We're back with more fixes and features requested by the community. Thank you for your continued support!
-- Sprinting & Jumping -- You can now sprint in the garden. This makes it easier to reach voxelotl on the other side of the garden more quickly. The ability to jump was added as well. Jumping is purely cosmetic at this moment in time. You can't clear gaps with it, but enjoy the dopamine hits that come with it :).
-- Improved Onboarding Experience -- The onboarding tutorial has been completely refactored to be an interactive tutorial. It guides you through each game mechanic and points you to where those mechanics are and how to use them. When you complete the tutorial you get 250 coin for your hard work! Enjoy!
-- Drop Zone Indicators -- When you pick up any object, icons will appear on the screen to help you locate interaction points. This was introduced to make it easier to learn what you can do in the garden with various objects. Enjoy!
-- New Achievements -- New stats were added for the new tutoria system, so we decided to add some new achievements to track those stats. - Punch A Tree: Get an achievement when your first Voxelotl punches fruit down from a tree - School: Several achievements were added to the school house tracking the lessons learned
- Voxelotl now leave a trail of dust when they run in fear. This makes it more obvious and it looks less like they dissapear from reality - Fixed several bugs in the item/money system that led to incorrect money values and multiple items spawning during purchase (like eggs) - Made the entrance to the beach a little more obvious using stones and pillars - The fullscreen option no longer appears for non-desktop platforms like the SteamDeck - Made coin icon match the coin model and fixed lighting on coin model - You can no longer move decorations while they are being interacted with by voxelotl like the TV - Fixed a bug with the race reward UI that was causing it to show less rewards for previous races where the voxelotl didn't earn first place - You can no longer freeze the game by holding the fast forward button before or after the races - Hotkey for exit have been added to options ui so you can quickly exit the menu - Added a new swim animation for expert voxelotl - Added new signs for each training station to help make them easier to locate
Service Patch 2
The community has spoken and we have listened! This patch comes with even more fixes and features to help make Voxelotl Garden more enjoyable and stable. Enjoy!
-- New Skins -- Our very own Abon has crafted new voxelotl skins! We've put the skins in rotation so you will get them from newborn eggs and see them in the races. Enjoy!
-- Performance Improvements -- We were able to squeeze more juice out of the performance of the game and the garden now runs at 60FPS on a steam deck! There is still room to grow for performance in the races, but that will come in the next patch.
-- Abilities UI -- There is now a data panel in the Voxelotl UI that shows you all the learned abilities, underlying stats, and effects on your Voxelotl. This makes it much easier to know what your Voxelotl is capable of doing and will streamline the core loop.
-- Decoration Auto-Repair -- Sometimes decorations can end up in invalid locations and there isn't a good way to correct the issue. We added an auto-correct routine when loading that will ensure that decorations are always on valid ground and are never in the same position as another decoration. If you had decorations stuck somewhere they should automatically "pop" into place when you load in.
-- Whisling & Tracking -- We got several reports that finding your voxelotl and running back and forth are getting in the way of the core game loop. To help with this, we've added tracking, which shows overlays over each Voxelotl and helps guide you to their location as well as the whistle mechanic which will attract your Voxelotl to where you are standing. These tools should make it easier to find your friends and get work done!
-- Other Items -- - The feedback UI now works on all platforms and the button is displayed in the UI to make it easy for players to give feedback - The splash screen no longer says "press start" and accepts any button from any platform. - Fixed issues with Steam Cloud sync. It works again. - Eggs now have a UI element to show how much longer until they hatch. - Achievements that watch the same stat no longer overlap. You won't see four achievements ding each time an egg hatches.
Service Patch 1
Service Patch 1
Thank you for your support for Voxelotl Garden! The community has stepped in and done a great job helping raise awareness of issues in our discord and in the steam reviews. We've been hard at work fixing up the issues and the patch is finally here! This is one of many patches that will be coming in next few months. We thank you for all your love and support!
-- Less annoying FTUE and level transitions -- Previously, every time you open the game it would force you to watch the tutorial videos and to read the patch notes. To make things more streamlined, the tutorials will never appear again after the first time and the garden intro animation will only play once per session. When you return to the garden a logo is shown that fades out and this makes it much faster to move between the garden and the minigames. Patch notes have now been moved into the option menu.
-- Voxelotl renaming -- At the request of the community, you can now rename Voxelotl while holding them and pressig the key displayed on screen. If you have spaces in the name, then the last part of the name will be used during the breeding process.
-- Race UX -- Several changes were made to the race UI to make it clear which type of race you are currently selecting. Voxelotl now stay in their lanes and each of them have their own goal at the end of a race. This prevents them group grouping up at the end and gives a more accurate result of the race. A fast forward feature was added during the races to speed things up.
Other things: - Race UI shows the right rewards now. - The fullscreen setting is respected between level loads now. - General UI navigation fixes for both mouse and gamepads.
Update to the latest version and have fun with these new changes!
Cursor fixes
- Fixing a bug with the cursor clicking off screen and losing focus in desktop mode - Increasing the amount of mouse sensitivity since the defaults were pretty low
Launch Day!!!
Today is our official launch of Voxelotl Garden!
Today you get to finally meet your new friends and begin a journey with them in the Voxelotl Garden. We are thankful to our community who helped us through this development cycle and are proud of our little simulation game. We hope you enjoy your time in the garden and that you take good care of your Voxelotl.
We love you a lotl, The Voxelotl Garden Team
Voxelotl Garden - Introduction
Come join us as we play our small but adorable pet simulator together and talk about our cute Voxelotl friends! We want to give an early look into the game and share our vision with the community.
What is Voxelotl Garden? Voxelotl Garden is a pet simulator where you take care of adorable Voxelotl pets in a peaceful garden. Voxelotls hatch from eggs and have a variety of different personalities, traits, and patterns. Train your Voxelotls to alter their appearance and skills and then compete for prizes in minigames. Come enjoy your new pets and take them on the journey of a lifetime.
So what's the plan for the rest of the game? Well... we are a very small team and we are trying to push as hard as possible to get this experience polished up. We have most of our core design laid out but we need to tighten up the mechanics, add a few new planned features, and then build up some content to keep you entertained. We have several ideas that we want to add before this goes out the door, but we are also interested to hear your thoughts on the matter. If you have any feedback please visit our discord https://discord.gg/BtbBQYP.
Community Playtest 1 - Patch 2
We've gotten a ton of feedback from everyone in this process and we have made HUGE progress towards a better build! We thank you so much from the bottom of our voxelized hearts!
We just uploaded a new build for testing that will be the new playtest build up until february 2022. We hope everyone is warm and safe during the holidays and we look forward to a productive 2022! CHEERS!
With that, here's what is going on in our world.
Changes: - We are dropping mobile support for the time being. Controls are now for desktop and consoles exclusively - New contextual UI is added to the creatures for giving items or triggering the not yet implemented "whistle" feature - The shop is now a physical place instead of a menu! Just walk up and the instructions should be clear - Removed training minigames temporarily while we re-design the universe. This fixes a slew of bugs that were in the minigames themselves - Fruit is currently the primary way to improve stats of creatures for the time being - Added a quest system to send one voxelotl on a journey to improve their skill! They will adventure even while you are not playing - Removing local co-op for the time being. We are analyzing this moving into our future
Known issues: - Races have no art! Unfortunately we suffered corruption in an engine update and was unable to get our work back. We are working on solving this - Icons on desktop still render as console icons.... specifically xbox icons. We need to implement a way to dynamically swap these things
Bugfixes: - Fixed bugs with the new trees not playing well with our new islands - Fixed navmesh/AI bugs with the new island layout - Fixed issues with voxelotl "teleporting" large distances when placed on the navmesh or given items - Fixed many food bugs with trees and "quantum fruit entanglement" - Made all audio 3D instead of 2D - Fixed some pretty nasty framerate issues. Things will be faster now! - Fixed a few bugs with the creature select screen and rendertextures. Voxelotl don't appear as floating eyeballs now.
That's it for changes to the current playtest build, however we wanted to give you a better idea of what our future might look like.
What's on the way? - Fullscreen/windowed support from the options menu - An improved experience for training your friends (stay tuned for updates!) - Physical and contextual (diagetic) user interface! We are adding shops for everything you need that you walk up to instead of opening a 2D overlay. We feel that this is more immersive - Polish on remaining UI across the application - An improved racing experience - More voxelotl styles (eyes, mouths, skins, voices) - A sound pass to add in natural environment sounds and proper vocals and sound effects. Things need to sound adorable too, you know? - A follow feature where you can request that your voxelotl follow you by whistling at them. They will form an adorable line line an old school RPG. - Nice cinematic camera angles to show off the garden on entry (skippable after first time) - Ummm.... so we're adding poop? Yep. Never thought i'd say that in my lifetime... - We're adding weeds so that you can spend your time grooming the garden. Possibly for profit? - Big events such as mating, hatching an egg, or retirement have even higher chances of being missed with the new perspective. We want to draw your proper attention using cut scenes! - An entirely new minigame for testing the skills of your voxelotl! This is another topic you should stay tuned for.
What's on the chopping block if we run out of resources? - Local co-op - Online co-op - Garden decoration framework - Mobile companion app for taking your friends on quests and doing basic interactions. Yes... it's like the memory card thing...
Community Playtest 1 | Dec 10 - Feb 01
Details
We have made the decision that mobile support was too restricting and we are setting mobile aside for now and focusing on Desktop and Console development.
With the constraints of mobile out of the way, we are able to bring in a lot more power and some unique controls.
We are moving to a third-person camera with the idea that it is more immersive and will make you feel closer to your tiny friends!
The garden also got a pretty hefty revamp as well.
Basically, just run about and play the game and if you find something odd just hit F1 to open an in-game reporting tool and send us what you got!
How to sign up
On Dec 10 the store page will have a button available that allows you to join the playtest. Simply click that button to get access!
Known Issues
- There's a weird floating UI that appears when you feed or pick up voxelotl. This is being removed soon. - One of the bridges seems to not be working properly... we should fix that! - Controls are still being worked on transitioning from touch controls. For now, the controls are a slight bit sloppy but we are clearing this up right away! - The floor in the races has gone missing.... of course that would happen when we make builds... - The loading screens are slow enough that you see bits of levels during the loading process. We can tighten that up as well
