Friedrich: Chapter 3 is now "complete" - i.e. it has a beginning and an end, more or less. And it became long enough that I want to break it up into two. For now this would be an internal change, affecting only the names of some variables. But in the release version it'd be cool if there were title cards, telling the player the current chapter. Other than writing quests I fixed a softlock in the first level (before that, a lever could close a door from the wrong side), and I added a little easter-egg: a dialogue for the painting in Odette's crypt (created by Ludwig Hanisch). Last but not least there's a new entry in our credits - our intern Hänno. During his two weeks at Rat King he invents and draws a new character for the game.
Jana: The German translation of the demo is ready and tested! Since our game is mostly written in English, it was a real treat to translate it into our native language. At the same time, it was interesting to see how much longer texts can become in German (it is known), and how some lines lose a bit of their punch compared to the English version. Alongside the localisation, I also made some minor changes, like adjusting the mysterious symbols in the demo/first level. Hopefully, they are now easier to distinguish from each other.
Patrick: The world of the inhabitants of level 4 is quite old. So old, in fact, that you can even find fossilized sea creatures embedded in the walls. Maybe I'll add a few real 3D models of such fossils to the level later on. We'll see. I've also added some 3D beams with ropes to the higher wooden walkways. Otherwise you might fall off, and that could end badly! And I've also crafted a few ghostly fossilized trees for the swamp. Slowly but surely, the swamp is taking on its muddy, beautiful form. Next to do are the swamp grass and vines.
Friedrich: I added an optional two-column layout for dialog choices - this improves two or three quests, and it was easy to implement. I like little stuff like this. Other than that it was the daily grind as usual: a bit more dialogs for a bit more quests. But I also play-tested the whole quest line of the third chapter (again) and noticed a lot of small bugs and inconsistencies, so things didn't progress as far as I would have liked. But at least the goblins have a toilet now. And I integrated the latest batch of sounds from our audio guy Florian. A forge is noisy, who would have thought?
Jana: Quite frankly, this week I didn't put in much into the game directly. Doing marketing, communications and planning sometimes feels so unproductive. Because of the German showcase and a bigger meetup of German developers, I thought about how to communicate our game better, about images, words, genres, similar games, etc. Pondering about where to submit the game (Steam festivals and such), analyzing what was good for us and what wasn't (and why!). Therefore, I started to work on the German localisation this Thursday. Something I should have done BEFORE we were in the German showcase… but you can only fight so many battles. So for me, this week sucked, but it was THE BEST whishlist-wise. Which is want you want as a marketing person.
Wishlists! Leaving out the y-axis on purpose - looks more magical this way.
Patrick: I structured the different areas of level 4 in Godot this week. I also started to try out some wall and floor textures. It will be a very muddy area. Oh, and I made a color palette that looks kinda dark but also very wholesome. :D
Apologies for not posting here more often - we really should get back to that. The truth is that we do not get much feedback here, so most of our game updates are currently posted on Discord, where we reach our small community directly, on the Steam forum and on IndieDB. But yeah, Discord, Steam and IndieDB are owned by other people, and this blog is actually ours. And it's also very long-lived now, which is pretty cool and it would be sad to let it die just because of convenience.
For a few months now we post weekly updates of Mops & Mobs. The basic idea was to let each team member (Jana, Patrick and myself) write a few sentences of what they achieved the last week and then collect that, add a screenshot, and post this small dev log on the game's Steam forum. As Jana created an IndieDB page for Mops & Mobs, it also made sense to use the articles section there for this (with the additional benefit of having a site to host the screenshots). And finally, just posting the updates on Discord was a no-brainer anyway. But of course feeding three different platforms is already a bit exhausting, and I'm not automating this in any way, so I didn't even think of this blog.
Still, a little update here is in order. This is what the latest entry of our dev log looks like (yes, it actually spans two weeks, because life got a bit into the way).
Dev log for the weeks from 26-05-25:
Friedrich: So this is another two-week devlog entry, because we had some off-time for a few days (no laptops during the weekend :O), and in the second week I got pretty sick. Still, I did some stuff. I gray-boxed the fourth level and did some more quest plans for it. Right now I try to make these plans more concrete, which somehow is more difficult than ever, probably because my own standards raised during the process. Other than that I added small bits to the levels, wrote dialogs, added a quest, and fixed a few bugs. One big change to our project was switching the extension of our dialog files - don't laugh, this was much more involved than it sounds, and it was necessary because I got very annoyed how Godot would always reformat the JSON dialogs and pollute our commits this way … Finally, I made sure that the demo will soon have an additional localisation. I hope next week I'll be back on track.
Jana: In preparation of gamescom I sent out some material for our group exhibition, followed by the pitch deck for potential publishers. Fingers crossed we eventually draw attention to a cool supportive publishing team. The other big task was planning: I'm working on the character arcs for two of our main monsters, Wyrmheimer the dragon and Odette the lich knight, while also creating a character with Friedrich (writing) and Johannes (art) who you'll meet in the later chapters. And who has quite the story AND look AND involvement – so agreeing on a look is quite the challenge.
Patrick: The only thing I made (modelled and textured) the first week was a mysterious stele. You need it to get into … a special room. That's all I can say. I was a bit down that week so I was going to make some 3D stuff at the weekend. Do you like digging through walls? If yes, then I made the perfect thing for you in the second week … a super heavy drilling machine! It rumbles, it puffs, and it'll soon be blazing its way into the depths of the dungeon… known as Level 4. :D I've also started working on this particular level. Friedrich created some cool level block-out for me, which I now have to fill in with nice looking 3D models.
Let's see if I can cater our official blog with the weekly dev log too. Would be nice. Oh, and there's a second AND third video now, with the fourth one coming soon:
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That's a lot of Mops & Mobs to digest, I guess. If this is TL;DR for you, just be assured that we're still working on the game, that we're still motivated, and that we hope to finish it this year. Which might be a tad too optimistic.
Mops & Mobs is growing - the demo, and the dungeon behind it. Much of that growth has happened in the shadows so far. Now it’s time to open the dungeon hallways: with our first dev log, we take you into the depths of development. How it all began, what changed along the way, and where the dungeon is heading: Welcome to the dungeon!
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