Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a *very* passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. This months devlog will be a little slim as were mostly just working on polishing things now, but we still have a few things to share (and one pretty big update at the end)!



[h2]Item Art![/h2]

Last month, we mentioned having a new animation that shows off items up close. Weve 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 weve added so far:





[h2]Environment Sound![/h2]

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, youll hear birds chirping and the occasional frog croaking, and youll hear crickets at night! Listen to a snippet here.

[h2]Music[/h2]

Aaaaaandddd were 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, were done. We decided to change the way we use music in Garage Sale, so now each house has its own track, and theyre all what we in the business would call bangers.

[h2]Discord Server[/h2]

It might be a bit quiet until we launch the game, but weve decided to go ahead and launch a little Discord server to go along with the next announcement in this devlog! Well send out more frequent updates here, so even if theres not a lot to discuss, its the best way to get notified about our process. If you're interested, join here!

[h2]And... Playtesting!!![/h2]

Now that we have sound done, were finally launching our final closed beta before release! The beta should launch on March 22, and well 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, wed love to have you sign up!

We wont be able to include every single applicant, but if youre 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!

[h2]What's Left?[/h2]

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 dont 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 :~)

Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a *very* passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. We have a big chunk of little updates to share with you this month, and we couldnt be more excited!



[h2]Playtesting![/h2]

We spent a few weeks this month watching people play our game, and we learned a lot from it! People pointed out things we wouldnt have noticed and gave us some really neat ideas. During and after these tests, we reworked some quests, changed some settings, and added a LOT of stuff ranging from a brief tutorial to new art and a map (more on that later). We feel super great about Garage Sale after making all of these changes, and our upcoming final round of testing should now just be to identify and quickly knock out any remaining bugs right before release.

[h2]Whoa... Is That a New Animation?[/h2]

Now, youll be able to see items up close while you buy / find them. Were still wrapping up art for a few of these little moments, but we have to say we think they look pretty cool, and we hope you agree!



[h2]Readable Books... and Drawings![/h2]

Aside from looking at all items up close, youre now able to read all books / newspapers / drawings in what were calling our brand new documents UI! Head to the library to learn about Lettuce Village's history, check the town yearbook to learn a bit more about each villager, or look at drawings you receive from your fellow kid villagers in all their messy glory whatever you choose to look at, it'll tell you a little bit about the town and the residents that live in it.



[h2]Town Map![/h2]

This is technically part of the document UI we mentioned in our last section, but its a big deal so were giving it its own section Lettuce Village officially has a town map! We noticed some people were getting lost during their playthroughs, so we went ahead and added an optional map to the game that will help you track down every last location. We won't show it here (spoilers), but rest assured, it'll be a a lot harder to get lost in Lettuce Village than it was before.

[h2]... And Sound![/h2]

Weve now worked a LOT on sound stuff, and Garage Sale feels a lot more alive because of it. Youll now hear everything from the pages turning as you flip through the notebook menu to the waves rolling in at the towns beach.

Best part: remember the horrible, scary, terrifying dialogue scroll sound from our first trailer? Weve replaced that, along with every other UI sound! Finally!

Weve also added a few cool features, like dynamic footsteps thatll sound different depending on the surface you walk on and adaptive music that brings layers in and out depending on the room youre in. And, speaking of music, our lead composer Rishu has spent a lot of time wrapping up Garage Sales music! We have just a few short tracks to go that we should be done with at the beginning of this month.

[h2]What's left?[/h2]

The few things we have left to knock out in our game development journey won't be super exciting to post about as we'll mostly be working on fixing bugs and polishing art and dialogue, but we'll continue to log our progress here. For now, we'll try to post more regular peeks into Lettuce Village on our Twitter and .

If you want to support us on our Garage Sale journey, please wishlist our game right here on Steam! Even if you dont 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 :~)

Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a *very* passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. Were a bit late because of the holidays and our ongoing playtesting, but weve got one big update and a few smaller ones to let you know where were at (and well have a big chunk of updates to share with you at the end of January!).



[h2]Our Game Is Pretty Much Complete![/h2]

WOW! Its 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. Were 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!

Well need a bit of time to add these features and make changes based on our tests, but were still on track to release early this year and well let everybody know when we've settled on a date.

[h2]First External Playtests In the Works![/h2]

Last month, we talked about implementing feedback from our internal playtests, and we wrapped this up in December! Now, were working on testing with some people outside the team. Well talk more about this in Januarys devlog, but its been really interesting seeing people play our game for the first time ever weve 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, well move on to a short online beta shortly before we release. If youre interested in signing up, shoot us an email at garagesalegame@gmail.com! Well post more details here later, but this is the best way to stay updated.

[h2]Several Art Changes[/h2]

Weve been working on fine-tuning our games art as we make progress, and this has included going back and making a lot of changes to some things that didnt look so great before. A lot of these are in areas wed rather let everybody explore for themselves, but heres our new town square for now:



Weve also changed a few things like character shadows and the background color of our game theyre 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 dont 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 :~)

Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a*very*passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. Weve been really hard at work on Garage Sale this month, so were excited to share a few tidbits and insights into our development process with you!



[h2]Flavor Text, Collisions, and Layering Done![/h2]

We tackled a huge chunk of work this month. Were finally done adding interactivity to every room in the game! This has played a HUGE role in helping our game feel more like a real game. Now, you can interact with almost anything kitchen counters, framed drawings on walls, the mysterious box thats sitting in the town square to get a bit more information about it. This has also included adding quite a few tiny easter eggs that go beyond just reading text, but wed rather leave these for everybody to discover on their own. We've left on our Tiktok account, and we'll be posting more sneak peeks into this on Twitter as well.



[h2]Scavenger Hunt Time[/h2]

Garage Sale wouldnt be Garage Sale without items to collect and coins hidden throughout the town, and weve finally been working on finishing adding both of these! We arent quite yet done hiding everything yet, but weve come up with some clever hiding spots and we've been keeping track of everything to make sure you can afford every item in the game if you find every hidden coin. This should be done really, really soon. During this process, weve also hidden a few secret passageways and achievements that arent tied to quests at all just little rewards for players who go the extra mile to find everything. We hope everybody has as much fun finding these things as we did hiding them!

[h2]Internal Playtesting[/h2]

Weve just about wrapped our first round of internal playtests! We had our team members play through the entire game this month and weve knocked a lot of pesky bugs out during this process! Its also been super eye-opening to have team members who arent as familiar with the quests play through them weve realized that we need to change the difficulty and structure of a few quests. We definitely cant reveal a lot about this feedback (thats spoiler territory), but we *can* show you some very silly comments from our first round of playtesting with absolutely zero context. Do with these screenshots what you will



[h2]Going Forward[/h2]

We have a lot of feedback from our internal playtest that we need to implement before we can move on to external testing! Weve started this already, but itll likely take us a few weeks before we can get to this point. Once thats done, though, well be ready to move onto a smaller external playtest with friends in person, and after implementing feedback from this round of testing, well have a larger closed beta to share with pretty much anybody whos interested. We should have details to share about this next month.

Were also a team of (mostly) students, so from late December (when finals end) to late January, well be out of classes and have a lot more time to tie our game together and meet our early 2024 release window. Because were entering finals season and mostly working on things we cant talk about in depth (like restructuring quests), its likely that Decembers devlog will be a little thin (and likely late we do not want to be working on a devlog on New Years Eve!), but we promise were hard at work!

If you want to support us on our Garage Sale journey, please wishlist our game right here on Steam! Even if you dont 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, or just want to say hi. Please we want emails!

Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by averypassionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. Its been a busy month for our team (and most of what weve worked on is in spoiler territory) so this is a bit short, but here's a quick recap of everything weve been up to during October.



[h2]Ending![/h2]

Our game has an ending! Like a lot of things weve added recently, theres not much we can reveal about this without spoiling the game. What we can say, though, is that the ending is very dependent on the way you interact with Lettuce Village the friends you make, items you collect, and quests you complete will all affect the games ending. Weve added quite a few new features to make this possible, so this ended up taking a bit longer than expected (hence last months release date update), and there are still a few small features we're working on implementing as we test the game. We think they're worth the extra time, though!

[h2]Playtesting![/h2]

Were now entering playtesting season as we get closer and closer to our release window. Were still working on this behind the scenes (currently with lots of team-wide testing and soon some in-person tests among friends), but we will be expanding to a closed beta test format closer to our release window. Well announce more details about this as well as start allowing people to sign up for our closed beta in the near future keep an eye out!

[h2]What else are we working on now?[/h2]

• More character sprites
  
• A few more ending-related features
  
• Music
  
• Collisions and sprite layering (fun fact: currently, Juniper is layered under most other characters, which makes playtesting very awkward)
  
• Flavor text
  
• Bug fixes (as always)
  

Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a*very*passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. Heres everything weve been up to during September, but first, an important update on our release date:

Garage Sale will now be out in early 2024.

Were still on track to complete development in the coming weeks, but after reflecting on the time weve spent working on our game, we want to dedicate an extra few weeks to playtesting and fine-tuning to make sure were able to release exactly what we intended to create when we began crafting the world of Lettuce Village.

Its been a long two years since we decided to turn our game into the Garage Sale it is today a little under two years ago, Garage Sale was just a Bitsy game with just a few rooms and characters (and only three colors) being made by one person! Since we became a team, its grown into a much larger project with quests, a proper ending, and over 75 (!!!) areas to explore. Were really proud of what weve created, and we just want a few more weeks to perfect the world weve created and run it past a larger group of people before we share it with the world.

We're announcing our new release window with confidence, and well keep everybody updated on our playtesting process and a release date when we're able to settle on one!



Now, time for some short (but exciting) updates!

[h2]Quest Completion[/h2]

We've finally finished adding quests to our game! We wrapped the majority of our quests in early September and have since been spending quite a bit of time retooling these quests to work in more intuitive ways. Its hard to talk about quests without revealing too much of the game's story, so well stop here and let our quests speak for themselves once our game's out.

[h2]Character Sprites[/h2]

Team members Josie and Jen have been hard at work making character art, and we're now almost done adding characters to our game. (So long, placeholder art...) Take a look at a few new dialogue portraits for some of Lettuce Village's quirky residents below!



[h2]Achievements[/h2]

Our game has achievements now! Just like quests, there's not a lot we can say about these, but we're just very excited that they're working.

[h2]Whats Next?[/h2]

Aside from a few more sprites and some minor code changes, our current big project is adding the game's ending and the last few chunks of interactivity. There isn't a lot of stuff we can say about this either, but we've made some worthwhile improvements to the end of the game and we should be done with the ending as soon as this week. As for interactivity, this will likely take a few weeks. We're also working on music and sound design, and we'll be sharing a few new tracks over the next month!

[h2]Before We Go...[/h2]

We wanted to thank everybody for over 100 followers on TikTok! Weve been posting some neat behind-the-scenes looks at our game (including ), and were glad people have been so supportive there. Well continue to share more updates and sneak peeks on both and Twitter, so keep an eye out if you're interested!

If you want to support us on our Garage Sale journey, please wishlist our game right here on Steam! Even if you dont 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, or just to say hi. Thanks again for your patience we're excited to finally share our game with you this winter!

Amelia + the Garage Sale team! :~)

Welcome to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a very passionate character who youll meet in Garage Sale, and were now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. As we hone in on wrapping our game (and settling on a release date), we want to share more of our process with everybody. Heres what weve been up to during August!



[h2]Adding Quests[/h2]

We finally wrapped Garage Sales environment design in July! Since then, weve been focusing on filling that environment with characters and quests, which means we get to finally explore Lettuce Village the way it was intended to be explored for the first time (exciting!). Rishu, our lead programmer, has been implementing last-minute changes to the quest system to allow each quest to take on its own structure, while our writing team has been hard at work on tying loose ends together. A few of our favorite quests weve added so far allow Juniper to step into different roles she can become a reporter, a baker, and even a doctor! Weve been spending quite a lot of time adding little features to make each quest feel like it significantly impacts the town in some way, too, although we wont spoil these details. We only have a few quests left to complete and should have these done in early September!

[h2]Tinkering With Our UI[/h2]

Our programming team is also getting close with quite a bit of UI work, including our settings menu, our options for saving and loading game files, and a new animated title screen. Take a look at a few of these new additions below!




[h2]Whats Next?[/h2]

While quests are nearly done, we still have a bit of interactivity to add to the world of Lettuce Village. Currently, youre able to walk almost anywhere in most rooms, which is fun for now, but, unfortunately, we, uhh, kind of need collisions. Weve also been working on hiding coins in every nook and cranny to fund Junipers Garage Sale day shopping extravaganza. Finally, weve been attaching shorter bits of dialogue to things so interacting with almost anything will bring up a bit of dialogue everything in this town has a story!

After we wrap up interactivity and the last few quests, the last big step is adding the games ending. We dont want to give anything big away, but Garage Sales ending has quite a few variations, so itll require a handful of programming and writing.

Other things were working on before were able to do a little beta test:

- Achievements (!!!)
- Music
- UI and environment sound design

Unfortunately, Garage Sale is a team of (mostly) students, and September brings the start of a new semester. We wont be able to dedicate quite as much time as we have been this summer, but dont fret! Were still working on our little game with all the free time we can find, and well update everybody on our release date in our next devlog. If you want to support us on our Garage Sale journey, please wishlist our game right here on Steam! Even if you dont 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, or just to say hi.

Amelia + the Garage Sale team! :~)