Update #4 - Heart Balloons & Hammers!

Items are a classic part of a good roguelike dungeon crawler. Now Happy Grumps has Items to help your Hero spread Happiness! Each Item is intentionally overpowered, but they are balanced to only last for 10 turns.

• Coffee: Prevents sleepiness

• Flower: Prevents grumpiness

• Hammer: Destroys all walls

• Super Shield: Hero dodges all Hunter attacks

• Heart Balloon: Earn +1 Max Turn each move

• And more Items coming in future updates!

To balance the game against the power of these items, we also made the following changes:

• We reduced player trinket slots to three down from four. Players who resume old save files will still have their fourth trinket, but it will not appear in the HUD. If that is you, we are sorry! You will get a one-time bonus of 20 turns on your save file by way of an apology.

• The Shield Trinket now grants all Happy Grumps a 25% chance to dodge. We reduced it down from 50% to compensate for the increased benefit for all Happy Grumps. This also paves the way for a future update which will allow players to earn additional dodge % during a run.

IMPORTANT NOTE: These new Items will only appear on NEW runs!

Gameplay Styles

We are super excited about this mechanic!

You can now choose between different styles of gameplay. It allows us to flavor runs in different ways.

• The New Mode "Ascend" starts players with a low amount of turns, but helps them slowly grow in power by granting them +1 Max Turns for each cleared room.

• The Old Mode "Descend" is still an option for those who want a classic Happy Grumps experience: you start with a huge bank of turns and try to clear the dungeon before you run out.

• We plan on adding more gameplay styles down the road, including an "Endless" mode for people who want to test their mettle :D

New HUD & New Hint Text System

To make room for the new Items system, we gave the HUD a HUGE overhaul. We placed Turns, Items, and Trinkets into a type of "belt" that runs directly beneath the game board. It turns out (a terrible turn-based pun!) that Remaining Turns / Max Turns were getting lost in old HUD, so we gave them more focus here.

And we also made BIG changes to our Help Text system:

• Players can now toggle the Hint Text on or off - or players can hold the CONTROL key to toggle this on temporarily.

• Players can select any Grump (even unhappy ones) and hover over their portrait to view their Hint Text.

• Players can also hover over board items like chests and walls to show their Hint Text when the Hint Text is toggled on.

This should continue to provide new players with the information they need to learn the systems, but stay out of the way of experienced players.

Whew - that's a ton of stuff. There's lots of little bug fixes too, but this post is already too long. We are looking forward to our next big update.

Thanks again for playing and supporting Happy Grumps!!!

• Glenn & Drew