Today we are taking a road trip back to the beginning of Tinkertown to look at how it all started; let's dive into it!
The Idea Behind Tinkertown The idea of Tinkertown came to life around 2019 when Headup's CEO Dieter played a lot of Treasure Arena and was reminded of the classic 16-Bit Zelda and Terraria again, thinking: "What if Zelda and Terraria had a sandbox baby?" Together with Niko, the Dev behind Treasure Arena and one of the Headup Developers, they started to build the concept of "Fourest," later known as Tinkertown.
The first week of development: Testing the infamous tilted camera with popup objects.
The team wanted a Terraria-style game but with 16-but Zelda-esque visuals. However, you can still see that Super Treasure Area heavily influences the art style of Tinkertown.
Along the way, the team and the game's ambitions grew with new biomes, features, dungeons, and bosses. One of the first things that were added for the more casual players was farming and fishing.
Looking closely at all the new features, we can find inspiration from several of our favorite games. The NPC building coming for Terraria and Zelda influences the quest system to progress with the NPC.
But we also have some bosses that are influenced by our favorite games. Heart of the Forest is a tribute to the Secret of Mana. Anubis, the god of death mechanics, is inspired by Dark Souls, where you fight him in different stages and can learn the attack patterns to beat the boss.
Thank you for your continued support, and we look forward to sharing even more content with you!
Your Tinkertown team
✅ Verified for Steam Deck: Play Tinkertown wherever you want!
Greetings Tinkerers!
We have already addressed this topic in another update, but we are making an extra update out of it once again: Tinkertown was recently reviewed (again) and got finally verified for the Steam Deck! Woohoo! ːsteamhappyː (Until now, it was classified as "playable")
So, what does that mean for all of you Tinkerers out there? Finally you can enjoy Tinkertown in all its glory on the Steam Deck wherever you are: at home on the couch, inside a plane, on a bus or a train, or deep inside the darkest dungeon - just about anywhere!
Happy tinkering on the go, friends! Your Tinkertown team
After last weeks huge announcement that Tinkertown 1.0 releases on June 22nd, we wanted to continue showing you some of our progress behind the scenes!
A few months ago, the team was joined by our great artist Gustav, who has been tinkering away on a lot of cool tweaks to make the game even more beautiful. Here's his take on boss kill animations for Heart of the Forest and God of Death. Cool, huh?
Other than giving our bosses a beating, we have also fixed some broken text for equipment stats. As usual, we compiled everything in a short but sweet list for you:
Early Access 0.17.4
Added new animations on defeating God of Death and Heart of the Forest
Fixed broken equipment stat texts
Reduced housing check animation to trigger only for relevant items
Fixed issues with tile placement
Thank you for your continued support, we look forward to sharing as much as we can with you, coming up on our full release in just a few weeks!
Your Tinkertown team
Tinkertown releases June 22nd!😲❤
Dear Tinkerers,
We are so very proud to announce that Tinkertown is going to leave early access and launch as version 1.0 on June 22nd!
With the full release, our long hours of hard work will pay off, as we finally get to let everybody experience the best version of Tinkertown. Check out our freshly baked trailer, listing 10 things you can do in the game right now!
If you don’t own the game yet and want to check it out at launch – hit the Wishlist button and we’ll remind you when it’s out! There is a lot of good stuff coming, either as a part of the game hitting 1.0, or in the future. Just look at this fine list!
A journal to gather all the cool information in the game in one place
NPCs will get a bigger role, with a relationship system put in place to give them a more active part of gameplay
We’re adding an endgame dungeon with an additional boss fight, and some special loot for you after defeating the boss
After launch we’ll have new types of events and community activities
So, as you can see, hitting 1.0 does not mean the end of the road in terms of updates! We will continue to fine-tune the game and add content, to keep you coming back to Tinkertown. In the future we will also do a big database rework, which will allow us to add cloud saves and make several changes to the backend that will benefit the game going forward.
But now we are super interested to know if you have questions or ideas for Tinkertown beyond the games’ launch. Our Discord server is the best place for those discussions, but the Steam forum is of course also a great way to make your voice heard.
A truly heartfelt thanks to all of you that support us and engage in our beloved Tinkertown. You mean the world to us.
Now let’s get excited for version 1.0!
(Pssst, as a bonus - we are now verified on Steam Deck! So you can bring your cozy town with you wherever you go!)
(Pssst, as a bonus bonus - we also have a small patch ready for you right now. Neat list below!)
Early Access 0.17.3
Fixed the Master of Craft achievement bug
Fixed a bug where some buttons have to be pressed twice
Minor bug fixes
🔧Fixes and Polishing!🔩
Hey dear Tinkerers!
It's Tuesday and you know what that means - our game gets slightly better with Tinker Tuesday!
This week we've polished up the controller support, changed the boomerang a bit and adjusted timings for some of the music. As usual - look below for a very handy list of the changes:
Early Access 0.17.2
Fixed a bug where craft buttons were not able to be entered with a controller
Tweaked overpowered boomerangs
Nighttime music now starts with dusk
We're also slowly but surely closing in on things like the journal update, database update and other exciting things. So keep your eyes peeled here and on our Discord!
Your Tinkertown team
🔨Building contest: Exploring the Wilds!🌵
Dear Tinkerers - it's time for our next building contest!
With the warm weather comes our itch for adventure! To go out and explore the wilds and find breathtaking views and hidden paths.
Maybe you stumble on a dark cave, full of fairies and flowers? Or find a peaceful oasis in the desert, where a grove of cacti are framing a cooling lake.
The theme for this building contest is Exploring the Wilds! We want to see your most daring expeditions captured in screenshots or a short video clip.
Submit your entries in the comments, on our Discord server or on Twitter. The winners are picked by a voting jury consisting of five of the Headup team members. The contest ends Tuesday 23rd of May, at 15:00 CET. Make sure you submit your entry before then!
One entry per contestant, and the glorious prizes are:
1st place: Your name on a craftable in game item! Also the Discord role as “Building Contest Champion” and 3 Steam keys for Tinkertown.
2nd place: 2 Steam keys for Tinkertown
3rd place: 1 Steam key for Tinkertown
Now - go out there with bold steps and return with tales of wonder!
UI touch ups and hookshot tutorial!
Hey dear Tinkerers!
Tinker Tuesday is back, making our favorite game even more enjoyable! This week we have updated the area for the hookshot tutorial (in the Ice Dungeon), to make the use of the item a bit clearer. We've also continued doing small tweaks to the UI and other neat details!
The full list is conveniently placed below:
Early Access 0.17.1
Updated hookshot Tutorial Area in Ice Dungeon for a better introduction
Smaller changes and bug fixes for the UI rework
Updated Chinese font for better readability
Made placeable walls destructible with bare hands to prevent players from being locked in
Increased item pickup range slighty
Minor changes
This sets us up nicely for major things to come! We have both the database rework and the journal update in the pipeline and we're working hard to get everything together.
Do you have something that you hope for in the coming updates?
A huge thank you for your continued support and love for Tinkertown!
Your Tinkertown team
The Big Database Rework!
Dear Tinkerers!
Today we want to share some juicy details about what we are currently tinkering on for our save game functionality! It will improve a whole lot of things for the future (and possibly create a small amount of temporary hassle).
Behind the scenes we are reworking the way save games for characters and worlds work. "Why?" You might ask - It's mainly for these reasons:
Cloud Saves - Formerly our save game consisted of more than 10.000 individual files. That stopped us from implementing cloud saves, something we now can introduce in future updates!
Performance - To have that many individual files is bad for performance, especially on slow hard drives.
Upgradeablility - The new save game is a SQLITE file. That makes it possible for us to introduce more complex changes in the future that would otherwise have threatened existing player saves.
Modability - Because SQLITE is a standardized portable format, it is very easy to modify save games! We want to stress that this is NOT mod support, but it takes us a lot closer to it (even if it's not a primary goal for us) and very invested players can take steps to modify save games to match their vision!
Why do we talk about this?
There is a risk that some parts of your old save games may not be ported to the new way of saving. But don't panic! Your characters and worlds will still be there. However, your questing progress will likely be lost, because we also made big changes to the quest system to make it more enjoyable in multiplayer.
We are currently doing our best to keep everything you achieved, but we wanted to be as transparent as possible and give you a heads up that some parts of your saves may be gone.
What changes have we made to the quest system?
The quest progress will now be bound to the world instead of individuals. Currently, every character and every player has their own quest progression. That forced us to make many of them repeatable and therefore perhaps less impactful. We also found it clunky that every player had to finish the quest for themselves.
We think that these changes will set the game up real nicely for future updates and we are eager to share even more soon.
Take care and thanks for being an awesome community!
Your Tinkertown team
UI overhaul!
Dear Tinkerers,
Today, we have some exciting news to share: We’ve updated our UI to make the game even more accessible to all players! This big quality-of-life improvement also comes with several smaller fixes and squashed bugs, which you can find in the full patch notes down below.
We have been able to improve readability by shifting from our previous pixel-font style to a more readable version, that still matches our Tinkertown aesthetic, but ensures that the in-game text is a bit clearer. Additionally, we have adjusted the positions of several UI elements and included keyboard and mouse icons for all of our non-controller-wielding Tinkerers!
We are looking forward to hearing your feedback about the big and small changes for this patch. Here is a full list of the complete patch notes:
New UI theme
New fonts for improved readability
New icons in-game to support navigation
Improved positions of several UI elements for better user experience
Added icons for keyboard and mouse
Added display on the bottom of the screen showing usable buttons for active interfaces
Fixed issue in the settings menu, when moving through tabs, sometimes not displaying
Updated missing localizations for certain UI elements
Improved visibility for the shovel cursor
Added a new track in the Forest Biome at night
Fixed bugs and inconsistencies
Thanks for staying with us and keeping up to date on our progress, as we keep improving our game to be the best it can possibly be – for you!
Your Tinkertown Team!
Early Access 0.16.11b
Fixed an issue where the final sealed door at the end of the Ice Dungeon was not breakable
