Hi folks!

We’re still up to our necks in some big new changes that we’ll be excited to show when they’re ready. But in the meantime, we thought we’d talk a little about one big design priority in Loose Leaf: tactility.

We really want players to feel like they are a Tea Witch brewing for her guests with care, attention and dexterity. Our focus with the design of the game is on the physical brewing experience, interacting with all the types of ingredients and experimenting with your brews. This also matches the kind of magic we’d like to show the player using: a grounded and down-to-earth ritual, not just immaterial spellcasting. To help players feel all this, we look for ways of making the brewing process feel really satisfying and *tangible*.

A couple of our favourite little recent brewing features embody this — they’re still in simple prototype form, but we think they already feel great:

The grinder turns any ingredient into a grounded form. The sound effects for this action are really pleasing.

Some of the fresher ingredients will need to be grown such as this adorable little lemon tree (pictured above). And as soon as we started in on harvesting ingredients from plants, we were excited to feel that tug on the plant as ingredients got plucked — leading to this not-strictly-botanically-accurate lemon interaction.

Everything you see above will deserve more polish in beta-er times, but meantime we’re continuing to work through some pretty chunky design stuff that we hope to talk more about soon. It’s winter and many of us are warming up with a nice cup of tea. The Loose Leaf channel on the Kitfox Discord[discord.gg] has been lively with tea experimentation discussion so come by and say hi!

‘Til then, hope you’re all staying warm and cozy!

-Alexandra + David