The Village Demo for Adventure X
Wow, that escalated quickly.
In the last devlog I was calmly talking about the Blacksmith and her forge. One character, one scene, a reasonable plan. Very professional. Very naive.
Because the real target was a playable demo slice for AdventureX, and by May 21 I had to stop endlessly improving things and actually upload a build.
So this time I’ll try to talk mostly about what is inside the demo from the player’s side. And for fellow devs, or anyone who enjoys production pain, I added little Developer’s Cut blocks under the sections.
What’s in the demo
First of all: it’s not the full game. It’s one slice of the village - enough to meet Zoti, rescue the Goose, poke at a couple of puzzles, and talk to one very busy Blacksmith.
- A main menu - so it feels like a real game from the first click
- Zoti’s opening - she wakes up, falls into trouble, and the story begins
- Freeing the Goose - your sidekick is stuck, and you need to help
- The well - a rope puzzle, a bucket, and water to fetch
- The water tower - a separate spot entirely: ladders, height, and rotten planks
- A long talk with the Blacksmith - errands, opinions, and forge noise
- A demo end card - so you know where the slice stops
Developer's Cut
Originally I thought I would finish the Blacksmith, polish the forge, and move on. What actually happened: most of the work went into Village, plus a new MainMenu scene, a demo-end screen, music, build settings, and a lot of Adventure Creator action lists to make the slice playable from start to finish. Classic.
Main menu
The build no longer drops you straight into a random Unity scene. It starts with a real main menu: background, logo, main characters and the interactive menu - all the fancy things that say “yes, this is supposed to be a game.”
Developer's Cut
This also forced me to finally add an app icon and proper scene flow. The menu got its own scene, its own illustrated assets, play/quit controls, and a build path into the village scene. Tiny polish things, but they matter a lot when you send a build to someone who is not you.
Zoti’s opening and fall
Zoti does not enter the demo gracefully. Obviously.
She wakes up in the village - dead again, unreasonably optimistic as always - and almost immediately falls into trouble. I wanted the first seconds to feel like a proper little scene, not just “camera fades in, now click something.”
Developer's Cut
Most of the work here was sequencing: disabling player control, running the fall animation, syncing the camera, firing the landing/reaction beat, then returning control without it feeling like the scene just snapped awake. Nothing technically wild, but very easy to make flat if the timing is off by even a little.
Freeing the Goose
Remember the Goose from earlier devlogs? Honk, Pack, Pick, all that extremely serious gameplay design?
In this demo the Goose starts stuck, because apparently even sidekicks need an introduction quest. Before it can help, you need to help it first. Only then do the Goose actions start making sense in the actual flow, not just as funny buttons in a trailer.
Developer's Cut
The Goose needed two states: stuck and free. That meant a separate GooseStuck Spine setup, the regular Goose rig, and a custom Adventure Creator action to swap the active skeleton during the scene. Ideally players never think about this. Which, of course, means it took time.
The well
The well is the more puzzle-ish part of the slice.
You untangle rope knots, lower the bucket, and finally get water - with the Goose helping once it’s free. I made the first version of this puzzle while working on the announcement trailer, but for the demo it had to stop being a prototype and become an actual story beat.
Developer's Cut
The well is actually two different technical beasts. Day-to-day use runs on a separate Spine object - WellMechanism - with its own skeleton and animator, so the crank, bucket, and rope can play without fighting the village background art.
So: evacuate the crowd, switch to the overlay animation, then go back to the normal well state. Simple from the player's side. Three systems from mine.
The water tower
The water tower is its own hotspot: height, rotten planks, and Zoti trying very hard to convince herself that climbing is fine.
Developer's Cut
Climbing is mostly Zoti animation work: dedicated ClimbWaterTower / FallWaterTower clips in her 2D controller, triggered from Adventure Creator when you use the tower. Before the climb starts, an action switches her footstep ground type.
The scary planks are physics objects: each has a HingeJoint2D anchored on a nail point and a Rigidbody2D, so broken boards actually swing instead of just wobbling in a fake animation. When a plank is supposed to give way, a small PlankDrop script flips it from kinematic to dynamic and lets gravity finish the job.
There's also a dedicated WaterTowerCamera for the climb view, plus the usual pile of fail/success dialogue branches when Zoti chickens out or falls. Visually simple. Technically three systems holding hands.
The Blacksmith
The Blacksmith from the last devlog became the anchor of the whole slice.
She is not just hammering in the background anymore. She talks, sends you on errands, reacts to your very questionable plans, and generally behaves like the only responsible adult in the area. Which is impressive, considering she’s a zombie.
Her forge is a real place now too: fire, bangs, bucket drops, and plenty of things to poke at.
Green skin, silver ponytail, leather apron - and a lot of opinions about your choices. She is basically running the village’s to-do list, whether Zoti asked for one or not.
Developer's Cut
The trailer had a handful of voiced lines. The demo has around seventy-five, many with VILLAGE_* IDs. At that point manual naming becomes a trap, so I made editor tools to export Adventure Creator speech lines without IDs to CSV, fix them in a spreadsheet, and apply them back. Then each line needs localization CSV data, VO files, and Rhubarb lip-sync JSON to resolve correctly at runtime. Before: chaos. After: exportable chaos.
Where the demo ends
When the slice is over, it actually ends. Revolutionary, I know.
There is a clear demo end card instead of a sudden drop into unfinished content. Village music carries through, so the whole thing should feel like a small opening chapter rather than a scene that simply ran out of road.
Developer's Cut
This is the boring edge of demo work: music in the right scene, build profile, main-menu-to-village flow, end card trigger, and making sure the player cannot accidentally walk into unfinished content. I also added a small profiler capture dump utility near the end, because deadline builds are when Unity suddenly decides to make you ask questions about frame time.
Submitted - and two weeks after
May 21: the build went up for AdventureX. I posted “I made it… 😮💨 Now - only hope and patience 🤞” and then mostly stared into space for a while.
Not everything after that felt like relief. Steam quietly removed a batch of wishlists - normal churn, but it still stung. And anyway, a week after that, I finally beat the 100-wishlists milestone, which is HUGE!
Then a small bright spot appeared: the first article about Sly Crow went up on Adventure Game Hotspot. The universe has a sense of balance, I guess.
Developer's Cut
Yes, I upgraded the entire Spine runtime to 4.3 during deadline week. Every character, the Blacksmith, Goose, Zoti, the well mechanism, the water tower assets - re-exported, scripts poked, panic managed. A few integrations needed small compatibility fixes, including a SpineLegacyExtensions helper. Probably the right long-term call. In the moment? Questionable life choice.
What’s next (for you)
I’m still aiming for a public demo more people can try - hopefully by autumn. AdventureX feedback will probably decide what catches fire first.
If you want to follow along or support the project early, wishlists still help a lot. Even after Steam eats some of them. =)
Thank you for being with me, and stay tuned!