Crunch Time - Devlog #9

Been a bit quiet recently, but if you missed it, we announced the game's release day the other week - 4th June! You can check out the release date trailer here:

So a lot has happened to get us from the last devlog to here - so much that I think it's best to split this out into two devlogs, otherwise I don't think I'll be able to handle writing it all!

CHILLI ISLAND

So back in February I was still working through level designs - I needed to pretty much have all levels finished for the end of March, because I had a deadline to give all the localisation to Warlocs for the end of March. Without designing the levels I wouldn't actually know all the text I needed, I could probably guess but there would of definitely been stuff missed.

Chilli Island is the third main island of the game, and the difficulty starts to ramp up a lot more now. We introduce infusion (changing pools of liquids into new ones by adding ingredients), fiery foods (super hot foods that need to be kept away from dairy of they curdle), pepta dismal (special pink goop that beasts need to eat fiery foods), food poisoning (raw meat status that spreads to foods and makes beasts reject it) and allergens (like food poisoning but spreads through machines too...)

Up until this point there's not been too much to worry about with your ingredients - sure overpowering ingredients need you to be cautious, but worst case it absorbs an ingredient until you notice. With food poisoning and allergens you can now cause big spreading issues in your kitchens, and have to actually handle them with care unless you fancy dismantling a whole bunch of your nut infested gubbins. I also added a new type of cooking here, steaming, which uses the steam from super hot liquid pipes to slowly steam ingredients as they travel in item pipes.

We're also getting towards the main story reveal in this island, so I wanted it all to feel quite imposing, which I think came out nicely in the level design - large imposing factories and big dry deserts filled with boiling oil pools.

The final levels of this island have you learn some important story stuff - without spoilers there's something you need to do, and to do it you have to go to the old ruined Capital, the 4th island of the game.

THE CAPITAL

The Capital was a fun area to design - at the end of Chilli Island you now have 3 upgraded machines, one to massively increase fluid pumping, one for power, and one for overclocking machines to get double the speed. I wanted to not only let you play with all these new tools but also have a couple levels where you're nerfed and can't use any of them, instead being stuck with the basics.

A lot of the Capital areas are very restricted and very 'worn down', so it makes for some awkward placements. No nice neat factories here! It's a good learning curve for the player I think, and also a chance to learn that sometimes things can be 'good enough' if they work, you don't need to make everything perfect.

The Capital itself doesn't neccessarily introduce new mechanics, but it does show you some stuff that you've been able to do the whole time - you just probably haven't considered them before. It culminates in an absolute bastard of a level, W4-2, which I feel will cause many strongly worded letters to be sent to me...

After tackling the gauntlet, there's a fun break - the player has to make an important story gubbin, so we get to do some actual factory game style manufacturing - making machines instead of food. Then there's some other little side levels that are more puzzle focused, plus some level revisiting to prepare the player for the final 'boss' level of the game. I won't go into details but it's a big ol' level, and a nice way to 'end' the game!

Around this time I also changed one of the utilities - display panels. Originally you could make them in fabricators but I found basically no one used them (all they did was display an item you placed on it). Instead I merged them into the sign placement in the blueprint tool, and added a new display for wetworks and networks so players could easily see fluid + power details without hovering over any wires or pipes.

After the player beats the final level of the game and roll credits, they have a couple new things unlocked! First is "Second Helpings", a special mode that allows you to revisit levels with modified rules and higher rates - but I didn't need much text for this so I just wrote what was needed and left actually designing the mechanics until later on, I was still on a deadline after all!

The second is the post-game dessert island, which is just straight up and entire other island as big as the other main islands!

DESSERT ISLAND

Doing desserts was always on my list of things I wanted to do - I felt like the second helpings were fun but I still wanted some more levels, and dessert after beating the game felt like an obvious thing that needed to be done.

With desserts I had some new mechanics I wanted to introduce - freezing, which like steaming applies over time, but using coolers to slowly cool an ingredient into a frozen form, such as cream => ice-cream. Once frozen, frozen ingredients have to stay frozen or they turn into mush, essentially a 1s shelf-life. There was also drizzling liquids (for cakes/toppings/ice cream flavours) which requires the ingredients to be on conveyor belts.

I won't talk too much about some of the fun levels here as there's a few unique ones and I want them all to be a nice surprise, but safe to say there's a lot to get stuck into even after you think you've beaten the game - and when you finish dessert island there's some more 'Second Helpings' plus an infinite level...

At this point it was the end of March, I'd done all the levels and me and Jamie were now furiously going over every line of dialogue and checking we had everything sorted ready to submit to be localised. Thanks to that deadline I'd been working pretty full on for the entire first 3 months of 2026, including weekends and evenings - but because of it I'd now designed every single level in the game which was like 80% of the entire game...

In an ideal world I would of been able to spread out the workload across the entire 6 months, but because of needing the levels done for all the dialogue it meant I could now have a reasonably 'chill' 3 months finishing everything off...

DRAWING TIME

There was a lot of drawing I had to do - every beast and every dinner have their book entries with the higher res images, the backgrounds for each world, some of the levels were more important story-wise and needing decoration.

For the dinners I had managed to do a bunch of them as I made the levels, so I didn't have many left to draw afterwards which was nice as that was the one I was dreading the most as I found them very hard to draw. I think because they're all real-life things that exist it was easier to look 'wrong' vs something like a funky blob beast that doesn't exist IRL.

I also wanted to add NPC emotions - I'd planned for certain lines to have different npc profiles for funny or serious moments, I just hadn't actually got round to drawing them as I felt it'd end up being a lot of work. But after playing with Orguste for a little while and some small expression changes I found I didn't need much for something fun and so ended up being able to get all the emotions drawn pretty quickly. Mapping the lines to specific emotions however took like 3x the time...

I also finally got round to doing some set dressing stuff for a few locations, like the Witchelin Hut which most playtesters had been used to seeing as an empty room with a single bookcase that said 'TODO' on it. Some 'levels' are just places to further the story and chat to an NPC so I wanted them to feel a bit more lived in and interesting, vs the actual game levels which don't really need that level of detail.

NICE-TO-HAVES

Coming up towards the end of April I had a few last big jobs left: - a bunch of small qol nice-to-have things (a lot of them) - gamepad/controller support and control remapping - steamdeck support - all the music for each world to replace the old demo music

We knew we were going to do a new demo release in May, so I set aside the gamepad/steamdeck stuff for that and tried to work through a lot of the quality of life stuff. My reasoning was that gamepad/steamdeck would be a nice bonus for the new demo if I had time, whereas I felt a lot of the QoL stuff would make the demo overall better and all be stuff people would probably suggest anyway.

I won't bother going into detail with all of them, but one example is the 'overlay' mode, which can be toggled with tab to show extra info.

It adds a grid overlay, makes ingredients in pipes clearer and shows their stack count, and adds small UI panels to every single machine to summarise the main infomation you need for it without having to open the machine or hover over it. There was a lot of things like this that came from playtesting and it's all stuff I think makes the game better so it'd be better to have in the demo to really make people enjoy it as much as possible.

Other stuff included: - copy/paste machines - more shortcut keys - middle-click selection for equipped item - 'photo' / free-camera mode - smarter automatic input/output setting - placing pipes with direction pre-set

With that done it brought me to the end of April, which is where I'll stop now to give your poor eyes a rest. At this point I was around 95% done I'd say with actual functionality but more like 85% done with coding, as the gamepad stuff was going to need a lot of work, and then there were lots of little random todo's that are more work than you'd expect like 'add achievements' or 'add modding' lol.

Spoilers for next devlog but I did actually manage to do it all, and you can check out all the fun qol stuff or gamepad support in the new demo right now!

~ Ell