Lower Crumbling: Dev Log

A proper name

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

“The Dragon's Cook” was only ever a working title. It said what the game is about, but it sounded like a picture book for bedtime, and it slipped out of your head the moment you closed the page.

So the game is now called Lower Crumbling, after the village where it all begins. The village sends someone up the mountain every spring and has stopped asking why. “The Dragon's Cook” stays on as the subtitle.

The chalkboard on the title screen got the new name painted on, with chipped letters like an old biscuit. The dragon in the chef's hat kept his spot.

The new title screen.

“No thinking involved”

Sun, 08 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The second playtest was kinder than the first, but it found the next weak spot. Too many problems were solved with one line of dialogue, and the hard ones mostly came down to handing someone a thing you could simply pick up somewhere. That is fetching, not thinking.

So every puzzle in the Prologue and Act 1 was checked against the old rules of the classic adventures, and most were rebuilt. Every puzzle now has to pass these:

Nothing opens with a single dialogue click, and nothing lying around is the answer as it is. Things you find are raw material: they need an idea, or need to become something else first.
The obvious attempt should fail, and the failure should tell you why.
What you need to know usually comes from someone else, somewhere else. Some conversations are small duels you can lose and try again.
Still fair: logical in hindsight, no dead ends, and the hint book will walk you there if you ask.

Act 1 grew along the way. The mountain has two new places and two new residents, both with a history that ties into the rest of the story.

A second rule came out of the same playtest: if something happens, you see it happen. No more Pim announcing “I open the gate” while nothing moves. Anything that can fall, swing, open, roll or disappear is now its own painted piece, set into the room, and it moves when you use it.

Around that:

A new interface. Menus, buttons, hint box and title now look like they hang on a kitchen wall, painted in the same style as the rooms, with a handwritten font. The inventory icons were all painted again to match.
Rooms with depth. Instead of a flat wall over an empty floor, the camera now stands inside the room and looks into a corner, with dark shapes in the foreground. The village market with the big tree is the reference every new painting has to match, so the style doesn't drift.
Crowds of people, not wallpaper. Background people are now separate little figures who idle, clap and cheer on their own.
No more floating heads. Some puppets had their heads hovering a little above their collars. A small checking tool now catches gaps and long necks before they reach the game.

And the next act exists, in rough form, playable from start to finish. Where it takes place stays a secret for now.

Puppets with knees

Sat, 07 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

None of us can animate by hand, so the characters are cut-out puppets: painted parts, pinned together, moved by code. The first version of Pim was a stiff cardboard figure that slid across the floor. Today he got proper joints: thighs, shins, feet, upper arms, forearms and three different hands. His feet stay on the ground while he walks, he crouches to pick things up and reaches out when he uses something.

Two lessons from the day:

Cut-out arms look fine from the side and terrible from the front. From the front or back, a character now gets a whole painted body per pose. When we tried jointed arms on the Town Hall clerk, they looked like a string of meatballs.
For the big scenes, paint the whole group as one picture first, then cut the puppet parts from that. The departure from the village came together this way: a cart, a donkey with opinions, and a farewell crowd that is a little too cheerful.

The rooms also grew. Every background is now a full 1280 × 720 painting, with the inventory sliding up from the bottom edge only when you need it.

“Charming, but ten minutes long”

Fri, 06 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The first full playtest of the Prologue and Act 1 took about ten minutes. The verdict: lovely, but far too thin. Most puzzles were one step: give item to person, done.

So we tore it open. The new rules:

About two hours for the Prologue and Act 1 together on a first playthrough.
Puzzles chain. Most need several steps and several people, and the threads cross each other.
“Fair but chewy”: logical in hindsight, sometimes worth a think. The hint book got rewritten so its last hint for each task nearly tells you what to do.
Conversations work the old-fashioned way: options change as things happen, used-up topics disappear, and people notice what you've been up to.

The village grew from five rooms to seven, the mountain from a handful to eight. Every room got repainted denser and stranger, with lots of things to look at that have nothing to do with any puzzle and are there only for a joke.

The kitchen is open

Thu, 05 Nov 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Day one. The idea: a point-and-click adventure in the spirit of the old greats, with the tone of a comic fantasy novel, but entirely our own world. A dishwasher who has memorised fourteen volumes of cookery and never boiled an egg. A dragon who can't taste. A kingdom where cooking without a licence is a crime.

Some decisions we made early:

Godot 4, with a small engine of our own instead of a framework.
Modern controls: one click to act, one to look, no verb bar.
English first. A German version will come later, with the jokes rewritten, not translated.
The game never kills you and never locks you out. You can always pick something up if it's physically possible; if you can't, there's a visible reason in the world, and that reason is the puzzle.

By the evening there was a playable prototype with everything drawn in code. By the next day we had swapped it for painted art and never looked back.

The dining hall, a few days later.