TomeSpire 05/16 Sprint Retrospective

Inscribed on

As the temperature warms up outside many would say soup season has ended. Pifflesquish and hobblesquawk says I. Soup season is the eternal state of mind which surrounds the bowl. And the bowl is life. Think on that. Think on that real hard.

Hey, remember how two sprints ago I was like, “tome menu?” and you were probably like, “what?” and then last sprint I was like “tome menu?” and you were all like, “huh?”

Well guess what.

TOME MENU.

A pixel art-style game features a bookshelf on a grassy field with various interface elements, including controls for speed and volume.

Look, we didn’t say the Tome Menu would expose any options. That comes later. I said we’d have a Tome Menu, and now we have a Tome Menu.

Tome Menu.

Okay So What Did We Actually Get Done?

A pixel art bookshelf is surrounded by green grass, containing books, a computer, and a human skull, with cobwebs on the top.

  • We kill the map. We killed it dead until it was no longer living anymore.
  • Long live the bookmark tabs! Look if we’re going to go hard on the “Tome” part of “TomeSpire” (the wind gently whispers… tome menu…) we may as well have some bookmarks too.

A vertical menu with icons and banners related to farming activities is displayed, with a green background.

  • The tome menu exists! (This is very exciting and has made many people quite happy).
  • The tome menu lives in a haunted bookshelf! It will follow you wherever you go. At work. In the car. In your dreams. Especially your dreams.
  • Oh, also, a fricken’ dungeon.

A pixel art-style dungeon room features a grid floor, a single pop-up creature, and an entrance with a blue blob character.

  • Did we strictly need a dungeon? No, probably not. But we’ve got one now. Do you have a dungeon? Didn’t think so.

Oh, also I’m going to take this one out of the punch list because it’s important.

We’ve got a newsletter now! You can (should) subscribe here. I promise never to sell your email, or send you spam you don’t want. It’ll be occasional updates about cool stuff we’ve found, plus notes when we’ve got a game you should try. Totally different from the stuff I put here! Go do it. Subscribe. You know you want to. And also I want you to.

The Broth, or The Foundation of Things, or What Would I Want To Have Known Before This Sprint If I Could Have Known Them

  • Lean hard into diegetic menu elements. They’re awesome. A haunted bookshelf that follows you around is 317.2% cooler than a traditional menu system. That’s a real number. We calculated it with science.

The Bread, or The Accoutrements, or Other Things That Go On The Side And Are Also Good Maybe But Aren’t Really A Meal On Their Own

  • Small randomized elements make the world feel alive. It’s sort of hard to show in a gif here or there, but having one kind of grass everywhere feels dull, boring lifeless. Having the system put a couple different kinds of grass down, and a couple different kinds of flowers is how it starts to feel like a “place.”

The Beans, Beans, the Magical Fruit … Which Isn’t Really A Soup And Is In Fact A Song About Toots, or The Things Coming Next, or That Which I Naively Believe We Might Actually Be Talking About Next Time

  • More books on the bookshelf. We’ve got a haunted bookshelf, why not fill it with haunted books?
  • More content in the tome menu. It exists, it works, but it should probably do things.
  • More dungeon in the dungeon. Like. Probably there should be some skeletons what you can murder for their tasty bonemeats.

I’m reliably told that some people consider gazpacho to be a soup. But I think if tomato juice can be a soup, then we’re really looking at an “any fluid can be a soup” situation. Does that mean smoothies are a soup? Is aqua fresca a soup? I feel like at this point we’re really starting to call into question the essential soupliness of at least five different kinds of food, and I’m not sure that’s a box we want to open right now.

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