Happy belated Thanksgiving!
We’d also like to thank you for giving us your attention and jump right into...
What we did last month!
We mainly:
1. Uploaded a new devlog!
Finally!!! In our 15th devlog, Alicia discusses her current dialogue portrait design process and shares how her expression drawing pipeline looks like. Be sure to check it out on YouTube!
2. Playtested approximately 30% of the game!
We playtested for 5h and finished 30% of the game’s main quests until we reached some game/immersion breaking bugs.
Game breaking bugs we encountered and fixed were:
A main quest relevant letter wasn’t loaded active (though the save file said it should load as active)
The letter system (which is relevant for mid-game) overall did some weird stuff (deactivated itself when it shouldn’t, pushed the wrong dialogue) – hopefully it’s fixed now! (but it’s a bit confusing for us too)
The compost couldn’t be watered anymore because it thought it was still being watered
Time valuation didn’t consider week/season changes properly therefore time stopped progressing after a week change (which means: plants didn’t grow anymore)
Some game immersion breaking bugs we encountered and fixed were:
You weren’t able to replant an excavated plant (stage 3 tomato lol)
You’d always scroll through your toolbar when scrolling through all the plants you are currently hitting with your cursor (which made it impossible to water/fertilize obscured plants you can only reach that way because you'd always scroll past your watering/fertilization item inventory slot)
The Olla (our version of sprinklers) UI wasn’t calculated every frame making it clip in the center of the screen sometimes
Ollas lost all their water/were set to 0 water when picking them up and placing them again
Higher tier fertilizer (and fertilizing potions - that one isn’t fixed yet!) weren’t using their higher value when they were added to plants
The static ingame storage boxes at the beach didn’t save & load whether they were unlocked (therefore locking all your stored items)
Besides that some less relevant things we did were:
Reworking plant neighbourhood to work without rigidbodies for better performance
Reworking our textual questlog to a visual questlog to make quest goals easier to understand and fulfill
Adding UI to display additional plants hit with your cursor to encourage scrolling through your crop selection
Moving the hit detection of Ollas (clay sprinklers) from their individual objects into a manager script (as we did with plants in August)
And what are we currently working on?
Our focus for next month is:
1. Working on the dialogue portraits of Milly, Maynard, Susu, Tomo, and Crane!
Since making/implementing Helio’s and the Herbit’s portraits took around a month, making and implementing the portraits of Milly, Maynard, Susu, Tomo, and Crane will probably take two months. After that only the portraits of our main villain, 4 side NPCs, and 3 super-side NPCs (without any quests) are still missing!
2. Trying to playtest the main quests up to the 36% mark!
Playtesting really is a step by step process. Therefore we only aim for small steps regarding our ingame progress (36% from the current 30%) to focus on bugfixing. After leaving the mid-game letter-based main story there will be a quest line based on physical present NPCs (which will have no letter-based bugs and therefore will be easier/faster to playtest) again, before coming back to letters at the start of the end-game (and then again return to a regular NPC quest line).
Besides that we are also trying to:
Bugfix current high priority/potentially game/immersion breaking bugs
Bugfix older low priority bugs
Check for performance issues
And that’s it already for this month!
If you would like to playtest our game well before its (demo) release to give us feedback AND receive our game for free, you should consider following us on any social media so you do not miss the start of our beta playtesting program mid/end next year!!!
Because this is the last Update post in 2025 (the December Update will be posted in January 2026) we already wish you Happy Holidays and a Good Rutsch in the New Year (as we say in Germany)! Have a healthy and happy new year.
We are very happy to have you!
xoxo Baloneybert
