Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy news & patch notes

Welcome to our latest devlog for our open source fantasy point and click game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

As always, this is more of a quick overview of key changes we've made since our last devlog, so let us know if there is anything you want us to take a deeper dive on or if you have any questions.

In today's devlog, we'll talk about some of our new characters, updates to our contacts system, implementing achievements, map updates, and some other refinements.

So let's dive right in.

New Characters

We've had placeholders for some more characters in the game for a while, but we've finally got them all in with their proper art and animations.

Here you can see Billy, just chilling on the town fountain, eating his popcorn.

And here is his older sister Tilly, too, showing off her magic wand.

We've also added in Ahri, our cheery but busy diner owner.

We have more characters implemented too, but we think it'd be best to leave those as a surprise for the final game.

The characters and animations bring a lot more life to each scene, but what we're most enthused by is the personality each one will have when you meet them on your quest.

Contact Updates

To further emphasize the characters, we wanted to expand on our simple notebook contacts to allow each character to have a few fun facts you can learn about them.

So we updated the notebook contacts and the styling to better support this, and you can see us here unlocking a new fact, getting the new toast message, and opening up the book to check it out.

We really liked the new style changes here, and decided to bring those to the rest of the notebook too.

So here you can see the new style for cases.

And sketches.

And our save stats, and other stats too.

We even updated our licenses and credits scene.

Achievements

As part of refining the notebook, we decided it was time to add the achievements section.

So you can now see your earned achievements directly in the notebook.

We also wanted to setup for integrating achievements on Steam. Luckily there is the GodotSteam add-on to make this as easy as possible.

GodotSteam didn't only help us with the integration of achievements, but also with other integrations such as opening the store page from our demo.

To do this as cleanly as we can, we made a steamworks file which handles using the GodotSteam plugin, and an integrations file that wraps that and any other potential integrations. Then our code throughout the project doesn't need to know anything about what integrations are being used, or if they even are.

Map Updates

We also wanted to finalize the notebook map. So you can see here that we have updated icons for both the village square, and the meadows, and also added cleaner buttons for waiting or ending your current day which better match the existing styles of the notebook.

Other Refinements

Lastly, we just wanted to mention a few more brief refinements to help smooth out Aster's journey.

We wanted to be sure it was always easy to see characters in any scene, as they often move around at different times of day. So we update the character shader to keep them bright at night. Even if it's potentially less realistic, it helps them be a lot more visible, which is important for players.

We've also setup an initial pass at a new travel information system, which shows you what time of day it is and where you are when you arrive at a new location, to help keep people clear on their progress through the time loop.

There is still some animation work and edge cases to sort out, but we think it looks pretty good so far.

Having big things like the characters, notebook polish, and steam integration in are all a big relief at this point. It can be hard to know how well you're on track in game dev when there are so many unknowns at various points in the project. But that also means it feels particularly good each time you knock another one off the list.

Is there anything from our devlog you'd like us to take a deeper dive on?

Let us know in the comments!

Until next time, keep creating good.

Welcome to our latest devlog for our open source fantasy point and click game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

As always, this is more of a quick overview of key changes we've made since our last devlog, so let us know if there is anything you want us to take a deeper dive on or if you have any questions.

In today's devlog, we'll talk about more support for user translations, a bunch of new areas, an initial stats manager, some more settings work, and some improvements to the feel of our conversations.

So let's dive right in.

Supporting User Translations

At this point, we don't have the budget to get the game translated to any other languages ourselves, especially with the complexities around open sourcing any work that would be contracted by us. So we set out to make the locale dropdown more dynamic. From the core game side, we made it so that the locale list was populated dynamically from the user translations added in Godot, so if a translation is added to the project, it will automatically show up in this dropdown.

But we also wanted to support end users without Godot experience being able to create or use their own translation files, so we added support for custom user translation files, where they can be dropped into a folder, and loaded into the game that way. To support this, we implemented buttons to open that folder and to refresh the list, right next to the dropdown.

New Areas

Our big focus at the moment is trying to set up to work on the flow of the rest of the game. A big part of that is setting up the areas and interactables for each scene that we can start to work with. So we'd like to quickly go through all of the new areas we've made since our last devlog, starting with the outside of Ezorick's house.

As a part of this work, we also added support for 3 times of day, including evening, which meant adding in support for lighting.

We were able to utilize CanvasModulate nodes in Godot to add this, though it did require some minor changes to our outline shader to avoid the outline being darker as well. We may still touch this up a bit but so far we think it looks pretty good!

We also added this scene of the well located near Ezorick's house.

And the main Village Square.

Here is a first look at the village's "diner" from the outside.

And we even completed the three scenes comprising the front,

back,

and office of the diner.

For the outskirts of the town, we added in some meadows.

A tiny home of one of our more reclusive characters.

Including their backyard.

And a cute little storage space.

To wrap up the new areas, we have a street with a few houses.

And the backyard of the main house there.

In addition to these new areas, we also updated the Bureau Server Room to have dynamic lighting as well.

In many of these locations, you will be able to turn off the lights.

This covers the majority of the areas that will be in the final game now. It's really exciting to see them all finally coming to life.

Initial Stats Manager

Alongside the playtime statistics, we wanted to track a few more stats like the number of interactions you've performed so that we could give you achievements based on those numbers. So we created a new stat manager to track these or anything else that may be interesting to the player in the future, which you can now see in the notebook as well.

For clarity, these are only ever used locally for showing the player and triggering achievements, and are not for analytics or anything like that.

More Settings Work

We had a few more items we wanted to add or clean up in our settings as well.

For one, to fix a few issues before the demo release, we had hard coded a max FPS value to 60 FPS, but have now added this as a user configurable value. We don't know why you'd play a pixel art point and click game at 144 FPS, but you do you.

Another change was that if you delete your save game, we added a new confirmation message to be clear your file was deleted. It wasn't necessarily clear before that the deletion had occurred when we just returned you to the original view with no confirmation.

We also added a setting where you can change which of your displays the game will run on, if you have multiple.

And if you change the display or your resolution, you now get this confirmation panel asking you to confirm your settings, which will automatically revert if you do not confirm the change before the countdown.

We recently added public TODO and ISSUES markdown files to our repository, so you can see some potential future work (though mind the spoilers).

Also, you can submit issues to us directly on our Codeberg!

We recently received and fixed an issue where the toggle buttons in our setting were not very clear on which state was active.

Here you can see the change, where it is much clearer what the state of each toggle button is.

Improved Conversation Feel

For conversation feel, we added that we can display "unknown names" for people Aster hasn't yet met or been introduced to. So you can see here, when she first meets Ezorick, we can show the name as "Ezorick, probably?"

You might also notice that the sprites displayed during conversations can now blink. This seems like it would have been a simple change as we already had blinking animations for our characters, but actually, it was a bit more tricky. The issue was that these are TextureRects in the UI, not sprites, so there is no way to just animate them in the same way as an AnimatedSprite2D.

Luckily, there was a helpful tutorial by a user named "Chevifier" on Youtube which we were able to base a custom AnimatedTextureRect:

"Godot Animated Texture Rect Tutorial" tutorial by Chevifier

But the gist of the AnimatedTextureRect is to take in the necessary information for an animation, such as the sprite frames, and then just swap out the texture whenever a new frame should be shown.

Regardless, we think the result brings a lot more life to our simple conversation system!

We're happy to have created so many of the necessary environments and for getting some other important polish in this time. We're looking forward to continuing the work on building out the remaining content to fill out the core game flow.

Is there anything from our devlog you'd like us to take a deeper dive on?

Let us know in the comments!

Until next time, keep creating good.

Welcome to our latest devlog for our fantasy point and click game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

As always, this is more of a quick overview of key changes we've made since our last devlog, so let us know if there is anything you want us to take a deeper dive on or if you have any questions.

This devlog covers everything leading up to the release of our demo! It was included in the February 2026 Steam Next Fest, but is still available on Steam.

So you can go play it now!

In today's devlog, we'll talk about the sketches you'll be able to collect on your journey, updated contacts with photos, an updated brainstorm system, the first unlockable location on the map, and lots of other smaller changes and fixes.

So let's dive right in.

Sketches/Collectibles

We'd already implemented that you could "collect" information on certain plants behind the scenes when interacting with them, but now you can view the sketches you've collected in Aster's notebook. We tried to blend pixel art with a sketched look and are pretty happy with the results. Try to collect all the sketches in the full game!

Updated Contacts

Similar to the sketches, we had that you could learn about the people you interact with as you go, which is also now reflected in the notebook. This includes a dashing photograph for each contact as well! For now, each contact has a quick line about them, but in the full game, we want you to learn a few simple things about each contact as you interact more with them and the world.

Updated Brainstorm System

We had a rudimentary knowledge/clue system where you could see what you've learned for your cases, and could combine two pieces of knowledge to "brainstorm" something new. But our previous attempt was very stiff, and we wanted to provide more information on some thoughts from Aster about each clue, and the ability to provide some additional dialogue for context when clues did get combined.

So now if you hover or have your cursor on a clue, you get a little more information in the bottom right. In terms of feel, as you click on clues, we use tweens to animate the movement dynamically.

We can shake clues if you've got the wrong idea or already combined those clues before. We also have that new clues get written out, before they transition over to your clues list. And we have a dialogue panel we can use specifically for this brainstorm text, without affecting the regular dialogue panel which you may have open in the background if you paused during a conversation.

Here is an example of the code for the movement tweening. We can set up a function on our knowledge button such as "move" which takes a destination. Then when we need to move a knowledge button in the knowledge panel, we can simply call its .move function and pass in the destination.

We also expose the tween's finished signal so we can call a follow up function when the movement is completed.

We definitely see us using tweens more in the future now that we've got a better feel for them!

First Map Location

As you explore the village of E'erpath, you'll be able to use Aster's map to navigate to different areas. We added the first area into the map, which will take you to Ezorick's house. So if you were wondering what his house looks like, now you have a bit of an idea! New locations will show up on the map once Aster learns about them, and if you highlight an area you can see it also uses the outline system for a clear indication of what is selected.

Other Small Improvements & Fixes

We mentioned before that the old Bureau server room screen saver didn't look very smooth in the pixel art style and that we'd like to redo it.

We ended up going with a fade in and out style you can see here, which definitely feels a lot less jarring!

Did we need a screen saver that shows up for a few seconds before you touch the mouse and then never see it again? Yes, obviously, for the whimsy.

We also renamed our glyph types to avoid any potential trademark related issues. To make this more clear, we added a nice preview showing some of the more distinct or important controls.

And on the note of glyphs, we also updated the tutorial glyphs for easier readability with a new shadow and filled in interiors.

We also updated the styles on our dialogue boxes and inventory to feel a little more unique and less off the shelf. And when you get a new item, we now play a little shakey-shake animation to help draw your eye to the new item!

We continued work on other visuals like a new animation of Aster getting up off the ground, as well.

Why was she on the ground? Find out in the demo!

Just do us a favour and make sure you don't look at this specific frame of the animation.

Hey, what did we just say!

. . . It's not a horror game, we promise.

---

Phew, that was a lot of small things, but the small touches are what can make a good game into a great game!

It was a lot of work to get the demo out in time for Steam Next Fest, but we're happy we got it across the line in time.

Now that we have the demo out, we can tackle some structural issues and really drive forward on finishing off the flow for the rest of the game going forward.

Is there anything from our devlog you'd like us to take a deeper dive on?

Let us know in the comments!

Until next time, keep creating good.

Welcome to our latest devlog for our open source fantasy point and click game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

We fell a little behind on our devlogs as we recently pivoted to working on getting our Steam page live. Luckily, that's done and our page is now available.

Since we're a little behind, we're going to cover things at a bit of a higher level today, so let us know if there is anything you want us to take a deeper dive on or if you have any questions.

Today, we'll talk about some new environments, a pass of UI refinements, new puzzle mechanics, more controller support work, dialogue system improvements, our new main menu, our initial save system, and some other small but important improvements.

So let's dive in.

New Environments

This is the village entrance. This will be the first area you see after leaving the Bureau, so we wanted to be sure it was bright and welcoming, but also gave some hints as to what you might expect from the village through the subtle silhouettes in the background.

We also added a new introductory scene for the game, with Aster making a stop at her local library on the way to her first day at the Bureau. This will give us an opportunity to introduce Aster and give a bit more context for the story, and also, libraries are super cool.

One last environment to show today is Ezorick's house, and also Ezorick himself. Look at that show off.

UI Refinements

For a while, we were using temporary UI for our in game menus, and things like licenses and credits.

We've updated this now to be a notebook themed UI, using things such as sticky notes to navigate between sections.

For things like licenses and credits which aren't in the pause menu, we added a nice wooden table backdrop as well.

We also updated the top UI to give it a more unique feel. We updated the styles of our toast messages, and moved them into the bottom left. By default, toast messages will close after a set time. When this setting is enabled, you can see a masked progress bar is used to show how much time is left.

Toasts can also be clicked, to jump to the relevant section of the notebook.

New Puzzle Mechanics

We've added our first puzzle in, where Aster needs to repair a sticky note to learn a password. It was interesting to figure out a good mechanism for drag and dropping, and snapping pieces into place.

The code for this can be seen here, but basically we just had a list of pieces and target nodes for where we wanted the piece placed, and if the piece is dropped when closer than some distance limit to that target, we snap it into place and increment a correct pieces count.

For a more casual game like this, we also want to be sure everyone can enjoy it even if they are just here for the story and characters, so you are able to skip the puzzle entirely if you so choose.

We want Aster to be able to collect clues and combine them together to come up with new insights, so we added an initial system to facilitate that.

We still need to update this to give better feedback on creating new clues, and also add the ability to review hints about current clues.

Better Controller Support

We continued to work on making the game playable using a controller. We added a new pointer which we use whenever you are navigating menu items with a controller. We also switched to a fully virtual cursor, rather than relying on code moving your real cursor around, to better support some environments such as Wayland.

We also updated this so you can now move the cursor around and trigger clicks with the keyboard, so you could play the entire game without a mouse if you wanted.

The "next" button in dialogues was updated to show the correct icon based on your given controller or selected glyph type as well.

Improvements to Dialogue

We've continued work to try to make creating dialogue a lot simpler, having refactored it entirely at this point. This means a bunch of new helper functions, such as create_monologue, create_dialogue, create_message_branch, and more.

We also simplified a lot of things, by creating "libraries" that we can pull data from, such as an item library, so we don't need to remember any plain text IDs when working in conversations.

Ideally, it should be straightforward to both read and create dialogue for the game, and we've gotten a lot closer to that goal than what we had before.

We added the option to automatically progress dialogue a few moments after it has been spoken. But you can also now click the dialogue box to progress dialogue too. The first click or button press will complete the message if it is still being spoken, though, to ensure lines are not accidentally skipped.

We updated the dialogue border to match the speaker colour by default, which can be disabled, and also added an option to have the full text match the colour of the speaker as well.

We also updated so that options you've picked previously will be greyed out, to make it easier to know which dialogue you have already explored.

New Main Menu

We've also gotten around to setting up our main menu for the game.

You'll notice the background shows the latest area you were in when playing the game, but we've also got new title text, and our studio icon to link out to our site. We think it looks a lot better now.

Initial Save System

We have implemented the initial saving and loading system for Aster Pebble as well.

The main things to note on this are:

Welcome to our third devlog for our open source pixel art game, Aster Pebble and the Case of Bad Bureaucracy.

We're continuing our focus on trying to get to a playable slice of our point and click game.

So today, we'll talk about some new animation work, further improvements to our conversation system, reactive cursors and initial controller support, and a few other extra bits.

So let's dive right in.

Animations

No? That's not one of your new idle animations? That's okay.

With a point and click game, we wanted to be sure that our scenes still felt full of life, even when staying on one screen for a little while. So we want to be sure our characters each have some idle animations, along with any environmental animations we do.

To make these feel more alive, we give each character a list of their available idle animations, and play them at random, with a random wait time afterwards.

Things weren't always this smooth though, as we originally had each animation on its own sprite sheet.

And in this case, our outline shader needs to know how many frames are in a given sprite sheet.

For now, rather than update the parameters each time we change animations, we just switched to a combined sprite sheet per character. Sorry about that, Aster.

We also did some animations just with the animation player, such as this blinking cursor, and this sleeping computer LED.

We also did a code based animation for a screen saver of sorts, but smooth movement at slow speeds for pixel art doesn't really work out, meaning we end up with a choppy result. So we'll likely leave this one out, and do something that better plays to the pixel art aesthetic.

Conversations

With conversations being tied to a given item or individual, we made a new action and proof of concept to have one conversation be able to lead into another.

We also finished up showing the correct characters on each side of the conversation, but also in fading out the characters if they aren't the current speaker.

This also meant conversations owning this for now, so they can dictate which side each character is on based on the context of the given conversation.

We also wanted to update our "message" system to be able to use requirements in the same way that our "option" system can. But this was unique for messages, as rather than just not displaying, like what happens with options, we needed to track which message to fall back to, if a message shouldn't be played.

We also took this time to create a constructor for our messages to be more sensible and in line with our other data types.

Cursors and Controllers

Although this is a point and click, we still want to support controllers, to give players that option.

We also wanted to support different cursors for different contexts, to help give the player more information on their potential actions.

Cursor Pixel Pack:

https://kenney.nl/assets/cursor-pixel-pack

We meet again, CC0.

So we setup some cursors, with a reduced outline, from Kenney's CC0 Pixel Cursor Pack and had a cursor follow our mouse around.

We set it so different interactables could show different cursors when they are hovered over for nice visual feedback.

We also setup the cursor script to try to track if the user is using a mouse, or a controller, and to update the mouse position if a controller is being used.

This still needs some work. Currently, when you're using a controller to navigate buttons and other UI elements, the virtual cursor will continue to move around and we don't want that. But this is a problem for later.

Extra Bits

To wrap up today we have a couple extra bits which didn't really fit any of the other categories.

We want users to be able to change as many settings as possible while in game, rather than forcing them to go back to the main menu. This is especially true for accessibility settings.

We usually have our settings as a separate scene, but did some work to get it added into a panel you can open during gameplay. There were some struggles due to this UI not accepting input while paused by default, and having an inner canvas layer which wouldn't follow its parent being hidden or shown. And we needed to add a new event to emit when the outline colours needed recalculated. But this makes it just a little easier for our players which is always a win.

Lastly, we added our initial license and credits scenes to the game, copied from an old project but with updated credits. As users and contributors to the open source space, we know it wouldn't be right to not have this in place before we make any builds.

And that's it for our third devlog!

Our game continues to feel more game like, and we're hopefully on our way to being able to make a test build in the somewhat near future.

Until next time, keep creating good.