Hello world!

As the great state poet and federal weirdo Tyler Okonma once said:

Oh, of course we can, darling! So here’s a little recap for you about what we did this (last) month (November):

As you may recall from a video we made there is a small creature roaming your garden called Herbit. You can interact with, talk with, and even receive quests from it. At some point it may invite some of its cousins to your island – and they’ll start a small village!
These cousins can be employed (for some veggies) to sail over to the other islands of your archipelago to get new seeds and/or items for you. To improve the cousins abilities for expeditions you can expand their settlement by leveling up their chambers, lighthouse, storeroom, and harbour.
Though we still use placeholder assets for the settlement and the archipelago map the Herbit Settlement is fully functional and only needs some more hints, tooltips, and regular banter from the Herbit’s cousins to feel right :-)
Oh, but speaking of tooltips...

Sometimes I (Lion) get a bit lost in details but these things were (mostly) really on my to-do-list! I swear!!!
But either way you’ll now be able to adjust the game’s difficulty in the settings. Lower difficulties make quests easier to accomplish by demanding less items from you to complete them, higher difficulties will demand more items.
You can also adjust the game’s timescale if you prefer to have a more chill game. Currently the standard time scale is already pretty low with 12min/ingame day but you will be able to speed that down to 24min/day or up to 8min/day.
We also gave interactable objects an outline on mouse hover over, added the possibility to use world tooltips, and added regular (UI) tooltips for items (so far). As Blink182 would say: ‘All the small things!’
But speaking of small things: we also have one BIGGIE for you this month again:

And it’s finally one that was made by Alicia again!!! It’s about the design process of our upper garden/watch tower area. Therefore it contains the ideation and production of environment (the tower), vehicle (the Trade Co. ship that docks at the tower) AND character designs (Milly & Maynard are on the ship) – so it’s almost a whole ingame scene design recap! Be sure to check it out on YouTube as long as it is still hot!

Oh, you already knew that? But I bet you don’t know what we are currently working on, do you? Well, then I’ll tell you...

We already have some tooltips and hints in our game but currently we are trying to fill up their ranks. Meaning: we are adding descriptions for all placeable objects (pots, lamps, et c.), excavated items (plants you dug out with a shovel to place them somewhere else), as well as tooltips for all ingame interactables (compost, water well, sleep capsule, potion crafting desk). Additionally we want to make tooltips ‘expandable’ (via pressing SHIFT on hover over) to give additional info about specific items (e.g. the fill amount of a watering can, the approximate buy/sell value of an item, et c.) and add an overview of all absolved quests (currently there is only a UI window for your currently running quests). Exciting!

As you may know (again) we implemented the (more complex) compost, crafting, and Herbit settlement UI in the last couple of months. They all came with new ingame mechanics (leveling compost chambers to access better compost soil tiers, ‘exploring’ crafting recipe ingredients through trial and error, leveling the Herbit settlement for better Herbit expeditions) AND all had a associated character sitting at the bottom of the screen in case you need any help (kind of like Window’s Clippit/Clippy). These characters (the ‘compost version’ of the Herbit, ‘crafting’ Helio, ‘settlement’ Herbit) currently only have tutorial dialogues/specific info to tell (like what compost value a selected item has in case of the Compost Herbit). That means: they still need some additional/banter and/or a FAQ-like dialogue if you need any additional help after the tutorial dias.

We are also planning to setup a Discord server in the next couple of months. Maybe even this month??!? Who knows!!!
By the way: did you know that we have a Bluesky account[bsky.app] too? Maybe you should check that out!

That's it so far! We do not really have as much time to do stuff this month because of Chrisme and stuff but so do you! So keep that in mind and don't be too harsh on yourself. After all: it is Chrimse!!!
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xoxo Gogobee

Griasz eich Gott!

I am here to update you about medium level change & progress we made regarding our wonderful garage band game Golembert.


After we added the machine translations of 7 languages we planned to release on Steam we got the feedback that machine translations are bad and that we should feel bad. We definetly felt that and decided to remove all languages that the game wasn’t originally written in officially (it was written in German and English only). Unofficially we will keep the options to: a) edit the game’s translations .csv file (via Excel or even Notepad), and b) still select the 7 excommunicated languages ingame. That way speakers of these languages can easily add their own translation to the game and trade them with other players unofficially. We will (sadly) henceforth ONLY support the English and German version of Golembert because we do not have the budget to hire professional translators for other languages.

Last month I wrote about all sidequest being added but now we also added the last couple of bottlepost quests (that you’ll receive via… bottlepost) and are now officially done with all the quest dialogues – hurray! Golembert will feature 76 quests (including 24 main quests). Depending on the way you calculate their playtime (we haven’t played through them all ourselves yet lol) they could lead to a minimum of 19h (15min/quest) of playtime!!! Unbelievable. Mom, get the camera!!!

Now that all the quests were ready to test we had to start giving them all reasonable quest goals. And what’s reasonable in times like these? Well, good question. To find that out we made a big spreadsheet that listed all the items (and the time they consume to be made and their water and soil cost), potions (and the items they need), and quests (and the potions/items they need) and divided them by the maximum amount one could (approximately) do within an ingame day – and that is how we came up with an economy. That’s probably how they did it back in the GDR too I guess lol


Oh, we still are? We still are! So bear with us!!! Seriously the whole MA of Alicia really took a toll on our YouTube game. But we will be back for you in the near future! Until then you can still indulge in our old, well ripened devlogs from the past. They still are – I might say – a blast.

Guidance is really the most important thing in a game (write that down!!). Therefore we already added some casual ingame hints that guide you through the first steps of the game. But we don’t want the player to force read through a wall of text for some advanced concepts/mechanics – like our Compost or our Potion Crafting. That’s why we added/reused little helper NPCs for both mechanics/screens that will give you general or specific hints about compost input or crafting recipes. Sometimes they’ll even start a chat with you. Cozy!

As you may recall from a video we made there is a small creature roaming your garden called Herbit. You can interact with, talk with, and even receive quests from it. At some point it may invite some of its cousins to your island – and they’ll start a small village! Through it you will be able to send out Herbit Expeditions to other islands of your archipelago to get seeds and items you need. You will therefore also be able to upgrade the village to attract more Herbits, increase Expedition speed, and reach islands that are further away from you. And to make it look cuter of course!

We recently had some bad Social Media experiences (for example when asking around in Reddit about whether using machine translations as an indie dev is okay) with some downvotes and aggressive comments. Experiences like that make the already tough experience of being a 2-person studio not really easier. But sometimes you have to remind yourself that people that want to make you feel bad probably feel worse – so don’t think too much about it!

Love y'all, appreciate y'all,
xoxo Jolly Bert