Turbo Pudding

Dilly DeliversFrom the sketchbook

The pony that looked like a bunny

· The Turbo Pudding team · 4 min read

Barley, a peach pony with a lilac mane and bow, short ears and starry eyes, waves happily at Dilly the duckling in a teal courier cap, who has just set down a parcel on a farm lane; behind them a lilac stable with a golden horseshoe over the door, a red barn, a yellow tractor, a sleepy haystack, a purple mailbox and pink orchard trees, with a hay bale, a puddle, pumpkins, mushrooms and a cabbage with a face in front

Every picture in Dilly Delivers is drawn by the game itself, in code, without a single image file. Dilly, the parcels, the six places of the valley and every cloud and goose come from more than 12,000 lines of drawing code. When something looks wrong, we write down what’s off, change a few numbers and look again.

After Pudding Town, Dilly’s route runs through five more places. Each has five palettes, one for each parcel of the day, from morning to sunset, and Whisper Fog goes from dusk to deep night. Every place went through several rounds of looking and fixing. Here are a few pages from that sketchbook.

Drizzle Dale: ears and eyes

Drizzle Dale is rainy farm country. The first Barley the pony had ears that were a little too long. From a distance, she looked like a bunny. The ears got shorter, and now she is clearly a pony, with a lilac mane, a bow and a horseshoe over her stable door.

Barley likes a bit of drama. When a parcel arrives in perfect shape, she says, “Flawless! Like my mane! You deserve a rosette, darling!”

The geese needed the opposite fix. Their heads and eyes were too small, so both got bigger. Then the sign on each goose gate turned out to cover the goose’s head, so it moved low on a post. Even the tractors got a note: their exhaust puffs drifted over the windshield, so now they float off to the side.

Echo Gorge: a lot of goat

Echo Gorge is a candy-colored desert, and it is goat country. The goats took the most fixing. Their ears first came out looking like a bunny’s, again, so now they droop to the sides. A beard that looked like tusks became a soft tuft, and the whole head got 20 percent bigger.

Old Billy, the biggest goat in the gorge, had a horn that curled right over his eye. The curl got smaller, and the feather in his hat turned yellow. Juniper, a young goat in a green scarf, first came out with what looked a lot like a pig’s snout. Now Juniper has a cream muzzle and a rosy nose.

A white fluffy goat with curved horns and angry squeezed-shut eyes charges along a sandy path in a pink desert, kicking up dust, while Dilly the duckling in a teal courier cap with a parcel on her back is up by a wooden fence; behind them a mine tunnel with glowing eyes in the dark, a pickaxe, crates of crystals, a sandy mound of prairie-dog burrows with a blue door and prairie dogs peeking out, a prairie dog standing by a heart doormat on the right, cacti in front and the purple edge of a chasm on the left
Searched “cute courier game”. The goat skipped the cute part.

Snowpeak: a smaller yeti

The little Yeti who waits at the end of the Snowpeak chapter was first drawn too big, so the Yeti got smaller, with thinner arms. Yuki the yak had a fringe that didn’t work, and it was redrawn as bangs. Cabin roofs got a colored band under the snow, so they don’t melt into the white. And at night, the highlights on the clouds looked like blank eyes staring down, so they were dimmed. Sleepy clouds are fine. Staring ones are not.

Up in the Snowpeak sky, the sun wears fluffy pink earmuffs.

Yuki, a dark brown yak with curved horns, bangs, a light-blue bow and big starry eyes, stands in the snow next to Dilly the duckling, who holds a parcel; behind them a round hut with a blue roof, a round door and colored bunting, a mailbox on a post, a ski lift with skiers on the chairs, a deep blue ice crevasse on the left, a little white bunny in the snow and falling snowflakes everywhere
Search: “delivery game with a yak”. One result. Hat delivered.

Mirror Lake: new names for the roads

Halfway through, the two roads around Mirror Lake got new names. One became the Boardwalk way, with reeds, beach umbrellas and sandcastles. The other became the Lily way, past big lilies, cafés and an ice-cream kiosk.

Bucky the beaver was always meant to wear a hard hat, but at first there was no hard hat to give, so one was drawn especially for Bucky. The patch where the crab guards its burrow started out flat and became soft drifts of sand.

The sun over the lake wears heart sunglasses pushed up on its head.

Bucky, a brown beaver in a yellow hard hat with big starry eyes, waves next to Dilly the duckling, who carries a parcel, on a pink checkered promenade by a stick lodge with a round porthole, a yellow door and smoke rising from its chimney; to the left a red crab sits on a patch of soft sand by its burrow, and behind a white railing the lake has lily pads with pink lotus flowers, a little island with a gazebo and sailboats
Typed “cozy delivery game”. A toolbox, a beaver and a crab on duty.

Whisper Fog: the moon goes in front

Whisper Fog is the last place on the route, a misty land of lanterns, bog pools and fireflies. In the first version, the clouds covered the moon’s face. The moon wears a striped nightcap with a swinging pom-pom, and it would be a shame to hide it. Now it is drawn after the clouds, so it always sits in front.

The northern lights first read as rain, so they became two soft curtains of light. And the bats’ heads lost their sharp corners.

A lilac, misty marsh at twilight: Dilly the duckling with a parcel walks on stepping stones in the lower left corner, a white and purple bat hangs upside down from a tree branch with a red exclamation mark above it, a glowing lantern stands by a rope boardwalk, a small green frog sits on a lily pad in a bog pool, misty pine forests fade into the back, and high in the sky a sleeping moon in a striped nightcap with Z’s floating up sits in front of a cloud, next to two sleepy clouds
Even the moon searched “cozy bedtime game”. Hence the nightcap.

Drawing Old Oak, the little owl of Whisper Fog, also led to a fix for an old friend. Granny Plume, who hands Dilly her very first parcels in Pudding Town, is an owl too, but she didn’t quite read as one. Now she has feather tufts, round facial discs, a hooked beak, folded wings, chevrons on her chest and proper tail feathers. Her colors and size stayed exactly the same.

Come see the valley

What waits beyond the fog, we’ll leave for you to find out. Chapter 1, Pudding Town, is free to play in your browser at dillydelivers.com. The full game, all six chapters, is $4.99, paid once. More about the game is on the Dilly Delivers page.

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