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!

Quest Completion

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.

Character Sprites

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!

Achievements

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.

Whats Next?

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!

Before We Go...

We wanted to thank everybody for over 100 followers on TikTok! Weve been posting some neat behind-the-scenes looks at our game (including a peek at how our dialogue system works... and can be broken), and were glad people have been so supportive there. Well continue to share more updates and sneak peeks on both TikTok 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! :~)