Welcome to the debut of the official new Pitter-Patter website! As corporately-owned social platforms around the internet continue to fail, we here at Pitter-Patter have decided to forego them entirely and maintain a space that truly belongs to us. Notably, X’s insistence on AI technology – and stealing the creations of its users to further its development – has discouraged us from continuing to showcase our work there. Individual Pitter-Patter members of course have social presences outside of X (check out our links on the staff page), but that was the only platform where we had a collective presence as Pitter-Patter. Instead of scrambling to get Pitter-Patter accounts set up on all sorts of pop-up social media sites, we’ve decided to simply exist in our own space that we can personalize to our own needs.

To be honest with you, as the one who was in charge of our X account, I’m relieved… Workshopping posts that encourage a specific kind of optimized interaction squeezed the art out of our art and turned it into a product. It felt dishonest. Being free of the pressure to appeal to algorithms or microsecond attention spans is already significantly more gratifying. Now we can actually offer insights about our work that aren’t arbitrarily constricted by a character limit!

In fact, we’ve got several exciting updates to share with you today, including a teaser for our next big upcoming project. Let’s get on to the good stuff.

Just about a year ago, we released an update for Commonplace which we called “the final update.” Among other tweaks, this update touched up a certain late-game interaction to make it more visually appealing and offer more convenient support for players not using a keyboard. We planned to implement these adjustments for the game’s initial release, but other priorities kept popping up which this particular feature a little unfinished.

Unfortunately, finishing it wound up completely breaking the entire interaction! It took control away from Sam and forgot to give it back once the interaction was finished, leaving players softlocked after investing an hour or more of gameplay. Whoops!!

It was an optional interaction, but also a heavily suggested one that we put a lot of effort into. Punishing players so severely for engaging with something we wanted them to engage with was obviously a problem. Well, we’ve gone ahead and fixed it to be completely operational again. We’ll be releasing this patch… Today! Right now! To our knowledge, this was the final bug that negatively effected gameplay. At the risk of jinxing ourselves again… This should truly be Commonplace’s final update. No more! Commonplace is for real finished now. Please download this new updated version when you’d like to play the game again.

Actually – when was the last time you played Commonplace? It released in 2022 and now it’s 2024… People can change a lot in a short amount of time. Maybe it’d be worth peeking back in again and seeing what you may or may not remember.

Here’s something I bet nobody was expecting: we’re also releasing an update for our game jam project Monster Bargain! And guess when it’s releasing: Also today!! Also right now!! This is a game we put together in a single weekend, which wound up releasing a little under-baked so it could be submitted before the jam’s deadline. In the end, we actually got it uploaded after the deadline, only to be saved by a generous grace period. We were working on it literally to the very last second. Because of this, we only had time to properly test one of the two scenarios, leaving the other riddled with bugs. This update fixes all the bugs plaguing that second scenario so the game plays 100% as intended. It’s not exactly a flagship Pitter-Patter title the same way Commonplace is, but enough players enjoyed the game that we deemed it worth “finishing.”

The reason I put “finishing” in quotation marks is because Monster Bargain will never really be “finished.” The original idea was that the three of us – Frankie, Robin and myself – would each write a scenario to put in the game. We decided it’d be cute for each scenario to represent the three main settings typically found in RPGs: fantasy, modern, and sci-fi. I remember Frankie jumping at the chance to write a sci-fi scenario, Robin took on the modern scenario, and I accepted the fantasy scenario. Despite Frankie sounding the most excited to write that sci-fi scenario, not a single word for it ever got written since coding the game itself took the entire duration of the jam. This is what I mean by Monster Bargain never being “finished” – to write that sci-fi scenario now would be against the spirit of what we were able to accomplish in the jam. Simply adjusting the code so that the game points to the correct dialogue is one thing, but adding an entire third route is too much! It’s for this reason the game will always be “unfinished” – but don’t let this keep you from enjoying the two routes that we did manage to include! The game is now in a perfectly playable state regardless of which scenario is chosen. There’s never been a better time to play.

In fact, don’t let anything stop you from enjoying Monster Bargain; the game initially released exclusively for Windows, but we’ve taken this chance to release it for Mac and Linux operating systems as well. Now everyone can play if you’re so inclined.

We’re also using this opportunity to release the Monster Bargain soundtrack on YouTube and Spotify, where before it was exclusive to Bandcamp. As the composer, I’d still prefer for people to use Bandcamp… But I understand not everybody likes to download files all the time (personally, I think owning files is the coolest). Big day for Monster Bargain! Lots going on!

With all this Monster Bargain-related news, I asked Robin if she wanted to say anything about the game while it had all this attention. She was the one who came up with its overall concept, and the scenario she wrote is the one that necessitated this new update. This is what she had to say:

Monster Bargain was the game we made for the 2023 GMTK Jam, under the theme “Roles Reversed”. Having the idea to use some liberal inspiration from Shin Megami Tensei’s demon negotiation, then flipping this negotiation mechanic around made for a lot of neat spins on the existing formula, mostly through having to think about what ideals a typical hero would have, and exactly what they would like to hear from a monster.

Getting to design the heroes was a lot of fun! Picturing and developing on the most average look for these heroes I could think of for their respective settings led me into doing some interesting research in the visual design of myriad games, just to amalgamate it all into a stew of a character design. It’s a shame we ended up scrapping the sci-fi hero, because they were my favourite design of the three. It turns out a lot of sci-fi RPG heroes get most of their design touches from fantasy settings as well, and it’s just up to the extra details to carry the weight of making them still look futuristic.

Writing the dialogue for the modern hero scenario was the first time I had written for any public project, let alone a game! Looking back on it now, I’m pretty happy with how it came out, especially when getting to develop the hero herself and what being a lone hero in a current-day setting would feel like. Although I ended up petering out and leaving the 6 hour writing binge dead-tired and upset, the work I had put in is something I believe I can be proud of, at least for my first time. I’ll appreciate having some more time to breathe the next time I write something like this, though.

– Robin

With all these old wounds patched up, we’re unshackled from the binds of the past and ready to move on to a new era of Pitter-Patter. All those old projects are behind us forever. Everything is different now! We have a website! And the long-term project we’re working on is a properly designed full-scale title, not just a trial run to test our skills. I suppose it’s finally time to tell you about that.

This new game… Is a very different style of game than anything else we’ve made so far. What exactly that means will be revealed in the next update. Personally, I’ve been working on it even before Commonplace released – I just checked, and this game’s first document was created on January 4th 2021. As of writing this article, it is January 4th 2024. This coincidence is putting my stomach in knots for reasons I shouldn’t explain right now. I might not ever explain it, at least not publicly. This is a game inspired by real-life experiences I’ve had, different kinds of people I’ve met, personal struggles I’ve dealt with, and struggles I know others have dealt with as well. The catalyst that led to the document’s creation on January 4th 2021 – the catalyst that essentially created this entire game – was a particular event that happened to me on that same day. This same day. Maybe you can see why it’s tricky to speak on this right now. I can’t believe it’s been exactly three years.

Anyway, Commonplace released on August 28th 2022 – over a year and a half later. I had been quietly chipping away at concepts and details for this new game the whole time. Our Discord message history shows that I gathered Frankie and Robin to present the materials I had been preparing on September 18th 2022, about a month after Commonplace was wrapped up. I remember sketching some piano mock-ups of musical ideas I wanted to use in the game and playing it for them while they read through the documents. Production started around November or December.

The year we’ve spent working on this game looks profoundly different from any period of time we spent working on Commonplace. For example, our work sessions are shorter and less frequent but more productive. We’re spending more time focused on individual tasks and making sure they’re done effectively and efficiently rather than jumping around the entire project until it’s “good enough.” And this time, it’s just the core three of us working on the game – for Bip + Bop and Commonplace, we brought in some of our friends to help cover extra ground and hired performers to record some of the music. This game will be a showcase of what just the three of us can achieve by ourselves.

We’re extremely pleased with how the game is coming along, but since we’re working on it in this toothpick-and-tweezers way, it wouldn’t look especially impressive to anyone if we showed it off quite yet. We will be able to do so in the next update, however! This is a promise. The next time you see an article on this website, it will include real footage demonstrating the game and how it plays. We just need a little more time. To tide you over until then, Robin has prepared this wonderful piece of art relating to the game:

It’s a beautiful painting, isn’t it? I hope it gets you wondering about the game. Who is this woman? What significance does the doll have? Are there any clues regarding how the game might play…? For answers to questions like these, please look forward to future updates on this website. (And to see this image in its full resolution, check it out in our gallery!)

Well, that’s about all I’ve got for you today. I wish I could show more, but you’ll just have to be patient for a little while longer. We’ll only publish articles like this when we have something meaningful to say, so I hope you’ll look forward to them and check in every now and then. Please enjoy all the updates to our previous games, as well as all the features of our new website. Thank you for reading, and thank you for following our journey as creators!

– Max