Peep peep, Mayors! 🍍
Huge thanks to everyone who joined our recent closed playtest!
We’ve loved reading all your feedback. We’re already hard at work polishing systems, fixing bugs, and improving the overall experience!
It's been lovely to see how your towns are coming along...
Credit: LittleBun
Coming Soon
Controller Support
First off, a quick win: controller support is in, tested, and feeling super smooth! Navigating menus and moving around with a gamepad is working just as expected. Woo!
Building & Visual Polishing
We also caught and fixed a handful of quirky building placement bugs - such as being able to build in pools and the sea or unable to build in random empty areas - alongside a few visual glitches, so constructing and placing structures should feel much cleaner now.
Quest Revamps & Flow Adjustments
Thanks to player feedback around early-game progression (like building your first few houses), we’ve made a few key adjustments to improve the pacing:
- Jack’s House Quest: We ripped out one of Jack's old house quests and replaced it with a brand-new, item-based quest type.
- Ichi’s Quest Line: We revised Ichi’s quest requirements to focus on your total house and villager count instead.
Bug Highlight
The Curious Case of the Ghost Villagers
Our favourite bug fix from this session involves a ghost problem we’ve been haunted by for a while - and just in time for Halloween season, too!
Players were encountering "ghost" villagers - characters who appeared in menus as if they had moved in, but were nowhere to be found in the game world.
Turns out, these poor villagers were stubbornly trying to move into houses that had already been deleted! We've sorted this out, so there’ll be no more phantom townies cluttering your menus.
What We’re Focusing on Next
Player feedback from testing has been incredible, giving us plenty to refine leading into Next Fest and beyond:
- Clearer Town Score Progress: We want to make it much clearer when and how your town score increases since some players have been confused about how to increase their town score, or misunderstood how it happens. As a quick fix we'll see if we can get the townscore bar to show up in the build mode view, and maybe add a little animation to it as it increases, to help strengthen that connection between score and decorations / buildings.
- Selling Items & Map Destinations: Selling items isn't as intuitive or fun as we want it to be yet. A lot of players suggested having a dedicated physical destination on the map to sell goods. We’re brainstorming ways to make the shop flow feel great long-term.
- Economy Balance: Economy tuning is a bigger job on our radar, and we’ll be diving deep into balancing trade and prices right after the demo drops.
- Audio & Music: The lovely Rose (ImpyCat) has joined the team, and is working on finishing touches on the music theme (including some differences between daytime and night time) while also pulling together a full list of SFX we want to implement (e.g. new footstep sounds, page turns, etc)
As always, thank you all for the feedback, bug reports, and support!
Let us know what you think in the comments or hop into our community Discord to share your thoughts.
Peep peep! 🐣
Biscuit Factory Games