Fixed a couple crashes related to the new content, thanks to those who sent me crash reports. Plus, a new setting useful to people streaming the game. And the usual barrage of typo fixes. Crash Fixes Now, I want to emphasize something. One of the crashes occurs only if you missed something very, very obvious, and you got that crash, you should be a ashamed of yourself. The other crash was sporadic, and only happens in rare cases when you're in the library. Probably you didn't see this, and if you did you restarted you weren't able to reproduce it since it's sporadic and rare. New Setting for Streamers Another thing I added was a setting to reserve the bottom-left or bottom-right corner of the screen to put your webcam and/or animated avatar in. The caption box will be moved out of the way, thus benevolently allowing (or cruelly forcing) people watching the video to read the full captions.

At long last, I have implemented one of the "Future DLC" areas in the game. The new content is a major side quest at the University of Chingaim LIbrary. You don't have to buy the new content, it will be delivered as part of a regular update.

Murder Mystery Side Quest

Other Changes

• Huge fix so that the game now recognizes so-called Xbox Gamepads (many or most of which aren't actual Xbox gamepads, but are treated by the operating system as if they were).
• There is now an app that lets you keep track of your Main Quest and all your Side Quests. You have to buy it, though. You don't just get it.
• Some of the items in some treasure chests have changed. In the original game, there is a (let us call it) joke item that seems useful, but is actually extremely, maliciously evil. Later on, there is a similar item that is actually useful. This update expands the number of treasure chests these two items might appear in, and thus gives players more opportunity to acquire the useful item earlier in the game. (You still have have to look around and explore a bit to find them, though. They are not just an automatic thing you will get on the main quest.)
• The changing rooms in Regal Amory and Outfitters are now open, so you can go in and try armor on. That's just a nice little touch, really. There certainly isn't any larger benefit to you in this game just by being able to try on some armor.
• All buildings in the Town of Brobensy can now be entered.
• A couple new achievements. One for solving the Murder Mystery Side Quest, another one for figuring out how to use a late-game item that otherwise seemed to have no use.
• Lot of new signs.
• A completely and utterly useless rugby pitch on the overworld. There's not a rugby match there in this game, no one goes there, nothing happens there, and it's not at all properly marked or sized. There is literally no reason to have a rugby pitch in the overworld. But by golly I put one in, because I go hard.
• It's not super easy to find, and it's not readily apparent what it is, but you can now obtain an item that can help you get one of the game's more difficult achievements.

Ditty News

So earlier I had said that some updates I was working on were a bit delayed from my original hope of a New Year's Day, and the end of February was a more realistic time frame. Well, it's the end of February, and I am done with the content of the update (with one annoying exception, long story), but I made so many changes to game engine to implement some of the new content, that the game needs a thorough test run or two before I can release the changes. That'll take a little more time, a week or three. But it is still coming soon. The need for game engine changes was the major delay, along with my fatal flaw of going on tangents. I had thought the update was pretty mild in terms of features, but it turns out one area that had some topological irregularities needed a lot more updates to the engine than I anticipated. But, it's (almost) all in now. Anyway, to hold you over, here are a few outtakes of things what will be in the update.

• More opportunities to get a (useful) speedup earlier in the game. Probably my biggest regret is that it took most people too long to get the useful speedup, amusing as the non-useful speedup was.
• Many locked doors are now unlocked, especially in Brobensy. Other doors are still locked but the game explains them better.
• There is now a way to keep track of your quests and side quests.
• There is now a rugby pitch on the overworld. A rugby match is mentioned in the dialogue of one of the new side quests, but there was no reason to actually add the rugby pitch to the world, and yet I put one in.

Just a quick update on the new content I promised. I had been hoping to get it done by the New Year (yes, 2025), but right now I'm thinking end of February is more realistic. Long story short, I've been developing this new content under the George R. R. Martin model of game development. Instead of sticking to the relatively small scope of the content, I went off on all kinds of tangents fixing hardly noticeable issues and adding new features that had little to do with the actual side quest. (As an example, I needed to add a new item you have to purchase as part of the side quest. I could have just added this item to an existing shop, or made a new shop in an existing location. Instead, I decided to create the interior of a whole building. Then I added a bunch of other stuff to the building to fill it out.) As with George R. R. Martin, the feature creep has caused the schedule to slip a little bit. Unlike George R. R. Martin, I am actually going to finish the thing.

Ditty of Carmeana is the perfect holiday gift for your friends because, let's face it, you don't know what to get them and you hate shopping. Keep things simple and give them the gift of Carmeana! Especially now that it's on Sale for the Steam Winter Sale. And really especially because an update with a major sidequest is coming! Update on Update I am trying to get it done by the New Year. It's, well it's coming along but I kind of got distracted on something. There is a thing in the game that is not done, and not something that has a Future* DLC sign on it. I had kind of overlooked it and only realized it was still unimplemented about two days before the release date, I was frazzled at that point and was like, ah, it's a minor feature, I'll just implement it first release. And here, nearly three years after the release I'm finally getting to it. That has nothing to with the promised content, except that the update will be a few days or so later than it would have been. The actual DLC update is coming along just fine, it's pretty complex though. You can see a sneak preview of the setting if you head to Tivany Hall in Brobensy. And, uh, if you are one of those people who thinks this game had too much dialogue, you might want to skip this new sidequest....

A couple new conversations, one crash fix, and many, many, many typo fixes. One of the new conversations help flesh out a minor character who ought to have a had a bit more characterization in the game. Another conversation (well, it' more that it adds to an existing conversation) helps players get through a situation many players seem to be particularly bad at. Future Updates As some of you have noticed, there are two sidequests in the game that are not complete and I have labeled "Future* DLC". I've made quite a bit of headway one on them, and I expect it to be complete pretty soon, dare I say by Christmas? We'll see. It's pretty extensive too. It's not DLC you'll have to buy separately; it'll be delivered as part of a regular update.

Monday, typo fixes. Tuesday, typo fixes. Wednesday, typo fixes. So many typo fixes... (Also fixed an obscure crash, corrected a situation where Tabitha's gives the wrong advice, and added an option to open the Inventory app from the Inventory screen.)

For those gamers for whom the The Ditty of Carmeana has become boring and stale, I have introduced a feature to bring a new exhilarating level of difficulty to the game. Just go to the Settings App in the touchscreen in Tabitha's belly, choose Misc Options, and check the option for "Remove major economic loophole". With this option, now you'll face the thilling prospect of actually having to earn money. In addition, a bunch of typo fixes, an update to the game controller DB, and a new item.

The Ditty of Carmeana has a new feature! For the next half-hour of time spent playing The Ditty of Carmeana, you'll be rewarded with a series of annoying notifications that you'll incorrectly think are messages from friends, followups to your posts, or new games becoming available, and you'll get all happy thinking something cool has happened, then you'll realize it definitely hasn't. And there's no way to turn it off! You just have to wait it out till they stop. That's right, the Ditty of Carmeana now has Trading Cards. Surreptitiously delivered to you whether you want them or not. But hey, once you've waited it out, that's fifteen whole cents to put toward your purchase of Naked Mole Rat Simulator! Or, if you're one of them, you can buy and trade cards and create badges or whatever. Of course, if you don't already own the Ditty of Carmeana, you'll need to buy the game to get the cards HINT, and since it's on sale (or soon will be), now would be a great time.
NEW BUILD While I'm making an announcement, I might as well mention the I recently put up a new build (1967) so you might see an update. It's mostly typo corrections, but I did add one bit of voice acting that I hadn't added when I released.

Now is your chance to stick it to the mean ol' imperialist capitalists! This week, The Ditty of Carmeana is on sale, and when you buy it on sale, that means less money going into the pockets of that evil union-wrecking mega-corporation, Tampered Evidence LLC. So let's stick it to the corporatofascists and buy the game, and then we can all frolic in a Utopian world of love and harmony and flowers as we play The Ditty of Carmeana! [spoiler] Disclosure: Capitialism doesn't actually work that way. [/spoiler]

So if you have Steam Deck and were on the fence, go ahead and get it. The funny thing about this is, Steam sent me an email in what I would call a subtly admonishing tone about how a few things about my game prevent it from being "Verified". Yeah, I'm like, I'm a single indie developer who never once tested this on a Steam Deck and didn't really do anything specifically to make it compatible with Steam Deck. The fact that it's "Playable" with no effort on my part is pretty good actually. The reason it is "merely" Playable are a few minor controls oddities, like you have to bring up keyboard to enter your name, and sometimes it shows keyboard/mouse controls, and text that's a bit too small for their threshold on the small screen. Another funny thing is that Steam chose to review this for Steam Deck, I didn't request a review (that I can remember). I'm guessing they chose this minor indie cult classic to review because I had a native Linux build and a fair number of Deck users.

Just created a new build with typo fixes I've been accumulating. Also a minor change that probably won't help fix a issue that I sometimes see where mouse clicks don't register. Also, maybe, a new limited sneak preview of something I would like to add to the game, someday.

OMG What better gift for your lover on Valentine's Day than The Ditty of Carmeana? On sale the week before Valentine's day. Squee! It's the greatest love story of all time. A really cute boy from a backward farm town goes on a mission to Rescue the Princess, but I have a feeling he's gonna find love with a certain Info Booth Girl. So buy the Ditty of Carmeana see if I can reel him in!!! <3 <3 <3

A new achievement for passing the Bowtudgel History test... for real. Background: There is enough information in the game, somewhere or other, to be able to pass the final exam for Bowtudgel History at the University of Chingaim. However, most people who pass the test don't actually scour the kingdom looking for scraps of history (which was my original intention for that achievement), since it's quite obvious you can cheat on the test, in game. You don't even have to look on-line for the answers. It's an interesting story of how one feature of a game was sacrificed to improve another feature. But I still wanted something like an achievement for actually digging up the answers, and this is it. To get the achievement, you need to visit all the places, or do all the things necessary, to collect the information needed to pass the test. For instance, if information needed to answer one question is found in a book, on a sign, or as part of a conversation, you have to do that thing, andfor every question. Then, in the same game, you have to pass the Bowtudgel History test, without viewing a corrected test. Also, fixed a bug for crashes that can occur when you have very extensive save files.

A couple small but exciting improvements. FRAME RATE FIX It turns out that for certain people, the game would slow down noticeably if they turned the frame rate above a certain value (the exact rate the slowdown occurs probably depends on the monitor and graphics settings). I figured the slowdown was because I wrote the game in Python, which is not exactly a fast language. I had also supposed that if a typical gamer turns up the frame rate and notices the game is slowed down, they'd know to turn the frame rate back down. So I didn't consider this to be a very important issue. Apparently I was wrong. So, this week, I begrudgingly went to implement frame rate throttling to help people not play the game in slow motion. But when I did a bunch of testing, I found that the code was perfectly capable of running full speed at 120 fps even on fairly old hardware (like my old system with a non-Ryzen CPU). The slowdown was actually caused by a timing issue that caused the game to skip a vsync, resulting in up to a 50% slowdown. The good news is, I don't have to implement throttling. But the game does now limit the actual frame rate to the monitor refresh rate. (As in, if you set the frame rate to 120 but the monitor's refresh rate is 60, game will run at 60 fps. It would be pointless for the game's frame rate to be higher than that.) No, I did not and have no plans to make monitor refresh rate adjustable from within the game. If you find that your Ditty of Carmeana Experience is ruined by viewing it less than 120 frames per second, and your equipment supports it, there is probably a graphics driver utility that lets you override the monitor refresh rate when playing the game in full screen. DIALOGUE UPDATES I've updated the dialogue of one or two characters to make it easier for the player to find various things in the game. You still have to read it though. If you just blow the dialogue this change not going to help. A NEW APP I added a new app to Tabitha's touchscreen. This app has no effect on gameplay but does reveal some minor trivia about how I came up with certain character and place names. In order to obtain this app, you need to cook up the following recipe with an alchemist:

• 4 eyes of newt
• 2 scales of dragon
• 7 teeth of wolf
• 5 maws of shark
• 1 root of hemlock
• 5 galls of goat

I have noticed that many people playing the game don't seem to notice the help text at the bottom of the screen that appears if Lance stands still for a couple seconds, that tells you how to do some common things like open inventory menu, talk to Tabitha, and view a controls cheat sheet. Therefore, I've added a new app, Controls Help, for people not to notice. The Controls Help App just shows the cheat sheet, and it appears in your inventory retroactively. Also, fixed an issue in DNA Replicator mini-game where it runs too fast if you increase the frame rate.

Mostly added some more social media posts on MyFief.com for the game's diverse set of characters. Also, this update contains the long-promised change to make the Speed Boots quite a bit less annoying. Finally an update to the gamepad db.

Just a few odd fixes and changes I've been accumulating. A new, completely useless app.

Build 1890 is a bugfix release with a few small changes, hopefully big improvements.

• The biggest change was to modify the "control display" settings to make it a little more clear what it does, and to add a new screen in the settings menu that lists gamepads that the game detects, to aid troubleshooting gamepad issues
• A small fix that I am hoping solves an issue of uncommon sporadic crashes that seem to happen for no reason during or before some conversations and cut scenes. Located the issue when someone finally sent me a crash report capturing one of them.
• A fix to remove an anomaly in the menu that appears sometimes when talking to Tabitha.
• A few small typo corrections

Build 1883 of the Ditty of Carmeana is released. The new content is a scene I threw in mostly just to look at, there's a couple people to talk to there but no items to be got or any gameplay. The scene is unlocked after you "beat" the game, and you get an achievement for reaching it. The other achievement is for the Andria sidequest, if you find her eight pieces of furniture (which is how many there are in the game). If you have saved game where you already found all eight, you can get the achievement just by talking to her. Here's a list of fixes:

• Fixed a crash that occurred when pausing the game when music occurs in conversation (most obviously, while Lance plays Sonata #14 in the Chateau)
• Fixed an issue where the game could crash sporadically if you talk to Tabitha (or, sometimes, other characters) when the strikebreakers are firing at you
• Fixed an issue where some of the conversation with Dawn Elly never got reached
• Closed a loophole that put some of Tabitha's advice and the Map Question Markers out of sync with the current situation. This situation could occur any time after defeating the Chateau, however it never made the game unwinnable
• Various other small fixes, spelling fixes, and additions

Some important bug fixes.

• Several people have been reporting issues with earning achievements when you pass a test. I believe ... hope ... pray that this has been fixed. So if you still need to get those testing achievements in, now is a good time.
• Updated to the latest database of gamepads. If your gamepad wasn't working before maybe a good time to try again. Just remember to plug in your gamepad before launching the game. It is not smart enough to figure out that you've plugged one in after is starts.
• Closed another loophole that puts game into an unwinnable state, this one regarding sheep herding.
• Player now has the ability to crash the game from the main menu. This can be useful if you want a crash report to send to me but the game is annoyingly not crashing. It's also fun. Speaking of which...
• The crash log viewer is now actually part of the Steam build. Oops.
• Fixed an minor annoyance when selecting armor or items with a gamepad or keyboard.

Made a release to fix three crashes, all regressions I inadvertently introduced in the last update. Two of the regressions are edge cases that any developer might have made.

• If you try to bypass cut scenes very fast you could trigger a bypass before the cut scene has a chance to get properly set up. This has been fixed, and you can now bypass as fast as your trigger fingers can click.
• Doing certain things in certain situations where a converstation loads dynamically crashes the game, this has been fixed. Easiest way to reproduce would be to eat a fortune cookie while standing near Achilles.

• If you tried to start a new game, it would crash.

A variety of improvements to the user interface and usability of the game, plus fixed a couple crashes in the passing. Summary:

• Can now bypass cut scenes you've already seen. (You could actually do this before somewhat, but it didn't remember what scenes you saw across different games. Now it does.) Unfortunately it's not retroactive, it doesn't start remembering scenes until you replay the scenes starting from this build.
• Scovilr App can now be used with gamepad.
• Improved Crash Report User Interface.
• Fixed issue where Jocelyn (of "peckernose" fame) doesn't sell the (free) Maps App.
• Removed an edge case that made it was possible to sneak into the Chateau before getting your commission to Rescue the Princess, which makes the game unwinnable.
• Closed an unintentional loophole that allowed one to cross the desert without hydrating. (You never really know if loopholes are intentional in this game, but this one was definitely unintentional.)

• If you continue or restoring a saved game in a Spinner Mote, the game would crash when you tried to exit, that's been fixed.
• If you happen to click in a very specific place while deciding what to say, game will crash. This has been fixed.

Some few files had been missing from the build that were causing an insta-crash on certain systems, these have been added.

Fixed two relatively minor issues that were crashing the game:

• Ringing the gong in the Chateau
• Unlocking then opening a certain door in the final Lair before you're supposed to be there

Made a small update so that the game explains something that's been confusing people.

Fixed three issues that were crashing the game: - Firing the crossbow after setting the FPS with the slider in video settings - Pressing "." then "=" in the calculator app - Shooting the rock in some cases in the Brazilian localization