.