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. This month’s devlog will be a little slim as we’re mostly just working on polishing things now, but we still have a few things to share (and one pretty big update at the end)!
Item Art!
Last month, we mentioned having a new animation that shows off items up close. We’ve been hard at work on creating the art for these items — there are a lot of items to pick up in Garage Sale, but we just have a few to go now! Here are a few we’ve added so far:
Environment Sound!
Our lead sound designer, Rishu, spent quite a lot of time layering sound effects to create some really neat environmental loops. Now, when you walk through the forest, you’ll hear birds chirping and the occasional frog croaking, and you’ll hear crickets at night! Listen to a snippet here.
Music
Aaaaaandddd… we’re done with our in-house music! We do have just a few tracks that someone outside our core dev team is finishing up over the next few weeks, but other than that, we’re done. We decided to change the way we use music in Garage Sale, so now each house has its own track, and they’re all what we in the business would call… “bangers.”
Discord Server
It might be a bit quiet until we launch the game, but we’ve decided to go ahead and launch a little Discord server to go along with the next announcement in this devlog! We’ll send out more frequent updates here, so even if there’s not a lot to discuss, it’s the best way to get notified about our process. If you're interested, join here!
And... Playtesting!!!
Now that we have sound done, we’re finally launching our final closed beta before release! The beta should launch on March 22, and we’ll give people about 5 days to play the game (it should take anywhere from 1-5 hours to complete). Absolutely no gaming experience is required — as long as you have a computer, a few hours, and the willingness to take notes and fill out a survey afterward, we’d love to have you sign up!
We won’t be able to include every single applicant, but if you’re interested in signing up, you can do so (and find more details about things like hardware and accessibility) at this link. Please sign up before March 19 so we have time to get in touch with you!
What's Left?
Not a lot! Everything we have left to do will be determined by this round of tests, so we'll have an update for everybody once that's done.
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 :~)