Hopefully you've since had the chance to check out and enjoy the April Preview Build of the GROVE Rework! 
This DevJournal will have some discussion of the content therein, so if you haven't played yet and don't want to be spoiled, do come check this journal out a bit later.

First and foremost, we really wanted to put out a build of the GROVE Rework that was a bit more representative of what the proper game would look like.

That's not just in terms of graphics, but also in terms of the game's systems and what a natural play session would feel like. Moving through areas, fighting enemies, discovering little secrets and uncovering the game's story!

We really hope you enjoyed the experience, seeing what's new, what's changed, and for those of you who've been around since the beginning, we hope it was maybe even a little nostalgic for you too~!

Save files won't be transferrable from Legacy GROVE, nor this April Preview... but we hope that this has allayed any of your concerns over replaying the early parts of the game anew! 

And there'll be even more things to experience later down the line...!

For those of you who follow these DevJournals, you might well have noticed a few things that we've talked about in the past that weren't actually included in this Preview.

Things like Cooking / Synthesis, Red Slimes, Fast Travel and Exploration Abilities that you use in the field are all still very much in the works, being refined and arted-up, bug-fixed and tested...

However, we opted not to include some things in this preview, either because they're systems that we intended to be unlocked and discovered a bit later through Grove's journey (i.e. Exploration Sigils and Cooking)

And some things, like the Red Slimes having an all-new area to themselves, along with some new mechanics and being part of a mini-quest, are things that we just want to keep back, as something for you to enjoy when the game is fully ready!

Same goes for a bunch of flavour text from examining items in the world, as well as things like the Tutorial Bandit Game Over scene, Dreams whilst resting, and of course a Gallery where you can fight enemies and view scenes!

All of these things are definitely coming!
We just wanted to hold off for now, so there'll still be fresh experiences for you all when the time comes...!

Of course, the whole point of a game is for it to be played! Thank you so much to all of you who gave the April Preview a go, and provided feedback, reviews, suggestions, and offered your opinions on our polls!

By far the most consistent bit of feedback we received about Combat was that a lot of you folks felt like the game was just a bit too easy right now. Looking deeper into the feedback, and it mostly seems around the regular enemies (blue slimes, green slimes) that are too easy, whereas the mini-bosses seem to be in a better spot.

In Legacy GROVE, we wanted the regular enemies to feel somewhat 'attritional', where they'd slowly drain your resources and armour and you'd need to keep yourself topped up and prepared for the eventual boss...
With the changes to Armour Repair needing to be done at campsites, we toned down the damage of the regular enemies, such that if you were fighting them effectively you could preserve your armour... but we realise now that this might not have been the best call, and made things too easy.

We may revert the changes about Armour Repair Kits, so you can use them anywhere in the field once again, as well as tuning up enemy damage somewhat to match the original difficulty style of Legacy GROVE... though we will keep Armour Repair Kits uncommon and limited, so as to still incentivize skillful fighting and using Struggle techniques to preserve your armour layers.


On some smaller points about Combat that were also commonly mentioned...:

We'll be looking into the potential of allowing all types of enemies to be sneak-attacked, not just the bandits. You'll deal an attack of initiative with increased damage... but it won't be a one-hit KO anymore unless you greatly out-level your foe. This will make fighting the bandits still a bit of risk, rather than completely disengaging with their content through knock-out stealth attacks... but also help with dealing with nuisance enemies on return visits through areas!

On a related note, we'll be subtly adjusting enemy movement speed and aggro behaviour. We DO want players to be able to slip by enemies if they're skillful, and different enemies will move at different speeds in the field so not everyone will be easy to run away from or slip by.
And we'll also be bringing back a few of the enemy ambushes, where moving past certain spots will have pre-aggro'd enemies appear and chase you. We don't want the full game to be a sneak-attack fest, but we will do our best to balance ambushes to keep them from being overly common or annoying.

We'll also be looking into an adjustment on what happens when you reach 0 HP.
Our planned change involves Grove being incapacitated like in Legacy GROVE, subject to the whims of an enemy to bring him to climax... but now Climaxing, rather than Getting Up, will give you a small chunk of HP back.
With this change, if you've got enough Stamina to survive an enemy climax, you can stand up, finish the foe off if they're close to defeat, or flee from battle to recover! But, if you're low on Stamina and reduced to 0 HP, you'll be powerless to resist!

When it comes to visuals, you folks were all largely quite pleased! We're really happy to see and hear these responses, and that the most common thing people had to say was effectively "more!".

There will of course be more, and we'll also be going over some of the existing visuals and just making sure things stay consistent between them (i.e. Grove's musculature), but otherwise we're really grateful that you're enjoying the new look of the GROVE Rework when getting to play it!

As the fella who writes these DevJournals and writes a lot of the words in GROVE, I'm happy to see that the response towards the new narrative is largely on the positive side!

It was very nice to see comments on people who enjoyed the additional world details, on Grove being just a little more talkative and showing more personality, and the interactions with and between the Explorer Trio of Kuno, Rinnal and Jaler. As with the art, the most consistent thing has been "more please", and there will most certainly be more...!

But there has also been some perhaps minor disappointment or confusion over how the Reworked narrative has been more of an 'expansion' on what came before rather than something completely new and different. For that, we do apologise if we gave the wrong impression at any point... but hopefully you'll enjoy things a little more, going forward, now that expectations have been set...!

Unfortunately, there are still some of you that are suffering from the weird, broken font issues. We had hoped to have found a new font that largely fixed the problems, and the reports have certainly gone down from last Preview, but it is still a problem for some of you out there...
We ARE doing our best to look into these issues, and we may well have a mini TestRoom in the coming months dedicated purely to seeing if you are still having textual issues. We're really gonna try and nip this problem in the bud as best we can!

Besides a certain person who thought to click "fairly unhappy" on every poll... (I guess thanks for not clicking "very unhappy"?), we are really quite pleased to see you are largely feeling positive and optimistic in your overall sentiment for how we're doing with the GROVE Rework!

Of course, improvements will come, features will be added, we'll do our darndest to make the game even better than what we've shown here. Please do keep giving your feedback and thoughts, and we'll do our utmost to make the game as good as we can make it...!

The first thing we're going to do... is take a little bit of a break. We hope you'll permit us a little time to catch our breath, as it's been an incredibly busy April full of testing, iteration and devwork, and then bugfixing and collecting feedback.

But even whilst we're taking a little break, we'll also be taking on board the results of the above polls, your feedback and planning on how best to improve the GROVE Rework as it stands, and taking those learnings forward into newer sections of the game!

And whilst May will be a bit of a lighter month overall (no TestRoom currently planned), we hope to show you the ways we're taking your feedback onboard, show changes to the Corruption System and glimpses of the other things missing from this Preview...

As well as a look into our plans on how to handle one of the bigger issues of a 'lose for lewds' game like Grove...

To all of you who've joined up for this Special Preview, we're so darn grateful! We'd love if you stuck around for our monthly DevJournals and semi-regular TestRooms. We know it's not easy to support adult game devs with how things are going on in the world right now... so we REALLY appreciate everyone who has!

Now then... we're going to collapse and recover for a bit.

May the Froots be with you!
- Regalbuster and SirIzike