Esteemed Artisans,
The latest patch for The Artisan of Glimmith has been deployed! This time, both the main game and the free demo have been updated. We've listed the changes below, but first, a few announcements:
Steam Trading Cards are now available!
They actually went live a little while ago, but we're happy to announce that Valve has approved us to have Steam Trading Cards! There are 7 cards available in total, each featuring a different puzzle symbol from the game:
You'll get a card for every 2 hours of playtime, up to a maximum of 4 of the 7 cards. If you want more of them, you'll have to trade for them! Collect them all and something good might happen! (You'll get a badge, Steam profile XP, and a random drop such as a Glimmith-themed background or emoticon).
They might also conceal a bit of a secret for those with keen observation skills...
Steam backgrounds and emoticons
You can also get the Glimmith Steam backgrounds and emoticons directly using Steam points at https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop/app/4160210/
A giant wall of :GLIMMITH_HEART: makes a great Steam forum comment (or :GLIMMITH_DISAPPOINT: if you want to express maximum disapproval).
You can now use Glimmith as a music player
By popular demand, we've added a "Mute in Background" option in the settings menu. Disable it, and you can Alt-Tab away while leaving Glimmith running with its audio playing at full volume. Glimmith's music makes great background audio for studying, work, or writing patch notes on Steam (I can confirm!)
Puzzle IDs are now available
Some players have asked us for a way to get a unique ID for each puzzle so they could make videos, solution guides, or just have a way of naming each one! We have internal names for the puzzle files, but they won't make much sense to players (in particular, they are totally out of order and are full of gaps in the numbering because all the previous versions of every puzzle that all had their own IDs).
So instead, we've generated a unique 5-digit hashcode for each puzzle. You can view them by mousing over the (?) below the mode selection panel:
Demo update
We've updated Glimmith's free demo to include all the latest bugfixes and features from the last few months of patches. Plus, we've ported all the translations and controller support over to the demo, so you can now play it on Steam Deck and in all 16 languages.
Tutorial updates
We've updated some of the tutorials for Palisade, Bricky, and Loopy to help make the rules clearer for new players and get them on the right track when solving these puzzles.
Usually, we prefer to rely as minimally as possible on text explanations for rules, and instead design the puzzle tutorials themselves to be as illustrative as possible, while also allowing players to experiment with the error-checking system of the game to verify their understanding and answer any questions about corner cases. This works great for about 95% of players (who really don't need these updated tutorials at all), but we've found a few instances where some players struggled because things weren't quite clicking into place for them. Palisade was the most common rule for which this was a problem, and the tutorial has been updated accordingly:
The Bricky and Loopy sections also continue to be quite difficult for some players, so we've added a few solving tips to help players get over the initial hump of learning the basic deductions. This should help to make players more prepared for the deeper solving tricks that come later in those sections:
Bugfixes and minor tweaks
Fixed a controller bug where the L2 and R2 buttons would sometimes not perform the right input if they were pressed halfway down on controllers supporting soft-press inputs.
Improved the Workshop to load about twice as fast for people who have subscribed to a large number of Workshop puzzles.
Added a workaround to improve stability for players who have Tiger Lake CPUs with Intel's TGL031 problem. We still highly recommend a BIOS update for these players to fully resolve the problem, but Glimmith should be less likely to trigger exceptions for them. Much thanks to everyone who sent us their crashlogs and memory dumps to help us track down the root cause of this issue!
Updated the error message that appears when a corrupted save file is found, so players are told where backup save files are located.
Fixed a few minor environment bugs.
Made some minor translation improvements.
Thank you!
Much love to all of our players for your continued support. If you have any feedback, please let us know on the Discord or on the Steam Forums!
