Hello all!

To celebrate the Games Germany Steam Event, we've put Late For Work on sale!

As some of you may know, we are based in Munich, Germany. Salmi Games started out operations from a colleague's living room, where our first game Ellipsis was developed, marketed and released. While the living room had comfy couches, it wasn't an ideal long term setup, so for the development of Late For Work (and late development for GrowRilla), we got ourselves a modest office near the Munich East train station.

A big turn came for our studio when we secured funding from the federal government as part of an investment initiative focusing on German game development. This funding allowed our studio to expand its team and to work full time on our then-upcoming VR title, Sweet Surrender!

We are happy to be developing in Munich, a vibrant city which presents certain financial challenges to a small Indie studio. We have some wonderful local neighbour developers such as Mimimi Games , Realmforge Studios and DU&I , as well as all of our fellow German developers across the country!

To commemorate this, we are participating in this Steam event, where both Sweet Surrender and Late For Work are now at a discount! Enjoy!

Thank you,

Salmi Games

Hey friends!

We’re excited to finally announce that our newest VR title, Sweet Surrender, is coming out September 30th!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/638130/Sweet_Surrender/

We also have a brand new trailer for you to check out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iT1u9n2lSko

Sweet Surrender is our first fully budgeted game, and after 20 months of development we are really looking forward to releasing it to the public!


The release is super exciting for us, but is also the start of a new development phase. We have gathered a great deal of feedback and wishes from players. This feedback (along with our own ideas) will form the foundation for future (free!) DLCs and updates. We will outline these details very soon in our upcoming roadmap!


Thank you for all your support over the years. We hope you will check out our new game.

We will naturally keep posting our updates on our Twitter, Discord and Steam page!
In the meantime, remember to add Sweet Surrender to your wishlist, it’s a huge help for us.

Thanks,
Salmi Games

Hi everyone, exciting news!

We will be taking part in the Steam Next Fest, featuring our upcoming VR title Sweet Surrender! Not only will there be a playable demo available for all to try, but we will also be hosting a live stream on the June 18th (20:00 CEST/2pm EST/11am PST). Make sure to check out our Sweet Surrender page for details and further updates (and thank you for wishlisting the game).

For more frequent updates you can find us on Twitter and Discord!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/638130?utm_campaign=BLOG

Stay tuned!
 
Salmi Games

Dear friends,

We're excited to finally reveal our upcoming game!

Sweet Surrender, a Roguelite VR Shooter, will be coming out in late 2021. This is our biggest project yet: a fully-funded, action-loaded single player adventure set in a whole new world!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/638130/Sweet_Surrender/

To celebrate this reveal, we are running a sale on GrowRilla and Ellipsis!

Thanks for your support! As a small indie team, we really appreciate it!

Hello everyone,

Late For Work is currently doing a weekend sale. If you're interested in the game, you can check out the VR power hour stream of the game, to see what it's like.

We hope you enjoy.

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Hello friends,

today we are hosting a livestream by VR power hour. We hope you enjoy it.

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Hello everyone,

it's Halloween time and that means that our extra spooky content is making a return. The island inhabitans have been replaced with 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.


Following some very polite feedback in one of our few negative reviews, we took another look at our single player campaign:



Low and behold, we did have a few bugs related to the campaign, which prevented player progress! Thank you kind reviewer for letting us know! We've fixed the issues and tested the whole campaign once more. Single player mode is back! The full changelist of fixes is below.

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.

And of course, if you enjoy the game, please be so kind as to leave us a review on the store page. It means a lot!

Cheers,
Salmi Games

• Bombers have been removed from Single player campaign
  
• Fixed mission descriptions
  
• Fixed geometry of Intro levels to avoid menu clipping
  
• SteamVR bindings loaded correctly even when launching from SteamVR
  
• Fixed Mission 1 which was triggering the wrong AI wave pattern
  
• Cars were being incorrectly spawned instead of actual enemies

Hello everyone,

We just wanted to let you know that in conjunction with the latest update we also released a guide on how to properly use the custom game settings. You can find it here.

In it you can find a list of every editable setting and how it affects the game. We hope it will help you balance game modes to your liking. If you have any issues with the new custom game rules, please let us know.

Also, if you come up with some fun game mode balancing rules, please feel free to share them with the community. We'll do our best to highlight any useful ones.

As always, we welcome your feedback. Let us know if this guide was helpful or if there are other settings you'd like to see exposed. Come chat with us and the community on our Discord: discord.gg/salmigames

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Hello friends!

It's been a long time coming, but we're finally ready to unveil our next big update for Late For Work, featuring the most requested new features: game mode customization and Index Controller support.

As luck would have it, we've timed this update with a big update to GrowRilla. To celebrate, both games are going on sale this week! This is the best opportunity to grab them ever, both to save money and get all the new features. If you already own one, make sure to grab our VR Indie bundle to get the second game, as you'll save another 10%!

Let's dive into this update!


As we mentioned in our preview post, you can now edit virtually every setting in the game. From the number of kills the gorilla has to achieve in a deathmatch game to the suction strength of the UFO abduction beam.

You can find the settings in the start menu on the bottom right; opening them will lead you to a text file on your desktop in which you can edit almost every setting you can think of:



We also published a guide to explain all the different settings. If you're having trouble finding a specific setting or you're unsure about some of the configurations, you can check it our here.

We hope you will try out balancing the game modes to your liking. Let us know what you think of this new feature and share your favorite configurations (here or in our Discord).


Since the Index Controllers were already supported in GrowRilla, we now went back and also added proper support to Late For Work. They used to work fine thanks to a mapping we set up last year, but we wanted to integrate them to the tutorials and menu system. You can now use them to physically drag yourself through the world and become the ultimate VR gorilla without breaking the immersion of seeing a Vive wand. The Index Controllers are our favorite VR input device and we're delighted to fully support them. Our intuitive gorilla movement system feels even more comfortable using them.


We've fixed a number of smaller issues that have been reported by the community (thank you for all your feedback. As always we love to hear from our community, please join our Discord and get in touch with us).

Some of the issues addressed:

• Remove OP trees and lanterns in Bodyguard map
  
• Add fixed rocks for hiding spots in Bodyguard map
  
• Hide exclamation marks in Bull Run mode
  
• Minor fixes to Ape Escape mode
  
• Fixed a number of AI issues related to the new game mode configurations
  
• Beach umbrellas no longer stick to hands
  
• Buses now obey the laws of physics when tossed or hit into the air (instead of restarting their movement animation mid-air)

That sums up the major changes in this update. We're really excited to hear some feedback on the editable game rules. It looks like a minor change but we've had to touch the core parts of every game mode to expose these values. This game is challenging to balance for all the possible combinations of players (5 players vs 2, kids vs adults vs hardcore gamers vs VR beginners). We hope you'll enjoy editing all the modes to your liking.

Cheers,
Salmi Games

Hello friends!

We've been working on a new update (surprise!) for LFW for a while now and are almost ready to launch it. However to finalize everything and actually release the update we need your help.


The focus of this update is all about giving you the player the tools to customize and balance the game modes to your preference. Over the course of Late For Work's lifespan, we've realized that it's really hard to balance all the game modes for all the different combinations and skill level combinations. Some people are playing 1v1. Some are playing with 4 friends with years of gaming experience. Some are playing with kids (of various age). We've done a lot of work to dynamically balance the game modes based on number of players, but there's only so much we can do to account for different skill levels and experience.

Soooo, with this update, we're exposing all the key game mode parameters for every combination of players. You can now edit the game rules to your liking.

Changes like scaling the number of objectives or timer with number of players have certainly helped, but it still feels off sometimes. However with this update we'll let you guys edit the game rules to your liking. In-game you'll find an option to open the custom rule file:



(you can also find it by typing "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Salmi GmbH\GrowRilla\" in a windows explorer search bar).

There you will find plenty of options to edit, from the number of kills the gorilla has to achieve in a deathmatch game to the suction strength of the UFO abduction beam. We hope you have some fun playing around with all the settings.

The second improvement we will ship in this update is a better support for Index Controllers. The game should now function similarly to GrowRilla, with a more intuitive way to grab objects by well simply grabbing them with your hands. It also comes with some other improvements, such as an updated tutorial and menu.


So what do we need you help with? Well first, we want you guys to simply play the game, try out the new settings and let us know if you run into any issues. We've tested extensively but it's hard to catch every last combination. We've already made sure the settings file doesn't contain anything game breaking, but there could still be a few bugs lurking here and there by typing in some weird combination of values.

Second, we need your help with testing the index controllers. Unfortunately we only have access to the older Knuckles dev kit, so our ability to test them is limited. They should be working, but it'd be great if you guys that have Index Controllers, could have a quick look at it. If things are working properly with Index Controllers, please let us know either here in the comments here or in our discord (discord.gg/salmigames).

You can try out the beta by right-clicking GrowRilla in your steam library and selecting the "beta" branch in the betas tab.

Cheers,
Salmi Games