Hello everyone!
February has been a big month for us as we sprinted toward the demo that we released on March 6th! A lot of work happened behind the scenes, but also plenty of things that players will directly feel when playing for the first time. Let’s take a look!
Last month we talked about how we reworked the goats’ animations. This month, we did the same for Heidi herself!
We modernized her whole outfit, which meant updating her appearance everywhere: in-game, cutscenes, dialogue portraits, and even the tutorial images.
For the walking character, originally, Heidi was built from 3D meshes and animated in Blender, but we’ve now switched her to the same system we use for the goats: 2D polygons projected in a viewport. This gives us smoother performance and more flexibility when animating.
Before (3D meshes, Blender) and after (2D polygons, Godot)
Making this change meant redoing all of Heidi’s animations from scratch. Walking, guiding the goats… everything had to be recreated.
It was a huge amount of work, and still a lot more to go to improve things, but we’re really happy to have done it before the demo. Heidi now feels much more like a modern girl!
As we prepared the demo, we opened a private playtest with our Discord community. This was incredibly helpful, because it quickly revealed a few crashes happening on certain machines.
After investigating, we found the issue was related to the rendering mode we were using in the Godot engine.
We were exporting the game using Forward+, which offers more advanced features but requires more modern hardware. To make the demo run smoothly for as many players as possible, we switched to Compatibility mode, which is designed to support a wider range of systems.
Making that change meant adapting several parts of the game, including our color ambiance shaders, the lake shader, and some visual effects like the images that appear when you guide the goats. All worth it in the end! The game now runs a lot smoother, and on more machines than before.
The playtest also brought us a lot of feedback and bug reports, which helped us fix quite a number of issues before the demo release. Thank you so much to everyone in the Discord who helped test the game! (you’re the goat 🐐)
Our junior animator Elise has been busy adding more life to the mountain!
Her latest creation is a duck that lives in the village pond. It can swim around, ruffle its feathers, and even dive underwater. Bloo integrated it into the game world, and it already adds so much charm to the area!
We adjusted Peter’s schedule: now, in the evenings, he heads back to his mother’s house in the village. These little routines help make the village feel more alive and believable.
We also adjusted the digging mini-game for him: it’s no longer just about finding mushrooms, you can now discover fossils and small treasures while digging.
These items can be given to Peter to help him complete his collections, strengthening your bond with him over time.
We also added a couple of useful controls:
Press Esc during the intro cutscene to skip it
Press Esc during gameplay to open the options menu.
Simple additions, but often requested in the Playtest!
Finally, we’re very happy to share that the demo now includes a Simplified Chinese translation, thanks to the support of our friends at IGDA Shenzhen. We’re incredibly grateful for their help in making the game accessible to more players!
As always, thank you for following the development of the game and supporting our tiny team! Thanks to everyone who downloaded and tested the demo, and for all the feedback, we will have a LOT to say for next month’s Devlog 😄
See you there! 💚
Meli & Bloo