Hey everyone!

The last few months we've been working on GrowRilla (which you've already grabbed, right...right???) but we have a few upcoming spare cycles and we've been toying with the idea of doing a small update for Late For Work. Primarily we'd like to focus on two things:

• Adding full support for the Index controllers. We already support the controllers, but we'd like them to be first-class citizens, so fixing up the helper UIs and so on.
  
• Exposing all the tweakable values for all the different game modes. We spent many months balancing the different modes for a different amount of players (1v1, 1v2, etc) but still, it's hard to get just right. A few players have requested that expose all these values so that the community can work on it themselves, tweak it to their particular setup.

But we want to hear from you, is there anything annoying you or missing from the game that you really would like us to fix. Please let us know down here in the comments or on the forums.

We're running a small sale this week-end on both our VR games and just to sweeten the pot, we've created a "Indie Supporter" bundle where you can grab both games for a bigger discount (or complete your bundle):

https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/11985/

Finally, check out this funny and awesome review of Late For Work from our friends YYY












Thanks as always for your support and for continuing to rate Late For Work as one of the top VR party games. It means a lot to us.

Stay Awesome,
Salmi Games

Hello friends!

It's time for the annual Steam Awards! We'd really appreciate your votes and nominations for Late For Work for the Labor of Love award. Please consider giving it your vote. You can also find the full list of categories here: https://store.steampowered.com/steamawards/nominations

We are also humbly nominating our other VR game GrowRilla for the Best VR Game award, so please check out this link and consider giving it a vote as well.

Thank you!
Salmi Games

Hello friends,

We are super excited to (finally) announce online support for Late For Work thanks to Steam's new Remote Play Together. Steam rolled out this amazing new feature which gives us online for free! You'll now be able to play Late For Work remotely with your friends with just a few clicks.

Online play is/was probably our most requested feature and while we always wanted to implement it, it would've taken us many long and stresfful months to implement and test. And it most likely wouldn't have worked very well.

We are really excited about this new feature. This is such a cool surprise from Steam. We hope that everyone who requested online support for Late For Work will try out the new Remote Play Together (although please note that it is officially still in Beta status).

If you're curious to try out Remote Play Together, it's quite simple. You only have to follow this short guide: https://steamcommunity.com/games/593110/announcements/detail/3032537193879549687

Here are the specific steps we went through to set it up in our office:

Enable Steam Beta:

• Navigate to Steam->General->Account
  
• Click on "CHANGE..." in the "Beta participation" section.
  
• Select "Steam Beta Update" in the dropdown list.
  
• Restart Steam

(After setting up the Steam Beta as described above)

• Start the game
  
• Minimize the game, open the friends tab
  
• Click on the Late For Work play together icon to invite your friends

In general, we are quite impressed at how well this new feature works. For a Beta, it's already quite stable (and technically impressive). Here are a few things we observed with Late For Work:

• It only supports one keyboard/mouse input (which makes sense). Other players have to use gamepads.
  
• Mouse input is not always accurate
  
• There are occasional input lags (although in general we were impressed by how good it behaves)
  
• We noticed occasional sound distortions (especially on the gorilla footsteps sounds). We're investigating if there are things we can improve on our side to address this.

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Dear Friends,


Just a quick announcement that we will be sunsetting our Early Supporters Bundle on Friday November 8th. We introduced this bundle when we launched GrowRilla. Our goal was to reward early supporter's of our games and a way to help support us in developing our unique brand of indie VR games. Thank you to all of you who have supported us and our games. Make sure to grab the bundle before it's gone and get access to two awesome VR games and that warm fuzzy feeling of supporting indie development.

Thanks,
Salmi Games

Hello friends,

As you may or may not know, Late For Work is full of special content for the spooky Halloween season. This year we're running a discount for Halloween, we hope you'll jump and try all the scary changes to the various game modes in the game. Let’s dive in!

All of the inhabitants of the Late For Work island have gone missing. Instead you will encounter some truly terrifying creatures. Zombies, skeletons and mummies will be walking around the city. Street lanterns will turn to jack o’ lanterns. Witches will fly through the sky and many other spooooky surprises are waiting for you.





Some of the game modes are also explicitly affected with some scary fiends. Most notably, the UFOs are now Witches, who are trying to abduct the local cattle and some other participants of certain game modes have been spookified.



We hope you enjoy our Halloween content. If you want to share your thoughts and feedback on the game or to keep track of what we're working, make sure to join our Discord: discord.gg/salmigames

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Hey friends,

Our new game GrowRilla just launched in Early Access. Please check it out! We also just released the launch trailer. Honestly, I'm proud of what we accomplished both on the game so far and with the trailer given our shoe-sized budget.



We're also excited to be able to follow through one of our original goals with Late For Work and our VR games: to continue to reward early supporters who believed in us or invested in us from the early days. We did it with Late For Work by raising the price over time, early supporters would get the best deal. Now we've setup a "complete the set" bundle. This is effectively a launch discount exclusive for owners of Late For Work. This bundle will only be active for a limited period during launch.

Thank you again for all your support. Please help us make the GrowRilla launch a success by wishlisting the game, telling your friends about it, and, dare I say it, even buying it and leaving a review? We can't wait to read your reviews and feedback so we can make the best possible game.

Hi friends,

We want to share a bit more detail about why we're moving on from Late For Work. We first wrote this post a bit defensively, but the overwhelmingly positive feedback we've received since the 1.0 release makes us really appreciate the community around our game. Thank you for being so supportive. The positive reviews and feedback have been a joy to read for the entire team.


This game has been super satisfying to make. We think local asymmetric VR games is extremely under-served but unfortunately, after 2+ years on this project we understand a bit better why there aren’t more:

• Making a stable VR game with local multiplayer is extremely hard. Like really technically hard, just recognizing and handling all the different input schemes and not crashing. Never mind all the gameplay balancing.
  
• Most players play VR on their own. This means our target audience is a fraction of the VR market.

The frank reality is that LFW doesn't make enough for us to justify us continuing to work on it (or even the past year's worth of updates). All in all, as of July 13thth, we sold 2,417 units for a net income of $22,575. That's...actually not bad for a local multiplayer VR game. But it's not enough to justify even one person working on it full-time for 2+ years.

When we started this game, we didn't really think about this potential financial downside too much. We wanted to make a fun, social (in the classic sense) game that people could enjoy with their friends, that parents could enjoy with their kids. We're a small indie studio trying to make a mark in VR games. LFW was a fun idea and a way to deepen our skills in VR.

We haven't sold nearly enough copies to justify the investment we made developing this game, let alone continuing to support it. In order to keep operating as a studio, to keep making games, we need to start focusing on the financial side as well.

This is one reason our next game GrowRilla will be single player focused. We want to target the largest possible market. We hope you'll check it out and wishlist it.

Let's dig a little bit into the challenges we faced...


We've observed the local multiplayer scene for the past two years. There are actually quite a few really great games. Check out this awesome list! But what we learned is that it's really hard to make a local multiplayer VR game, let alone a stable one with 4 player support, hot-swapping, keyboard + gamepad (and all sorts of gamepads). It's like making two separate games.

Testing alone took so much time. Check out our QA sheet. This represents just our official test list. A lot of multiplayer related bugs would only get caught after a lot of rounds of testing and trying to break things.

We're proud of where we stand in comparison to the other games out there, especially in terms of stability and fun. But oh man was it a hard and sustained challenge.


Late For Work first started out as a prototype and evolved from there. We're experienced dev but VR was a new area with unique challenges. Our codebase went through a LOT of evolutions as we figured out VR, physics issues, controller issues, player management, all the vehicle controls, the SteamVR plugin, the OculusVR plugin and so on.

Further, the nature of the game required a lot of experimentation to create new game modes. This all happened on the same codebase. Next to the 7 game modes live in the game today we also have half a dozen sitting around unfinished (including a gokart version, a tower defense-like, humans hoping in and out of vehicle and multi-stage missions). We also used the same codebase to prototype bigger experiments for future projects that haven't seen the light of day:

• A single player story mode
  
• A sandbox town simulator with giant gorilla doing odd jobs around town to make ends meet (this one was waaaaay too ambitious)
  
• online sandboxes
  
• an action game where you take revenge on your tormentors and you get bigger every time you eat. Sounds familiar?

Unfortunately this has become a big delicate mess of code (in spite of our best efforts to refactor and think ahead, and trust me, we spent a lot of time cleaning up). It's harder to make changes without breaking things. We're stuck on an outdated version of Unity without modern goodies like nested prefabs, too scared to upgrade because past experiences have shown us it takes so much work to fix up after.

So we want to start new and we have. We're working on a new project on a fresh codebase with all our learnings from LFW applied. It's a liberating experience for our team. We're so much more productive, possibly an order of magnitude more efficient.

Let's be clear, LFW is near and dear to us all. We love this game and enjoy firing it up on a Friday afternoon. We feel that with all the game modes and maps there's something for everyone. And we feel we've left it in a solid state. And, again, we will keep monitoring feedback for critical bugs.

So, the future of the game: this is a 1.0 release. For us, the game is mostly done. There's a ton more we would like to add, but then we will never be able to focus on the next game.


Many players have requested this. And we agree, it would be genuinely fun. We would love to have added online but it's such a time and cost commitment without a guarantee it will pay off even if we produce something great. Getting that critical mass of players and/or really convincing bot behaviors is not a trivial effort. Online is an area we really want to focus on in future projects, but shoehorning it to LFW would have been a massive project.

We've observed other similar games introduce online and be forced to remove it due to the instabilities it introduced and the backlash from the players (both for instability and for removal).

Online is something we're continuously experimenting with, also for our next projects, but we're not going to release anything until we're confident it's going to be a net positive for everyone (stable, fun, sustainable).

So those were some of the technical challenges we faced making Late For Work. We’re now focusing on our new game GrowRilla (and a few other prototypes). Late For Work has been a long and incredible journey but we are relieved to put it behind us and focus on fresh ideas on a fresh codebase.

If you've read this far it means you've probably bought one of our games and enjoy it, so first of all: thank you, we can't really ask you for more. But if you want to help us keep making games, then the best way:

• Leave us a review
  
• Buy and wishlist our other games
  
• Tell other people about our games

Thank you for reading!

Dear Friends,

Today we are super excited to announce the 1.0 release of Late For Work and our exit from Early Access. After 23 months and 13 major updates, we are proud to release the biggest update to Late For Work yet. We also want to share our plans for the future, for Late For Work and for our next VR games but first let's go over what's in our 1.0 release!




Our 1.0 update is focused first and foremost on providing a stable and polished core experience. We invested a lot of effort testing the game and fixing bugs. Most (all?) of the recent player-spawning weirdness from the last updates are gone now. We've also fixed a number of other annoyances, please see the full changelist at the bottom for details.

We’ve improved and polished the UI in every game mode to better convey the score and relevant information for each game. We also updated all the visual UI assets.

We spent time going over each map. The town and seaport maps have been pretty good and balanced for a while but the valley and the snow map needed some love. Both maps are more fleshed out, with a bigger play area, more content, and more places to hide and explore. We also did a full visual color grading pass on the game.


We added another whole new game mode! Finally, the gorilla has been cut down to size and the tables have been turned. The now normal-sized gorilla has to evade capture from the mad scientists (non-VR players), who are hunting the gorilla and trying to capture the gorilla in their special oversized nets. Slam down your net and secure the gorilla to win. We call this beautiful game mode… Ape Escape!

Here's a funny GIF of the game mode we wish we could directly embed in this post: https://i.imgur.com/68bk6iU.gif


The gorilla has a body, finally! We've also redone the model to be more...gorilla-esque and consistent with the overall art style. The new gorilla chest is also a hit box and more easily hit from plane and tank shots. It also makes it much easier to spot the gorilla from a distance. We also experimented with a dynamic chest inclining algorithm. We think it works pretty well, we hope you like it too.




With this 1.0 release, we will scale down our efforts on Late For Work. While there are tons of ideas we would still love to implement, we have decided to focus on new VR games projects to have a better shot at supporting ourselves financially. Late For Work has been an incredibly fun project to work on, but unfortunately it’s not very financially viable.

We will be monitoring feedback on the game and we will of course fix any annoying bugs but please don't expect major new content for the game (unless the sales numbers drastically spike or say, this post gets 500 upvotes or maybe we get to a hundred reviews? That would really motivate us).

In the meantime, we have started working on a new game called GrowRilla and it would mean a lot to us if you add it to your wishlist. For all of you who own a copy of Late For Work, we’re working on setting up an exclusive discount on GrowRilla as a small thank you for your support of our studio.

Stay tuned in the coming days for another update where we dig a bit more into our plans for the future, discussing our sales numbers and why we’re moving on from Late For Work.

If you're reading this far it means you've probably bought one of our games and enjoy it, so first of all: *thank you*, we can't really ask you for more. But if you want to help us keep making fun VR games, then the best ways to support us are:

• Leave us a review
  
• Buy our other games
  
• Tell people about our games

Thank you as always. It’s been a fun ride.


Improvements

• Gameplay: Valley and mountain map received a massive overhaul
  
• Gameplay: new Ape Escape game mode
  
• Gameplay: Single player missions health has been adjusted to be more generous
  
• Gameplay: Tank shots now have a larger impact radius and more force behind them
  
• Gameplay: Changed how spawning for non VR players work in the tutorial, so you are now able to always respawn as a car
  
• Visuals: The gorilla now has a new head and body for you to shoot at
  
• Visuals: All maps now have improved color grading
  
• Visuals: Added sidewalks to all maps
  
• Visuals: You can now switch seasons in the menu
  
• Visuals: Updated the desktop icon
  
• Visuals: All UI icons of the old gorilla head, tanks and planes have been updated with their new counterparts
  
• Usability: Multiplayer tab is now more prominent and always the default activated tab on startup
  
• Usability: Removed the experiments tab as most experiments were broken
  
• Usability: The menu is now less likely to be blocked by ingame objects when you open it
  
• Usability: Updated the result menu to display information better
  
• Audio: Reduced the noise planes make
  
• AI: Improved car AI, better at hiding from the gorilla
  
• UI: Updated text for non-VR players when the gorilla is in the menu
  
• UI: Non-VR player UI got updated (now in the top center and displays information better)
  
• UI: In-game UI is now hidden while you are in the menu
  
• UI: Removed the death counter in hide & seek as it served no purpose and was blocked partly by the timer
  
• UI: Non-VR player UI now displays how many VIPs are left in bodyguard mode
  
• UI: Non-VR player UI now displays numbers of targets collected as well as number of UFOs destroyed in UFO mode

Fixes

• The billboard in the “save the city” single-player mission displays the sustained damage correctly again
  
• Fixed a bug where cars would drive off the road for no reason
  
• You are no longer able to start a round of bodyguard when there are no other players
  
• Fixed a bunch of broken disguises in last man standing
  
• Fixed a bug where non VR players were assigned no unit in bodyguard mode
  
• Fixed an issue where one player would control two vehicles in the tutorial
  
• The font for the plane ammo no longer increases in size over the course of a match
  
• Tanks no longer spawn inside of objects
  
• Tanks no longer get stuck on lampposts lying on the ground
  
• Fixed a bug where tanks would drop through the level on american city, but would still be able to drive around and hit the gorilla
  
• The game no longer resets the gorilla’s height when you eat something while ducking
  
• The menu text is no longer obstructed by the “back” button
  
• Fixed a bug where the UI would display keyboard controls for controller players
  
• The game mode descriptions are no longer missing when you start the game
  
• Fixed a bug where two players would spawn with the same plane
  
• Fixed a bug where you could boost yourself into the air in the victory screen, even if you weren’t being held by the gorilla
  
• UFO mode no longer has out of season UFOs
  
• The menu no longer clips into the ground and thus hides the “quit” and “tutorial” buttons
  
• Fixed a bug where you wouldn’t lose the bullrun gamemode as gorilla even if you ate too many innocent cows
  
• The “restart” button no longer appears if you went back in the menu, even if you never started a game mode
  
• Fixed some physics issues in the bodyguard game mode
  
• Fixed a bug where no AI players would join in hide & seek mode
  
• Fixed a bug where some humans would not count as collected in UFO mode

Hello friends,

We've just pushed out a super massive content update just in time for Christmas. OK, we may be exaggerating...a lot. Let's start again.



We just pushed out a small patch fixing a few bugs that appeared with the last update. It should clean up and fix a few issues regarding the Christmas mode (which you should definitely check out). We've also improved the collision shapes on a number of our new buildings and fixed a bug with some annoying repetitive sounds when you play Hide n Seek. Below you can find the full list of changes we made.

We hope you enjoy Late For Work with your friends and families over the holidays!


Improvements

• Improved physics on multi story buildings
  
• Improved collision on buildings
  
• Added some missing Christmas trees and presents to all maps
  
• Fixed/implemented the flying billboard scoreboard in the Hill map (bodyguard mode)
  
• Added additional ammunition power ups to the mountain map

Fixes

• You could join the bodyguard game mode even if there were no players available
  
• No longer play the “you found an item” tune every time you restarted the Hide & Seek game mode
  
• Gorilla player didn’t actually lose after eating an innocent human in the Bodyguard game mode
  
• The snow from our Christmas update is no longer pink
  
• Fixed some spawns for the tanks on the mountain map, no more tanks getting stuck in barns
  
• Hide the debug menu, oops

Hello Friends,

November is over, which means Christmas is right around the corner. Before we head into the holiday season, we wanted to get out one more Update for Late For Work. This one focuses on fixing a whole bunch of issues that many players have brought to our attention. We are always very glad for your Feedback!


Late For Work will now work with almost any controller. We tackled this bug after this review from one of our players. We improved the way the game recognizes USB controllers and it should work for pretty much every controller out there. Some may have to be mapped correctly with Steam Big Picture before use however, please check out this guide.

Also we noticed that we (inadvertently) disabled inputs when the game’s window was not in focus. This means if you clicked away (perhaps on a dual screen while streaming) or a random windows pop-up appeared then you could lose controller input. This should also be fixed now!

If you still experience controller issues, please let us know on the forums or in Discord.


Remember when we said that almost everything is new in the last big art update? Well now actually everything is new! Almost. We worked some more on the last few models that survived our art overhaul. This includes mainly the Cows (now properly distinguishable as bulls and cows), but also some other tweaks like improving the tanks (again).



When we replaced the car models in last release, we didn’t really pay attention to scale. Well, only insofar as the cars to the humans. For the cars to be big enough for the humans, they ended up being as big as the tanks. Long debates ensued on whether we should address this. Tweaking the scale of the tanks affects everything: controls, projectile strength, ease of cover, AI behavior.

But we couldn’t stand the idea of tiny tanks, so we scaled them up and fixed up all the ensuing consequences.




This one has been on our todo list for a while and we are happy to have finally finished it. In-game UI should do a much better job of showing what is going on, current health, current score and so on. The Gorilla’s health and flat players’ lives are now clearly displayed at the top of the screen for the flat players, while the billboards show the same info for all players.

Also we’ve tweaked quite a bit the other “help” messages that appear to be less annoying and more context relevant. Specifically, the “reset camera with Z” message should appear less often. We also added some visual clarity to the “motivating” feature in the bull run mode to make it easier for players to understand its effect. Thank you for all the feedback on this one.


This is something we wanted to integrate ever since we saw the first SnuggleTruck videos last year. We actually prototyped something 7-8 months ago but never wrapped it up because of the thousand other things to fix and improve. But, for this release, we wanted to include our first twitch chat experiment. This is as a small thank you to one of our nicest players, Mr. Pontus, who’s given us endless feedback (we know this is not “online support”, but let’s consider a first small step in that direction).

We’re not sure how many players want such a feature, but if this interests you, check it out. It’s still pretty basic, but play around a little bit and give us some feedback where you’d like to see us take it. https://discord.gg/salmigames

Of course there is much more than that. Many bugs have been fixed with this update as well. The full list of changes is below.


Improvements

• Controls: more responsive cow movements, especially when slowing down
  
• Controls: Added support for pretty much every USB controller
  
• Visuals: added new models for the cows and bulls
  
• Visuals: scaled up tanks so they are not the same size as the cars
  
• Visuals: new map preview images with the latest art models
  
• Visuals: added particle effects to a lot of objects when they are destroyed
  
• Gameplay: rebalanced the health of a lot of game objects since some would never get destroyed (looking at you, barn roof)
  
• Gameplay: changed Hide & Seek so that the gorilla automatically picks up items of players they destroy
  
• UX: Changed the “reset camera with X” message to not appear all the time
  
• UX: the “press X for help” message will now display if nothing else is being pressed
  
• UX: changed the look of the aiming reticle for planes to make it more visible
  
• UX: added some visual clarity to the “motivate” feature in bull run to make it visually clearer which cows are affected by it
  
• Gameplay: gorilla will now lose the bull run game mode if he eats / destroys too many innocent cows
  
• Systems: refactored game mode system to make it easier to add new game modes
  
• Systems: “Capture VIP” game mode has been properly renamed to “Bodyguard”
  
• Audio: when a witch picks up a human / cow in the halloween version of the UFO invaders mode she will give a maniacal laugh (you’ll have to wait for next halloween to experience that!)

Fixes

• Barn roof would fail to destroy vehicles
  
• Players could not join single player missions correctly
  
• Billboard plane was missing its model
  
• Bottom of the tank turret to not be see-through
  
• Fixed the center of mass for the cows, so that they are rotating correctly when thrown into the air (thanks reddit)
  
• Humans in the credit level now look in the right direction
  
• Fixed a bug where AI enemies would join a game even when the AI was turned off
  
• Ffixed the tutorial level so that the cars don’t collide with parts of the ground
  
• Fixed a bug where the gorilla’s hand would sometimes teleport to a random location which resulted in the gorilla moving at mach 10 super speed