Devlog / Devlog

Tuổi Thơ 1990: drying the rice, work in progress

By Cowork Game Studio · Published 2 November 2026 · Tuổi Thơ 1990

Hi everyone,

Here is a look at what we are working on in Tuổi Thơ 1990, our gentle memoir game about a seven-year-old girl growing up in the early 1990s in southern Vietnam. This new chapter is about drying the rice harvest in the yard. It is a work in progress and it is not in the public build yet. Chapter 2 is the one you can play right now, on itch.io.

Chores in the yard

The girl rakes the rice, carries the rake on her shoulder, spreads tarps and drags sacks across the yard. Mom lifts a full sack onto her shoulder and sets it down again, steadying it with her free hand. The chores in this chapter now play from start to finish. The clip below is a rough pass.

Filling and tying the sacks

Mom holds the mouth of a cloth sack open while the girl pours the rice in. Mom gathers the mouth, the girl ties it and drags it to its spot. Three sacks end up in a row. Afterwards the girl carries the folded empty sack out and lays it down. The sacks used to look silver in the sun, so they now share an aged ivory cloth look.

We also have a small preview of the girl flicking rice out of a bamboo basket so it spreads over the yard. It is not in the game yet.

Rain

Then the sky turns and it rains. The family covers the rice with tarps, and Mom weighs them down with 12 bricks, one at a time, carrying each at her hip and setting it on a corner. The chapter ends with the girl stopping on the porch to look up at the clouds.

Smaller fixes

We repainted the girl's face in a softer style with clearer mouth shapes. We also fixed a lot of arm and hand motion, so no more twisted forearms and no hands going through cloth. There is still plenty to do.

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