Hey everyone!
It’s already half February, welcome to the January update for the game 🙈🐐
This month we focused on visuals, animation pipeline improvements, new characters, and heavy testing so we can get a big surprise ready... !
🐐 Goats, revisited (big technical change)
First off, we completely reworked how goats are rendered and animated!
Previously we assembled and animated them in Blender using 3D skeletons, then imported those animations into the game, running in 3D in the world.
This month we moved to Godot’s 2D animator, redid all the animations, and projected these animations on what we call a viewport. It’s like playing the animation on a TV screen and moving the screen around!
Before and after
This change significantly improves performance on lower-end hardware and simplifies runtime animation control.
A related change was how we color goats. We used to recolor them with a shader on the fly, but that prevented proper shadows and limited visual variety.
We removed the realtime recolor shader and now load more textures instead! It gives us much better control over patterns (more variety!), and the goats finally get the shadows they deserve.
👩 More expressive portraits and breathing life into faces
We added new emotions to character portraits, including a snarky expression for Heidi, an embarrassed look for Birgit, as well as a sad portrait for grandpa and a grumpy one for Peter. These are still work in progress, but they already make conversations feel more alive!
We also implemented blinking for all characters. That required drawing four extra eye frames per character and playing a tiny eye animation on the face. The effect is subtle, but it adds a good amount of life and presence to every interaction.
⚖️ New interface: Decisions
We built a new interface we call Decisions. This is the moment where villagers gather and vote on important choices for the village. As Heidi, you choose whose side you support, and those votes shape the village’s future. It brings the community aspect to life and makes your choices in-game meaningful.
Edited for no spoilers!
🧍♀️ New villagers
We introduced two new NPCs, meet siblings Sebastian and Agnes! They’ll play an important role in upcoming story moments, interacting with Heidi and the other villagers.
🐿️ New hire: Elise
We welcomed Elise to the team as a part time junior animator! Her first task was delightful and small in scope: drawing and animating a little groundhog popping out of its burrow.
It is a tiny moment, but it brings a lot of charm to the game!
🐛 Testing, debugging, and preparing for…
January was heavy on testing and bug fixes. We put the game through extended play sessions, squashed a large number of small issues, and focused on stability. We also started using the playtest feature on Steam to gather structured feedback from real players.
All of this for our upcoming… ✨first demo release!✨
If you’d like to help shape the demo and peek behind the scenes, come join our playtest and hang out with us on Discord, we’d love to have you there!
Thank you to everyone who has already tested, given feedback, or cheered us on. We will need your support and feedback more than ever when the demo launches, so please consider joining the playtest and our community on Discord!
See you soon!
Meli & Bloo