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’re a bit late because of the holidays and our ongoing playtesting, but we’ve got one big update and a few smaller ones to let you know where we’re at (and we’ll have a big chunk of updates to share with you at the end of January!).
Our Game Is… Pretty Much Complete!
WOW! It’s been a long journey, but our game is finally 100% playable from start to finish! In December, we finished adding every single item (there are over 50), hiding every single coin, and putting together every piece of our ending. We’re still wrapping up work on a few smaller features (like long-needed accessibility features, better ways to view items up close, and music) in January, but the game is otherwise… pretty much done!
We’ll need a bit of time to add these features and make changes based on our tests, but we’re still on track to release early this year and we’ll let everybody know when we've settled on a date.
First External Playtests In the Works!
Last month, we talked about implementing feedback from our internal playtests, and we wrapped this up in December! Now, we’re working on testing with some people outside the team. We’ll talk more about this in January’s devlog, but it’s been really interesting seeing people play our game for the first time ever — we’ve learned a lot and been able to make some really tiny incremental changes in between tests that have made our game a lot easier to play.
After we make changes based on these tests and add the last few features, we’ll move on to a short online beta shortly before we release. If you’re interested in signing up, shoot us an email at [email protected]! We’ll post more details here later, but this is the best way to stay updated.
Several Art Changes
We’ve been working on fine-tuning our game’s art as we make progress, and this has included going back and making a lot of changes to some things that… didn’t look so great before. A lot of these are in areas we’d rather let everybody explore for themselves, but here’s our new town square for now:
We’ve also changed a few things like character shadows and the background color of our game — they’re smaller changes but they make a big difference!
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 :~)