Lots of improvements! Let's start with the most important ones:

• Changed how regeneration works. Prior to this change, the regeneration time after battle was based on the party member with the lowest life. This meant that if even a single party member died, you'd have to wait ~14 seconds until the next battle. With the new system, the time is based on the average life lost. E.g. if you have two party members and the battle ends with one dead and one at full health, the regeneration time will be cut in half. This should result in battles feeling like they're running faster, but each individual battle should probably only save 1-5 seconds.
• Fixed Spicy Cooking. It was actually detrimental to unlock at first and it wasn't until level 3 that it was marginally good. Now, all values are what they say they should be.
• Fixed Shield Bash. It was also detrimental in that it was increasing the damage that the Paladin would take.
• Added messages about invalid item destinations. E.g. if you try to drag a potion to the extractor and the farm is full, it will now tell you that. This should help new players.
• Fixed the tip about having multiple concurrent battles. New players frequently weren't aware that this was a feature, and it's because the tip that shows in the game about this had the wrong condition for showing.

Next up, the slightly less important changes:

• Highlighted mana red when you don't have enough to cast a spell.
• Allowed for dragging battle windows from any portion of them, not just the title bar.
• Fixed a bug where text in the town would be positioned weirdly sometimes.
• Added a sound effect when losing a battle.
• Delayed tips after beating elites so that you aren't overwhelmed by everything that's happening (a banner shows up when you beat elites, and the tip would sometimes show up at exactly the same time).

Finally, there are a handful of bug fixes that aren't worth detailing here. Hope you enjoy the new version!

[ 2025-05-28 22:12:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

Some big changes in this patch!

• Revamped every item graphic in the game! They now fit the Skeleseller style.
• Skills are now unlocked automatically rather than by spending gold. You get a new one every even-numbered level until you're at 7 skills.
• Fixed an issue where some shops were preferred over other shops. Namely, the armor shop should now see customers buying from it more frequently.

And then the usual set of minor changes:

• Looped music on the title screen. Streamers especially would linger on the title screen for long enough that they would be surprised when the music ended.
• Hopefully fixed an issue where the perks UI would resize vertically due to the appearance/disappearance of a "" character.
• Fixed a bug where the giant arrow telling you to open the battle map in the tutorial wouldn't show again if you closed the battle map without starting a battle.
• Applied minor balance tweaks: Paladin healing is up, Paladin Shield Bash has a lower cooldown, volcano bats do 5% less damage, and lowered the cost of a farming perk.
• Fixed a bug in the camera-panning code where you would hold WASD and open the battle map and it would still pan the town camera.

[ 2025-05-21 23:24:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

Relatively minor patch notes for today:

• Preload all icons to reduce any potential stuttering it would cause (it would have been pretty minor though).
• Change default of "Confine mouse to game window" to off. This feature is relatively buggy in Godot itself, and I don't want it frustrating new players.
• Fix the initial position of dialogs so that they don't show at the upper-leftmost part of the screen.
• Remove options for showing loot and battle stats. They were already on by default, and not many people seemed to try turning them off, so the options just aren't in the UI anymore.

[ 2025-05-16 21:00:21 CET ] [ Original post ]

This update contains lots of small changes (QoL improvements and bug fixes). The most notable ones are:

• Made icons look crisp when the game scale is >1x. For Mac users on retina displays, you would have had the game on 2x by default, so this will be a noticeable improvement!
• Similarly, made battles much more crisp when the game scale is >1x. This was fixed a while ago but got re-broken.
• Changed how the game scale can be set; it now allows for fractional values.

The other ~25 changes aren't worth detailing and aren't even necessarily something perceivable through the game, but they're all helping improve the polish and playability!

[ 2025-05-14 22:20:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

Skeleseller now has an intro! Sure, there was the Skelerap, but now it's directly in the game. It tells the story of how you became a skeleton.

[ 2025-05-08 22:21:12 CET ] [ Original post ]

• Fix bug with loading a save file from 0.7.9. This save data didn't contain battle-window positions, so attempting to load on 0.7.10 would break (and do very weird things).
• Make workers act faster after dropping off an item. This is most obvious when your workers are harvesting crops.

[ 2025-05-02 22:45:06 CET ] [ Original post ]

More QoL changes and bug fixes!

• Improve usability of the battle map. Locations are now darkened until you unlock them, and you can click an entire location instead to select it of just the little stone panel with the flag.
• Add "!" indicator to NPCs with explanatory text (i.e. the Garbage Slime, Chef Slime, Farmer, Fisher, and Enchanter). This will hint to new players that there's something to learn after building the corresponding buildings.
• Fix bug with reusing battle windows when opening the battle map indirectly (e.g. by first opening the "Adventurers" panel and then clicking the "Battle Map" tab).
• Fix blurry text when zoomed out. This mostly just affected sale text (e.g. "+5G") and it was most obvious with larger game-scale settings.
• Play sounds on hovering over more interactable things: NPCs, signs, spell books, and battle-map locations.

[ 2025-05-01 23:13:38 CET ] [ Original post ]

There's a new major UI change: battles now take place in proper windows, meaning they can be minimized, undocked, and moved. As part of this change, the close button is always present, which might help mitigate how often people see the shiny new button and immediately click it when they mean to edit a party. And, as usual, there are some very minor bug fixes and QoL improvements. The most notable one is that we've removed nudges toward giving feedback through an external Google Form. We enabled reviews on the Steam demo page for 2-3 weeks now, and we hope people will start leaving their feedback here on Steam. We did read through every piece of feedback submitted through each formthank you alland we plan to read through every Steam review (at least while there are <500 ).

[ 2025-04-29 22:21:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

v0.7.8 is now out!

• Fix a critical shader issue that probably affected next to nobody. It made everything with an outline appear at ~1/30th the regular size (so the signs, NPCs, the portal, etc. were reeeeeeeeeeally tiny).
• Add new perk to the Fishing Pond: Spicy Cooking.
• Lower the title-screen music's volume. Many people reflexively reached for the volume sliders as soon as they opened the game, but no other music is as loud as the first few seconds of the title screen.
• Change Harvesting Efficiency so that it harvests the crops closest to the one you clicked.
• Improve some small QoL stuff that's otherwise not worth explicitly listing.

[ 2025-04-25 23:16:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

v0.7.6 was already online, but I never wrote the patch notes for it:

• Improved readability of perks (the costs were hard to read and it wasn't obvious when you could afford the perk).
• Fix some bugs.

v0.7.7 makes these additional changes:

• Revamp enchanter graphics. There are no longer books directly on the ground.
• Add Skeleseller-specific icons for Harvesting Efficiency and the Quick-Move Menu perks.

[ 2025-04-23 17:23:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The biggest changes are:

• Add perk to allow manually harvesting many crops at once
• Add a setting to disable edge-panning the camera
• Add a setting to allow confining the mouse cursor to the game window

There are several small changes around bug fixes, flavor, and in-game education (e.g. the tips that pop up).

[ 2025-04-16 19:18:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've been getting a lot of feedback with this new version (thank you )! This particular patch (v0.7.4) includes ~25 small changes to improve the player experience and fix some bugs. None are super notable.

[ 2025-04-14 19:48:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been about two months since the last big update. In that time, we've been busy improving the game.

New systems

We've added farming and fishing to the game. Both systems allow you to accrue food to be cooked by this li'l guy:
Use the resulting Wisdom Sludge to level up. That brings us to...

Revamped adventurer progression

Adventurers can be leveled up individually rather than having them all level up at once when you beat an elite monster.
Skill points are given every other level, and skills are now randomly unlocked.
These changes were made to simplify the leveling experience, prevent players from having to read through ~10 skills at once, and allow for investing in specific adventurers.

Perks for everything!

Before this update, only the Town Hall had perks, and it only had ~6-7 "real" perks. Now, there are 5 different sets of perks to unlock:
This allows you to spend money on what you find to be important in the game. In addition, there are some shiny new perks:

• Item Stacking: this lets you stack two or three items in a single location. This essentially doubles (or triples) your warehouse space, the efficacy of workers, the purchasing power of customers, and your own manual item movements!
• Quick-Move Menu: this lets you quickly select a destination for items without having to move the camera around.

Other notable changes

• Removed the vault: this was a personal storage location for items, but there just isn't much of a reason for it to exist yet.
• Revamped the tavern: the tavern is still for quests, but the quests no longer grant health and power to your adventurers. Instead, you're actually completing the quests of other skeletons, and by helping them with their unfinished business, they'll join your town as a worker.
• Improved the battle map's graphics: these now match the aesthetic of the game rather than being a generic, inked, D&D-style map.

[ 2025-04-09 21:03:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

The game-design changes should be mostly done, so now it's back to coding. All may be quiet on the patch-note front for a while before those changes start flooding in.

• Animate items flying to their destinations. This should feel much more satisfying when dragging items around!
• Fix bug with fleeing a multi-wave battle. If you fled the battle while the "Wave 2 of 2..." text was showing, then you could get into a weird state.
• Stop customers from preferring the potion shop. It used to be that a customer entering the town had a higher likelihood of buying from the potion shop just because they were forced to go through that shop. Now, when a customer enters the town, they will go to a random shop that has a buyable item.

[ 2025-02-21 17:09:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Very quick patch notes for today:

• Fix bug with the Max Customers perk. When loading from a save file, you would always only get 2 customers in your town. If you were able to upgrade Max Customers, then you would get the expected number of customers, but if you were unable to upgrade, then you'd be stuck at 2. Thanks to ExplosiveJames for finding this bug!
• Use rounded rectangles for party member selections. Wherever you can highlight/select a party member (e.g. in the skill tree), the rectangles used to indicate your selection are now rounded. It looks nicer than pointy rectangles. ()

I just wanted to get the bug fix out ASAP, hence this small patch.

[ 2025-02-16 01:38:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

More patch notes! We're still actively working on improving Skeleseller as much as possible.

• Improve worker and adventurer behavior.
  • They won't pick up armors and weapons from your warehouse unless you've built those shops.
  • If they're holding an item but don't have an available destination in a shop, they'll go wait at the shop rather than wander around.
  • If they're not holding an item, they'll wander around closer to the portal and warehouse so that they don't have as far to walk when an item finally does appear.
• Show proper item values in tooltips. Shiny Loot makes items more valuable, but the tooltips never reflected this. Now, you'll see a breakdown of how an item's value came to be calculated.
• Stop "Buildings" menu camera panning. Instead of automatically panning when you press a button in that menu, there is now a small icon next to that button that will pan the camera.
• Make the Garbage Slime's value tooltip more flavorful. It is now covered in slime.
• Update Town Perks icons. They are now custom-made for Skeleseller.
• Fix explorer sprites. The sprites were a combination of two other NPCs. Also, the explorer's dialog was in white text.
• Add end-of-tutorial tip. Now, after building your potion shop, the game will say "You have an adventurer, a shop, and some customers! Keep battling, selling, and building to grow Skeletown!"

[ 2025-02-14 17:40:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! The main changes in this patch are:

• Improve the flow for starting battles. Before this, if one of your adventurers was battling, it wouldn't let you start a new battle with that adventurer. This meant that you'd have to close the battle map, manage your battle windows, then reopen the battle map to configure your next battle. Now, you can just click "Start Battle" and it'll automatically end battles as necessary! This same thing works if you have three battle windows open; it'll close the oldest one.
• Improved manual item management. Previously, you had to drag an item exactly onto a specific target (e.g. an item stand in a shop). This resulted in a difficult experience dragging items around because the drag targets could be far away, and zooming out would make them much smaller to try to hit. Now, the entire building will act as a drop-zone for items. This means you can drag a potion anywhere in the general vicinity of the potion shop and it'll get placed on an open item display, or you can drop a quest item onto the tavern or the quest board.
• Add new Garbage Slime graphics. The slime itself only looks slightly different, but its dialog box is... dripping with flavor.
• Add new town-hall graphic.
• Add sounds to icon buttons.
• Fix bugs so minor that they're not worth detailing.

[ 2025-02-12 00:04:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Smoothing out rough edges for new and old players alike!

• Add "edit" button to EndBattleScreen. It turns out many people didn't know that you could click your party at the end of a battle to edit them rather than having to open a brand new window. I hope this fancy new "edit" button will speed up your adventuring!
• Add new graphics for: guildmaster, all shopkeeps, and the guild building itself. All 4 new NPC graphics include blinkingno need for eye drops anymore!
• Add custom mouse cursor. Point your bony hand at those items and WATCH IT GRAB!
• The Garbage Slime's text ("feed item to slime for 3G") now shows in screen coordinates, so it will be legible regardless of how zoomed-in your camera is.
• Fix bug where battles may never start.
• Use more icons rather than text buttons for the battle UIs. These now have sounds (like every other button), too.
• Fix minor font issues (mostly spacing stuff).

[ 2025-02-08 00:52:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Did a lot of work today, but not all of it is prominent for players. Here are the minor changes that should help new players slightly:

• Make battle tip go away on its own. It used to be that you had to manually dismiss this, which meant that players may miss a more important tip later down the line.
• Remove tip about manually moving items. The Garbage Slime teaches you how to feed it, so it should hopefully be apparent that you may be able to move items elsewhere, too.
• Add tip for how to drop an item. Some people got "stuck" with an item on their cursor. After 5 seconds of holding an item, a tip will pop up near the mouse saying that you can right-click to drop the item.
• Update title-screen music. Rebalanced some instruments to make it sound better on the Steam Deck.
• Remove cost label from item displays. These labels were in "camera space", so as you zoomed out, they would become less legible. Now, they only show in the tooltips when you hover over items.

[ 2025-02-05 23:55:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Pretty minor patch notes from today's work, but I want to document this stuff when I've got time:

• Default to fullscreen on Steam Deck. This fixes a bug where the cursor was unusable for most of the screen without divining how to change window modes on your own.
• Add a nice-looking background to the "Walking to the Portal" screen.
• Add sound when an item disappears to make it more obvious that you're losin' loot.
• Make Loot Magnet do what it says. Before this, it said that it would double the items you earned from battle, but it would actually double the number of times we rolled your loot drops. On average, the loot should remain unaffected, but now, when Loot Magnet procs, you'll always get an even number of all items granted.
• Put build/upgrade costs directly into buttons. It used to take up space in the dialog's content.
• Make fonts consistent. There should now only be Skeleseller-specific fonts in the game!
• Fix small bugs with the "Upgrade Portal" button. Its tooltip was incorrect after beating an elite monster, and its text was sometimes confusing (it would say "Beat Next Elite" when appropriate, but for new players, that was confusing).
• Move tooltips closer to the mouse. They used to spawn 15 pixels farther to the right.
• Convert sign text to a tooltip. The text on signs used to show in "world space" rather than in "screen space", which made it blurry sometimes. It now only shows when you hover the mouse over a sign.

[ 2025-02-05 03:06:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! This is our first-ever Steam festival, and we're excited to show you what we've been working on for the past ~year. The Skeleseller demo has about 90 minutes of content. We're aiming for 5-10 hours by launchnot sure when that'll be, though. We hope you'll try the demo and provide feedback (the survey is here). Also, if you're interested in watching the live development of the game, Adam streams here on Steam and also on Twitch. Have fun playing Skeleseller!

[ 2025-02-03 17:48:31 CET ] [ Original post ]