Welcome back to The Lettuce Village Lowdown! The Lettuce Village Lowdown is the name of a newspaper run by a *very* passionate character who you’ll meet in Garage Sale, and we’re now also adopting the name for our new series of monthly devlogs. We’ve been really hard at work on Garage Sale this month, so we’re excited to share a few tidbits and insights into our development process with you! [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43879870/5bafb5b663b8ddf7dd55a188b738d562fc084735.jpg[/img] [h2]Flavor Text, Collisions, and Layering Done![/h2] We tackled a huge chunk of work this month. We’re 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 that’s 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 we’d rather leave these for everybody to discover on their own. We've left [url=https://www.tiktok.com/@playgaragesale/video/7301865208727833887]an example of what exploring a typical room might look like[/url] on our Tiktok account, and we'll be posting more sneak peeks into this on [url=https://twitter.com/playgaragesale]Twitter[/url] as well. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43879870/efd2675d4ca87e22afcdf9bc3e0392931472a524.png[/img] [h2]Scavenger Hunt Time…[/h2] Garage Sale wouldn’t be Garage Sale without items to collect and coins hidden throughout the town, and we’ve finally been working on finishing adding both of these! We aren’t quite yet done hiding everything yet, but we’ve 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, we’ve also hidden a few secret passageways and achievements that aren’t 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] We’ve just about wrapped our first round of internal playtests! We had our team members play through the entire game this month and we’ve knocked a lot of pesky bugs out during this process! It’s also been super eye-opening to have team members who aren’t as familiar with the quests play through them — we’ve realized that we need to change the difficulty and structure of a few quests. We definitely can’t reveal a lot about this feedback (that’s 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… [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/43879870/345dc8ddd55c89fdfa92fc4f90db6e6e6abe0afa.png[/img] [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! We’ve started this already, but it’ll likely take us a few weeks before we can get to this point. Once that’s done, though, we’ll be ready to move onto a smaller external playtest with friends in person, and after implementing feedback from this round of testing, we’ll have a larger closed beta to share with pretty much anybody who’s interested. We should have details to share about this next month. We’re also a team of (mostly) students, so from late December (when finals end…) to late January, we’ll be out of classes and have a lot more time to tie our game together and meet our early 2024 release window. Because we’re entering finals season and mostly working on things we can’t talk about in depth (like restructuring quests), it’s likely that December’s devlog will be a little thin (and likely late… we do not want to be working on a devlog on New Year’s Eve!), but we promise we’re 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 don’t 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!