There's a new major UI change: battles now take place in proper windows, meaning they can be minimized, undocked, and moved. As part of this change, the close button is always present, which might help mitigate how often people see the shiny new button and immediately click it when they mean to edit a party. And, as usual, there are some very minor bug fixes and QoL improvements. The most notable one is that we've removed nudges toward giving feedback through an external Google Form. We enabled reviews on the Steam demo page for 2-3 weeks now, and we hope people will start leaving their feedback here on Steam. We did read through every piece of feedback submitted through each formthank you alland we plan to read through every Steam review (at least while there are <500 ).

[ 2025-04-29 22:21:54 CET ] [ Original post ]

v0.7.8 is now out!

• Fix a critical shader issue that probably affected next to nobody. It made everything with an outline appear at ~1/30th the regular size (so the signs, NPCs, the portal, etc. were reeeeeeeeeeally tiny).
• Add new perk to the Fishing Pond: Spicy Cooking.
• Lower the title-screen music's volume. Many people reflexively reached for the volume sliders as soon as they opened the game, but no other music is as loud as the first few seconds of the title screen.
• Change Harvesting Efficiency so that it harvests the crops closest to the one you clicked.
• Improve some small QoL stuff that's otherwise not worth explicitly listing.

[ 2025-04-25 23:16:35 CET ] [ Original post ]

v0.7.6 was already online, but I never wrote the patch notes for it:

• Improved readability of perks (the costs were hard to read and it wasn't obvious when you could afford the perk).
• Fix some bugs.

v0.7.7 makes these additional changes:

• Revamp enchanter graphics. There are no longer books directly on the ground.
• Add Skeleseller-specific icons for Harvesting Efficiency and the Quick-Move Menu perks.

[ 2025-04-23 17:23:45 CET ] [ Original post ]

The biggest changes are:

• Add perk to allow manually harvesting many crops at once
• Add a setting to disable edge-panning the camera
• Add a setting to allow confining the mouse cursor to the game window

There are several small changes around bug fixes, flavor, and in-game education (e.g. the tips that pop up).

[ 2025-04-16 19:18:31 CET ] [ Original post ]

We've been getting a lot of feedback with this new version (thank you )! This particular patch (v0.7.4) includes ~25 small changes to improve the player experience and fix some bugs. None are super notable.

[ 2025-04-14 19:48:41 CET ] [ Original post ]

It's been about two months since the last big update. In that time, we've been busy improving the game.

New systems

We've added farming and fishing to the game. Both systems allow you to accrue food to be cooked by this li'l guy:
Use the resulting Wisdom Sludge to level up. That brings us to...

Revamped adventurer progression

Adventurers can be leveled up individually rather than having them all level up at once when you beat an elite monster.
Skill points are given every other level, and skills are now randomly unlocked.
These changes were made to simplify the leveling experience, prevent players from having to read through ~10 skills at once, and allow for investing in specific adventurers.

Perks for everything!

Before this update, only the Town Hall had perks, and it only had ~6-7 "real" perks. Now, there are 5 different sets of perks to unlock:
This allows you to spend money on what you find to be important in the game. In addition, there are some shiny new perks:

• Item Stacking: this lets you stack two or three items in a single location. This essentially doubles (or triples) your warehouse space, the efficacy of workers, the purchasing power of customers, and your own manual item movements!
• Quick-Move Menu: this lets you quickly select a destination for items without having to move the camera around.

Other notable changes

• Removed the vault: this was a personal storage location for items, but there just isn't much of a reason for it to exist yet.
• Revamped the tavern: the tavern is still for quests, but the quests no longer grant health and power to your adventurers. Instead, you're actually completing the quests of other skeletons, and by helping them with their unfinished business, they'll join your town as a worker.
• Improved the battle map's graphics: these now match the aesthetic of the game rather than being a generic, inked, D&D-style map.

[ 2025-04-09 21:03:19 CET ] [ Original post ]

The game-design changes should be mostly done, so now it's back to coding. All may be quiet on the patch-note front for a while before those changes start flooding in.

• Animate items flying to their destinations. This should feel much more satisfying when dragging items around!
• Fix bug with fleeing a multi-wave battle. If you fled the battle while the "Wave 2 of 2..." text was showing, then you could get into a weird state.
• Stop customers from preferring the potion shop. It used to be that a customer entering the town had a higher likelihood of buying from the potion shop just because they were forced to go through that shop. Now, when a customer enters the town, they will go to a random shop that has a buyable item.

[ 2025-02-21 17:09:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Very quick patch notes for today:

• Fix bug with the Max Customers perk. When loading from a save file, you would always only get 2 customers in your town. If you were able to upgrade Max Customers, then you would get the expected number of customers, but if you were unable to upgrade, then you'd be stuck at 2. Thanks to ExplosiveJames for finding this bug!
• Use rounded rectangles for party member selections. Wherever you can highlight/select a party member (e.g. in the skill tree), the rectangles used to indicate your selection are now rounded. It looks nicer than pointy rectangles. ()

I just wanted to get the bug fix out ASAP, hence this small patch.

[ 2025-02-16 01:38:27 CET ] [ Original post ]

More patch notes! We're still actively working on improving Skeleseller as much as possible.

• Improve worker and adventurer behavior.
  • They won't pick up armors and weapons from your warehouse unless you've built those shops.
  • If they're holding an item but don't have an available destination in a shop, they'll go wait at the shop rather than wander around.
  • If they're not holding an item, they'll wander around closer to the portal and warehouse so that they don't have as far to walk when an item finally does appear.
• Show proper item values in tooltips. Shiny Loot makes items more valuable, but the tooltips never reflected this. Now, you'll see a breakdown of how an item's value came to be calculated.
• Stop "Buildings" menu camera panning. Instead of automatically panning when you press a button in that menu, there is now a small icon next to that button that will pan the camera.
• Make the Garbage Slime's value tooltip more flavorful. It is now covered in slime.
• Update Town Perks icons. They are now custom-made for Skeleseller.
• Fix explorer sprites. The sprites were a combination of two other NPCs. Also, the explorer's dialog was in white text.
• Add end-of-tutorial tip. Now, after building your potion shop, the game will say "You have an adventurer, a shop, and some customers! Keep battling, selling, and building to grow Skeletown!"

[ 2025-02-14 17:40:37 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! The main changes in this patch are:

• Improve the flow for starting battles. Before this, if one of your adventurers was battling, it wouldn't let you start a new battle with that adventurer. This meant that you'd have to close the battle map, manage your battle windows, then reopen the battle map to configure your next battle. Now, you can just click "Start Battle" and it'll automatically end battles as necessary! This same thing works if you have three battle windows open; it'll close the oldest one.
• Improved manual item management. Previously, you had to drag an item exactly onto a specific target (e.g. an item stand in a shop). This resulted in a difficult experience dragging items around because the drag targets could be far away, and zooming out would make them much smaller to try to hit. Now, the entire building will act as a drop-zone for items. This means you can drag a potion anywhere in the general vicinity of the potion shop and it'll get placed on an open item display, or you can drop a quest item onto the tavern or the quest board.
• Add new Garbage Slime graphics. The slime itself only looks slightly different, but its dialog box is... dripping with flavor.
• Add new town-hall graphic.
• Add sounds to icon buttons.
• Fix bugs so minor that they're not worth detailing.

[ 2025-02-12 00:04:56 CET ] [ Original post ]

Smoothing out rough edges for new and old players alike!

• Add "edit" button to EndBattleScreen. It turns out many people didn't know that you could click your party at the end of a battle to edit them rather than having to open a brand new window. I hope this fancy new "edit" button will speed up your adventuring!
• Add new graphics for: guildmaster, all shopkeeps, and the guild building itself. All 4 new NPC graphics include blinkingno need for eye drops anymore!
• Add custom mouse cursor. Point your bony hand at those items and WATCH IT GRAB!
• The Garbage Slime's text ("feed item to slime for 3G") now shows in screen coordinates, so it will be legible regardless of how zoomed-in your camera is.
• Fix bug where battles may never start.
• Use more icons rather than text buttons for the battle UIs. These now have sounds (like every other button), too.
• Fix minor font issues (mostly spacing stuff).

[ 2025-02-08 00:52:08 CET ] [ Original post ]

Did a lot of work today, but not all of it is prominent for players. Here are the minor changes that should help new players slightly:

• Make battle tip go away on its own. It used to be that you had to manually dismiss this, which meant that players may miss a more important tip later down the line.
• Remove tip about manually moving items. The Garbage Slime teaches you how to feed it, so it should hopefully be apparent that you may be able to move items elsewhere, too.
• Add tip for how to drop an item. Some people got "stuck" with an item on their cursor. After 5 seconds of holding an item, a tip will pop up near the mouse saying that you can right-click to drop the item.
• Update title-screen music. Rebalanced some instruments to make it sound better on the Steam Deck.
• Remove cost label from item displays. These labels were in "camera space", so as you zoomed out, they would become less legible. Now, they only show in the tooltips when you hover over items.

[ 2025-02-05 23:55:16 CET ] [ Original post ]

Pretty minor patch notes from today's work, but I want to document this stuff when I've got time:

• Default to fullscreen on Steam Deck. This fixes a bug where the cursor was unusable for most of the screen without divining how to change window modes on your own.
• Add a nice-looking background to the "Walking to the Portal" screen.
• Add sound when an item disappears to make it more obvious that you're losin' loot.
• Make Loot Magnet do what it says. Before this, it said that it would double the items you earned from battle, but it would actually double the number of times we rolled your loot drops. On average, the loot should remain unaffected, but now, when Loot Magnet procs, you'll always get an even number of all items granted.
• Put build/upgrade costs directly into buttons. It used to take up space in the dialog's content.
• Make fonts consistent. There should now only be Skeleseller-specific fonts in the game!
• Fix small bugs with the "Upgrade Portal" button. Its tooltip was incorrect after beating an elite monster, and its text was sometimes confusing (it would say "Beat Next Elite" when appropriate, but for new players, that was confusing).
• Move tooltips closer to the mouse. They used to spawn 15 pixels farther to the right.
• Convert sign text to a tooltip. The text on signs used to show in "world space" rather than in "screen space", which made it blurry sometimes. It now only shows when you hover the mouse over a sign.

[ 2025-02-05 03:06:07 CET ] [ Original post ]

Hey everyone! This is our first-ever Steam festival, and we're excited to show you what we've been working on for the past ~year. The Skeleseller demo has about 90 minutes of content. We're aiming for 5-10 hours by launchnot sure when that'll be, though. We hope you'll try the demo and provide feedback (the survey is here). Also, if you're interested in watching the live development of the game, Adam streams here on Steam and also on Twitch. Have fun playing Skeleseller!

[ 2025-02-03 17:48:31 CET ] [ Original post ]