Hey everyone! 💚
March was a big month for us: our very first public demo launched on March 6th as part of the Women's Day Sale on Steam, and the response was wonderful. In one week, more than 2000 players explored the mountains with Heidi for the first time, and your feedback has already shaped a first round of updates. Thank you for playing and sharing your thoughts! 🐐
🛠️ Demo Fixes & Improvements
We made some updates to the demo: the most common feedback we received was about controls. We removed long-press mouse clicks in several places, including when talking to NPCs, to make things feel more fluid.
You can also hold the left mouse button to guide Heidi around (rather than only clicking somewhere). And to make interactive objects easier to spot, the cursor now changes shape when hovering over something you can interact with.
We also completely redesigned the dairy mini-game! Previously you could only produce one type of dairy product per morning, which many players found frustrating. The new version has you sliding tiles across a grid to form matching pairs! Each pair produces one of the three dairy products (milk, butter, or cheese), and the more pairs you form for a given type, the more of it you'll make. Much more flexible and fun overall.
Some players reported a bug where Heidi would float off the ground for a few frames. The culprit turned out to be the goats, when they got too close, their physics were pushing her upward. Fixed! 😅
I belieeeeeve I can flyyyy
Fixing the demo is cool, but we need to get working on the rest of the game!
🦘 Heidi Learns to Jump
We started working on a jump mechanic for Heidi! Later in the game, it will allow her to clear small cliffs and unlock new areas of the mountain.
Speaking of which… jumping unlocks the next chapter!
📖 Laying Out Act 3
This month we started laying the groundwork for… Act 3!
Elise, our junior animator, modelled and textured Sebastian's cabin and his portable sawmill in Blender, and Sebastian's character sprite is now in the game world with his own animations!
In Act 3, players will be able to produce wooden planks for the first time! Your goats will clear the thorny bushes blocking the forest path, giving Sebastian access to the trees. In return, he'll share wood resources you can turn into planks!
🐑 Angora Goats Are Coming!
In Act 3, you also unlock a new variety of goats: wooly goats!
We adapted our goat animation pipeline to support that: rather than redoing all the animations from scratch, we add angora-specific polygons on top of the existing rig in Godot. This opens up wool-based crafting without the extra workload 🧶
That's it for March! If you haven't tried the demo yet, please give it a try, we’re working on completely changing a core mechanic soon and need your advice 👀
And if you enjoy your time in the mountains, a review or a wishlist really does help a small team like ours. 💚
See you in April!
Meli & Bloo