We are now ramping up development of the yet unannounced “new Grimrock project” and we thought we could share some tidbits of development goodness to you. This week I’m going to talk a little about the changes under the hood of the engine.
Continue reading »
Feb 012013
Jan 172013
Ok, we know we’ve been awfully quiet with our blog lately, but that’s only because we’ve been working very hard. Working hard on what, you say? More about that a bit later. Let’s first look back all the way to year 2012.
Last year was an incredible success for Almost Human. We released our first game, Legend of Grimrock, which was the best seller for two weeks in Steam and has continued to surpass our expectations. LoG reached 82 points in Metascore declaring it officially to be a great game (but we already knew that, right). We also released the Dungeon Editor that has spawned lots of brilliant mods and Steam’s Legend of Grimrock Workshop has over 450 entries already! Our great community is always surprising us with their skills, creativity and activity in the forums with 50.000 posts and counting. And those post are really high quality stuff too, unlike most forums dedicated to games 
. That means you don’t run out of dungeons to explore in the future. Towards the end of the year we also released the highly anticipated Mac and Linux versions of LoG with great new features and optimizations. And to sum up the year, we’re now proud to announce that Legend of Grimrock has sold over 600.000 copies! We would’ve been happy with just one tenth of the sales numbers, so needless to say we’re very happy and the future of our company is secured for a long time.
But great success doesn’t mean we haven’t lost our passion for making great games. So, what’s next, you might ask. We thought we could share with you a glimpse of some new exiting things we’ve been working on. But beware, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Enjoy!
Dec 212012
Folks here at Almost Human are going to take a small well deserved break and hibernate through the holiday season under the vast snow drifts that cover Finland. But don’t worry, we’ll be back (in Arnold’s voice) next year with new adventures! Big up’s to all our fans and awesome community. Thank you for all your support, we hope you stick with us also the next year! Have merry Holidays and happy New Year. Cheers!!!
Hehey!
We’ve got a great big bunch of great news for you!
A new Humble Bundle just started and we’re in it! That’s right, the legendary pay-what-you want bundle filled to the brim with great indie games and part of the proceeds go to charities as well. It’s on for a limited time only so now is a great opportunity to get some stocking stuffers for christmas.
But wait, aren’t the games on Humble Bundle always available for Mac and Linux as well? Well, so is Legend of Grimrock now too! You can get access to all the platforms by buying the via the Humble Bundle (of course) or our store. Mac version is available on Steam (Steam Play enabled naturally) and you can purchase the Linux version at Ubuntu Software Center soon.
But.. The Humble Bundle and the new platforms are not the only gift we have in store for you. We also updated Legend of Grimrock itself so if you’re on Steam, the game should update by itself but if you’ve got the standalone version, you can download the patch here. Note: version 1.3.1 is required for the standalone version’s patch, so if you don’t have that version, the easiest way to update the game is to redownload it from the vendor you purchased the game from! One nice addition we put into the game is that if you’ve got a low-spec machine, we’ve got a new rendering mode that will help the game run much much smoother on older hardware. But the real exciting stuff is the new features for the dungeon editor. I’ll add a comprehensive change log to the end of this post but there’s one thing we want to highlight here: you can now create custom GUIs. That means you can add 2D graphics on the screen and interact with them using a mouse or keyboard. This means that now you can create, say, dialogues with NPCs, trading interfaces, screens for custom skills and so on. But to show off what the system is capable of doing, yesterday we decided to get off on a bit of a tangent and make a new game from scratch using it. Prepare yourselves for… Toorum’s Quest II!!!
You can now grab the mod from Steam Workshop or Grimrock Nexus and try it out for yourself.
Continue reading »
Nov 302012
Every year it’s the same story: bunch of snow suddenly falls from the sky and mayhem ensues. Snow plows rule the road with (almost literally) an iron fist and people wreck their cars and facebook feeds are filled with people who are irrationally angry towards snow. However I think (and scientists agree) that snow is usually cool.
But then again when you’re rescuing Petri from the side of a highway during a snow storm it can be kinda annoying. In the current weather you would basically need a pair of ski goggles to remain functional so you can imagine that it’s not the best moment to come to the realization that perhaps the fuel gauge in a -92 Volkswagen is not that accurate anymore.
Mac porting has progressed well but Petri also dedicated one evening of programming towards the editor too with the help of some beer and our wonderful forums community who could submit their most wanted features for him to implement. You can see what happened by reading onwards from this post. A dozen or so good features were implemented and if possible we’d like to do at least one more beer coding session before we release the next version. So make sure to follow the forums if you want to influence what new features get in!
Continue reading »
Nov 012012
Wow. It’s already been a few weeks since our last post on the blog. Sorry about that. We definitely want to maintain our activity in here so we’ll try to work harder in the future to update the blog more frequently. I don’t wanna make any promises, but… this is a promise.
Of course we have our excuses for being lazy writers and as a matter of fact in this post I’ll concentrate entirely in just one of the things that has kept us busy during the last few weeks: we moved offices! That’s right, we bid farewell to our old basement office on the edges of periphery: even though the office technically was in the city, our next-door neighbors was a horse stable. Or “neigh-bors” if you’re into embarrassingly terrible puns… Ahem. Right. Here’s what our old office looked like during its last days:
But now things are different since we live (or work? I always confuse the two…) in Keilaniemi, a few kilometers away from our old place in Matinkylä. There’s a lot of tech companies located here so I suppose you could describe the area as a watered down -version of Silicon Valley. Down the road to north, there’s the headquarters of Rovio and to the south the headquarters of Nokia. And right beneath our feet in the office below, we have the brand new Finnish branch of Unity Technologies.
Continue reading »
After several months of break-neck speed development, Almost Human is proud to release the most anticipated modding tool ever, the Dungeon Editor for Legend of Grimrock! The Dungeon Editor is a free update for everybody who owns the game.
Continue reading »
Oct 032012
Thanks to our never tiring public beta testers we have been extremely busy at work for the past weeks. We have been going through the massive amount of feedback, fixing bugs, adding features, and doing general polishing to the Dungeon Editor. And finally it’s ready and we are ready to give a release date…
Continue reading »
Sep 122012
We have now been working on the Dungeon Editor and modding capabilities effectively for almost four months. From the get-go we knew that there would be lots of work ahead of us, because many things were hardcoded and we didn’t have a level editor when we were originally working on the game. Even so it still took us longer than we anticipated to get here.
Continue reading »
Sep 052012
We realized that we really haven’t listed the Dungeon Editor’s features and capabilities in any single place clearly so hey, why not compile a list here. This should give you a better overall picture about what you can create with the editor. Let me switch on my marketing droid -mode here for a moment… There! Let’s go:
- Simple and straightforward user interface.
- Instant preview lets you test play the dungeon instantly: no need to leave the editor or wait for the level to export.
- Create puzzles, traps and contraptions simply by connecting buttons, pressure plates and other triggers to trapdoors, spawners or teleporters for example.
- Use Lua scripts to create even more complex logic and go beyond what would otherwise be possible.
- Fill your dungeons with any of the 350+ original Legend of Grimrock assets.
- Create new items, complete with new graphics and functionality like new magical weapons or potions with their own custom effects.
- If you want a cow-on-wheels roaming the tunnels, it’s no problem: you can use your own custom monsters!
- Totally transform how the dungeon looks and feels like by using custom environment graphics and objects.
- Trigger your own sounds or replace the background music.
- Tell a story with custom intro and ending cinematics.
- Create hellish demon snails simply by changing the textures of the original snail: you can modify, replace or recycle the original Legend of Grimrock textures, meshes or other assets to suit your needs.
- Publish your creations by using the built-in Steam Workshop support – or just freely upload the dungeon data anywhere or hand it out directly to your friends.
Some of you might know that we’ve previously had a policy in place that has prevented modders from modifying/distributing the game assets found in our game data. We will still have that policy in place as far as reverse-engineered assets are regarded but we will release a comprehensive pack of assets along with the editor that you can use and modify to create Legend of Grimrock mods. This is just due to the fact that we can’t, for example, give away sounds we have bought and give people the permission to use and modify those assets. But don’t worry, the majority of our assets will be in the pack for you to use. We will release the revised modding and asset usage terms soon.
Oh, and there won’t be a need to hack the game to access the developer console anymore either: to make it easier to debug your custom dungeons, we have implemented an option to enable the console.
If you’ve got any more questions on what could be done with the editor, ask in the comments or on the forum.
sending...
