Hello! We are still alive, more or less. The heatwave in Italy has been unbearable, and we spent most of the month trying not to melt. Nevertheless, we armed ourselves with ice creams, fought the Sun, and managed to get some work done. Here’s what we did:

ART

Chiara officially finished working on the Orange City backgrounds! Only two more cities to go and the backgrounds will be all done.
We really liked the way the greenhouse came out, so we decided to make another location that makes heavy use of parallax effects: it’s a broken cannon where citizens of the Orange City illegally breed bees.

Putting all the pieces together.

Meanwhile, Anita painted a… Horse. Plant. Thing. Because it would have been boring to have a normal horse pull your cart, right?

We also did some work on the UI, with terrible results. Terrible, trust us.
Luckily, we did our taxes and ended up paying way less than expected, which means we managed to fulfil our dream of hiring a UI designer!
Potouto specializes in text-heavy games like visual novels, and already has some experience with art nouveau. We are super excited to work with them and can’t wait to see how they will improve the game’s interface!

Potouto also worked on a game by our friend Isak Grozny, The Bitter Drop: a narrative game about a bigender ex-rabbi and a flamboyant doctor-necromancer uncovering a cult guilty of eldritch crimes against humanity. You would probably like it!

GAMEPLAY

You can now ask questions to random NPCs in the streets. Like story NPCs, they can tell you information about assorted topics — but contrary to other merchants, they don’t speak the local lingua franca, so conversations will be stilted and awkward.

You surely happened to help tourists who didn’t speak your language: communication quickly devolves to frantic hand gestures and simple words being repeated multiple times.
We wanted you to feel like those tourists.
Next update will arrive at the end of September! May the Sun hopefully shine a bit less by then.