Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a *very* passionate character who you’ll meet in Garage Sale, and we’re now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. We have a big chunk of little updates to share with you this month, and we couldn’t be more excited!
Playtesting!
We spent a few weeks this month watching people play our game, and we learned a lot from it! People pointed out things we wouldn’t have noticed and gave us some really neat ideas. During and after these tests, we reworked some quests, changed some settings, and added a LOT of stuff ranging from a brief tutorial to new art and a map (more on that later). We feel super great about Garage Sale after making all of these changes, and our upcoming final round of testing should now just be to identify and quickly knock out any remaining bugs right before release.
Whoa... Is That a New Animation?
Now, you’ll be able to see items up close while you buy / find them. We’re still wrapping up art for a few of these little moments, but we have to say we think they look pretty cool, and we hope you agree!
Readable Books... and Drawings!
Aside from looking at all items up close, you’re now able to read all books / newspapers / drawings in what we’re calling our brand new “documents UI!” Head to the library to learn about Lettuce Village's history, check the town yearbook to learn a bit more about each villager, or look at drawings you receive from your fellow kid villagers in all their messy glory — whatever you choose to look at, it'll tell you a little bit about the town and the residents that live in it.
Town Map!
This is technically part of the document UI we mentioned in our last section, but it’s a big deal so we’re giving it its own section… Lettuce Village officially has a town map! We noticed some people were getting lost during their playthroughs, so we went ahead and added an optional map to the game that will help you track down every last location. We won't show it here (spoilers), but rest assured, it'll be a a lot harder to get lost in Lettuce Village than it was before.
... And Sound!
We’ve now worked a LOT on sound stuff, and Garage Sale feels a lot more alive because of it. You’ll now hear everything from the pages turning as you flip through the notebook menu to the waves rolling in at the town’s beach.
Best part: remember the horrible, scary, terrifying dialogue scroll sound from our first trailer? We’ve replaced that, along with every other UI sound! Finally!
We’ve also added a few cool features, like dynamic footsteps that’ll sound different depending on the surface you walk on and adaptive music that brings layers in and out depending on the room you’re in. And, speaking of music, our lead composer Rishu has spent a lot of time wrapping up Garage Sale’s music! We have just a few short tracks to go that we should be done with at the beginning of this month.
What's left?
The few things we have left to knock out in our game development journey won't be super exciting to post about as we'll mostly be working on fixing bugs and polishing art and dialogue, but we'll continue to log our progress here. For now, we'll try to post more regular peeks into Lettuce Village on our Twitter and TikTok.
If you want to support us on our Garage Sale journey, please wishlist our game right here on Steam! Even if you don’t plan on buying it, every wishlist helps us out. See you in Lettuce Village soon! And please reach out to us via email (garagesalegame at gmail dot com) if you have any questions, suggestions, want to get involved in our beta, or just want to say hi. Please — we want emails!
- Amelia + the Garage Sale Team :~)