Demo Updates & Bug Fixes
It's almost the end of Steam Cooking Fest, and we've had so much fun showing our demo to all of you for the first time on Steam!
We can't even begin to tell you how grateful we are that almost 700 of you (!!!) downloaded the demo, and over 500 of you wishlisted! When you make art, you're never sure if people will pay attention or not, so it's so nice to see that ya'll are having fun with the game! We've had a lot of wonderful feedback over the past week, and we're ready to implement some new ideas from ya'll, fix some bug fixes, and just bask in the glow of hearing that majority of you had a wonderful time playing, and a relatively bug free experience!
Over the past week, you may have noticed that we've pushed some patches out to address some of the feedback we've received as well as some bug fixes, and just some fun things we really wanted to include! If you played the demo earlier in the week, you might find that you want to give it another try to experience all these changes before TOMORROW when the demo comes down so we can focus on refining another version for ya'll in time for future fests!
Here is what we've added to the demo/fixed:
Brand new tea making SFX- boiling, whistle, pouring (all original, done by our sound designer who is also our technical director who is also our programmer who is also.... indie dev, amirite?) These were mostly made in our real life kitchen, making real life tea!
There was a brief period of a few hours where a version of the demo was pushed that included our furniture layout build mode, which is not yet feature complete and breaks a lot of things in the game (oops!). We've since removed build mode again, so if you played while that was active, please try again because that is not the intended experience for this part of the demo! See future demos for when we fix build mode up and make it so you can decorate your clinic the way you want to!
Some of the character portraits were incorrect later into the demo, mostly the child version of the main character not getting replaced with the older character portraits when they should be. This is now fixed!
Water no longer falls through the kettle when putting it under the tap.
Switched to Wwise from Fmod for sound implementation.
(Potentially) fixed a bug where you could in some cases place the kettle on the cutting board. You should not be able to cut the kettle. This is NOT cake.
Feedback
We have received such amazing feedback from all of you over the course of the last week of our demo being up for the first time! Here are some of the positive comments we've seen:
"I really love the concept of healing through cooking, and the way you've crafted the environmental art feels so calming and inviting"
"What a creative idea to incorporate Indigenous languages in your game!"
"This looks really cute!"
"Played the demo! It was very fun! Wishlisted!"
Although the majority of comments were nothing but positive with no notes, we also really value when players are able to tell us what they'd like to see in the game, what they liked, what they didn't like, etc! Our community is what makes our game better, and we're so grateful that you would take the time to tell us all your thoughts!
Here are some of the things we have heard you on that we are going to be incorporating into future demo updates and/or into the final game:
Rewards for healing patients (other than bragging rights as the best Kitch Witch in the land ;) )! Yes! You will definitely be able to do that in the full game, and now that we've heard that players really want that sort of dopamine hit while playing, we're prioritizing this for the next demo! Stay tuned!
Being able to find the NPCs you've healed out in the world. This will be in the next demo (on a smaller scale than the full game) for sure! We're already working hard on making a little base hunting camp for Danis, the first patient you heal in the demo!
We already heard some of the ideas ya'll had for naming our moose/buffalo hybrid large friend! Some of the top contenders were Boose, Fluffalo, Buffaloose, Moofalo, Morph and.... Buford? We're still undecided, but we're leaning towards Fluffalo or Moofalo! What's your favourite? Tell us in the comments!
Being able to "inspect" the animals in the game in the same way that you can the objects. This is such a great idea, I don't know why we never thought of it! We've already made it so you can inspect in the cat, it's implemented just not released yet! Remember the petting mini-game in the DS Harvest Moon games? Yeah, we're going to do something similar to that! You will be able to pet the cat!
And of course, we always have more and more content in the pipeline ready to go! Stay up to date on our Steam page, and our Discord server here: https://discord.gg/x9cnNUxGbw for updates!
Up next... our Kitch Witch goes to magic school? 👀