Friedrich: Apart from more improvements to the game's scripting language (which was renamed from gompl to slang.gd) I primarily worked on the "skeleton" main story by writing and scripting the most important quests. Which means the fifth chapter can now be completed, but it's missing a lot of dialogues, player tasks and puzzles on the side. Of course all this will be added later on, but at least Johannes proviced new graphics for the swamp characters and I already implemented them. On to the chapter VI and VII! Oh, and last week I forgot to mention that I also a new trailer for the Trailer Tuesday Show; so a few days ago I extended it a bit for another showcase. Everyone wants "exclusive" stuff, hmmph. The upcoming week is gamescom week, so the next devlog will probably be a bit late again.
Jana: Next week is gamescom, and I finished up some meetup schedules and pitches for the event. But I also managed to work on the temple level a bit more, where I replaced all the old textures to look similar to the dwarf fortress (Ha!) design Patrick already did - just some clicks with Friedrichs tool (yes to self-programmed tools!). The setting is not finished yet, the colour palette needs some retouches and the lighting is not right, but I’m happy of how the architecture turned out. In said temple you meet a group of exravagant people whose dialogues I wrote. For that I found a page that assists me with rhymes (rhymezone.com) – expect crap – and also a huge fun for localization later. But right now I enjoy writing them – heavily infused with watching „Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead“ (recommendation if you like Shakeperean nonsense).
Patrick: This week I worked on the cave where the big fortress is located and on the swamp grass, but that's not finished yet.
Don't forget, if you're interested in talking to us directly - about Mops & Mobs our something else - visit our Discord!
Friedrich: It's quite some time since our last "weekly" devlog, mostly because we were on vacation. Still, I continued writing characters for the main quest (chapter 5) a bit, but everything has a loose end for now. I also played through the last parts of the current plot line again, in order to do some recordings, and of course I noticed several script bugs and level imperfections that I tried to fix along the way. And the forge level finally has map descriptions! Moreover, during some free time I got the itch to add support for arrays to the scripting language (gompl) that we use in Mops & Mobs. They are never really needed for our level and dialog scripts, but during some more complex scripts I sometimes thought it would make sense to execute several dialog nodes in a dialog graph at once. Arrays would make this a bit easier.
Jana: We're in the home stretch for the story! We pushed through the final story points to get everything into place. There's still a wagonload of quests and lines to write, but we want to be able to play through the entire main story soon-ish. For now, it's mostly a rough skeleton to give us an idea of where we're heading by the end of the game. Then there's everything else that keeps me from actually working on the game: I put together a super-rough trailer for a really cool showcase — if they use it, that is, because I was already quite a bit past the deadline. And gamescom is coming up next week, so I also prepared some more meetings and materials for that.
Patrick: After over a week long vacation time I came back to the project and did some plumbing, which basically means I filled the open parts in the swamp level with walls and ceilings, finished the columns and ceilings of the swamp inhabitants' architecture and lighted the dark areas with flickering torches. I also started to put a new path into the level that connects the fortress and the huts so that we have now a way to enter the upper part of the swamp. The whole swamp level comes more and more together now. That's cool! The next phase would be polishing and shaping things here and there so that the quests in this level can shine.
Don't forget, if you're interested in talking to us directly - about Mops & Mobs our something else - visit our Discord!
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:
(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)
(YouTube videos try to set cookies and contact Third Party servers!)
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.
As some of you may already know we currently work on a new project, which was named "Morituri" for some time but has now the title Behind Stars and under Hills. Its prototype is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the MDM.
Behind Stars and under Hills will be a Dungeon Adventure with detective elements and animal people. It puts emphasis on story and atmosphere, on interaction with NPCs (dialogues) and exploration. While there probably will be fights (of low complexity), those won't be the main focus of the game. Instead, players have to find hidden ways and items, translate scriptures, talk to the inhabitants, trade with them, circumvent and/or find ways around dangers (like enemies and traps), and use the light by placing torches.
There are no real hard facts to announce yet (hopefully soon though), but we started a picture blog for the project, especially for the prototype we currently work on. You can find it here. We post everything visual, i.e. drawings, scribbles, animations and screenshots from the game and the level editor. Our intention is to link the blog whenever we post those pictures on Twitter or Facebook, so people don't see a single slice of the game only, but can inform themselves more about the look of the game instantly. It also makes it easier to follow the project as long as we don't have a dedicated website.
