Rowan Needs Shinies!

As I'm writing this, Steam Next Fest October 2026 starts in an hour. We have spent the past two weeks preparing for it, by polishing the demo build as much as we could.On the art side this meant recoloring a lot of assets to make sure they were more cohesive, as well as polishing old assets that weren't up to our standards anymore.We also added new assets, some of which were:A moonbeam with suspended dust motes in the witch's house:Also note the new sign to the library!Moving clouds for the main collecting background:Look at them go! It adds so much to the atmosphere to have some movement in the clouds.We also added a new feature, a message log!This keeps track of all the dialogue you've heard, in case you forget something important.Finally we fixed a ton of bugs, for example:Evil synergy upgrades would appear that would decrease your stats instead of increasing them.Character voices would ignore volume settings, and always talk at MAX VOLUME.Performance problems when you tried to collect too many things with a bomb.Rabbit head buttons refused to stop shaking.Shiny shards would sometimes spawn in an infinite loop.Player could feed Floki air.Goop would miss the bucket and land on the floor.If you haven't tried the demo yet, now is the perfect time to do so!If you have tried the demo and liked it, please consider leaving a review, it helps us a ton!With love Sammie & Erynn

Our demo is finally out! It's been a few arduous months, but we finally released our free demo for you to play!The demo covers the early game, the focus was for the player to get introduced to the world and the game mechanics, without spoiling too much about the story or where it's going.You'll get to meet (almost) all the characters, gather shinies for Rowan, make recipes with Mephi, have your choice of critters to recruit, and feed cheese to poor Floki.The demo also has an early version of achievements. They were surprisingly easy to implement so we decided we could add them now and spice up the demo, we will overhaul them and add more for the full release.We really hope you enjoy playing the demo!We will also keep updating the demo to fix bugs and add polish to the content up until release, though we will not add any more content to the demo.With the demo release we also updated the steam page, and the trailer. Looking back and seeing how the game used to look was mindblowing, and slightly painful. The game has progressed so much, and we're excited to take it even further!Now we're going to take a very needed break, and get back to it next week.See you then!soft void

Something we both value in games is when the UI feels like a part of the world, what’s called diegetic UI. Since we are making all our assets ourselves by hand, this takes a fair bit of time.For example, we recently updated the night hub that has been in a placeholder state for months.As you can see, the buttons are just floating in the air, and have no connection to the world around them.How would you go about making this UI feel like a part of the world?Here’s the solution we went with:Instead of having buttons for navigation, you now have a signpost that looks like it could actually exist in the world.Instead of the large portraits for receiving dialogue, it now appears on a notice board as pinned flyers. In my opinion this is a huge improvement and makes the world feel a lot more cohesive and more like a place you are visiting.There’s still work to do of course, the New Day button is still a non-diegetic placeholder that needs to be updated, and I’m not entirely satisfied with how the bubble icons go outside the bounds of the fliers.Another improvement would be to have the on-hover effects also be diegetic. Currently for the fliers the color gets tinted when you mouse-over, and for the signpost small arrows appear to indicate what you are about to select.This could be improved so that instead an edge of the flier you are selecting gets folded up or something similar, and for the signpost we could change the arrow to look more like something that could be scratched into the board itself.Another example is the skilltree. In the old version, the upgrades were just connected with white lines, which stood out and broke immersion. We changed them to instead be tied together with red strings, secured with ribbons and pins.Again, there are more improvements that can be made here. The strings are too taught and would look better with some slack, and the ribbons look too similar, so having a couple of different variations would help. One step at a time though! As we are n...