Thanks a bunch for your attention and interest this past year! I wanted to take a moment to quickly recap what happened and what's coming. Some highlights for me though:

• The team has grown - SaKo has been helping for a few years but we've collaborated closely beyond portraits to enhance the battle system, improve the game HUD, and more. FJLink joined to help with that next level of polish to the sprites and long-time collaborator Brandon M. (Trepang2, Heroes of Umbra) returns to help out with providing original music to the game.

• 427 code commits[en.wikipedia.org] across the year - It was a bit of a slow start, but I feel like I'm making decent, steady progress (again, I only really have time to work on this nights and some weekends as I have full-time work/family commitments.)

• Full localization support - I want the game to reach a wide audience, so building tools and infrastructure that work seamlessly with my game's cutscene engine to support this is important to me.

• Clearer direction for the game's plot - Writing is hard. I hope I'm getting better at it, or at the very least identifying when things aren't working much sooner.

The first half of the year was spent reconciling some plot changes to the ending of Act I and redoing a lot of Act II, trying to salvage what I had. I'm sure you're sick of me linking it by this point, but I touched on this in the devlog from about six months ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tHYmNguYq6wFollowing this devlog, I've started doing these monthly updates. The cadence gives me plenty of time to reflect on what I've done, plan for the following month, and try to build some accountability. These started on the blog, but I prefer having them on the steam page. Maybe they can be on both, but uploading the same content in two places feels tedious. I'll briefly link the updates and recap each here if you missed any:

Act 2 improvements, cutscene reworks, gutting a redundant puzzle.

Act 2 work: more Reene, cleaning up boss battles, improving game combat and puzzle usability.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/3101780/view/525352692558594559FJLink (aka Pipasdefranilla or Fran) joined to help with sprites! Game quality immediately goes up as the main cast gets running animations. New cutscenes. (PS, buy a shirt[ko-fi.com]!)

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/3101780/view/511844430570849702Work at this point pivoted to refining existing content. The idea is that instead of steamrolling ahead on more story, it's worthwhile to take a step back and make sure the fundamentals are sound: is combat fun, does the game look presentable enough visually, is the game adequately outlined, is it ready for localization, does it support a variety of setups and playstyles?

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/3101780/view/726894573624755444Continuing the refinement train, I improved the battle HUD, made a dynamic settings menu to easily configure settings options, added tutorial support, and more. I began recording footage for a new trailer. (I need to re-record most of this for the English version still...) One miss here is I thought I'd be ready to announce a demo date soon.

https://steamproxy.net/steamstore/news/app/3101780/view/530990439685161692What seems to be an engine bug caused havoc on development. Despite dozens of late nights trying to get a trailer in order, I ended the month with little to show. Amalia's new portrait and the sprite updates from SaKo and FJLink respectively came out amazing.

You're reading it right now! And I'm pleased to report, there's been lots of movement. I downgraded Gamemaker and haven't bothered to upgrade. 😤

I've removed most of the hardcoded English text. In addition to story scenes, which are sequenced in rough plot order (it's sort of semver[semver.org]-style, but I'll talk about it more later), identifying speakers, tutorials, and so on, are now localized. The stylized vertical text also got an overhaul for Japanese, since it's not enough to simply rotate the text, it needs to handle vertical text rendering differently. And IYKYK but it's not enough to simply add a newline after every character.

I've added translation approve functionality, review queues, and context notes affordances as well. These small quality-of-life changes hopefully make this pleasant to use.

These are things I'm testing and looking for feedback.

• Stab skill rework - Stabbing adds a stack of the Marked debuff to enemies (increased crit chance). Stab will instead become Double Strike if three stacks are on the enemy. Leaping on said enemy with 2+ stacks will stun them.

• Dynamic Combat BGM - I'm working with Brandon on this one. Battles can have their own intros/themes/outros which are more intense versions of the field/exploration music. These are tempo sync'd to make their inclusion and transition cleaner. Field music position is also saved.

• Exp and Money Drop - This will probably be gated behind passives, but enemies can conditionally drop money/items/exp to collect mid- or post-combat.

  

• Dodging and Timed hits - More ideas to spice up mid-combat.

I recorded a trailer for a few festivals in Japan. Shoutouts to えなじ～ for helping with the localization work. I'm waiting to see if I get any bites before sharing these on socials.🤫

Soon after steam approves the new playtest builds, I'll announce dates for an open playtest. As part of this work I've built a pipeline to automate game updates, which builds the app in "Demo" mode, compresses game data, removes unused assets, and pushes it all to steam. It's a bit tedious to worth automating a bit to save time in the future.

There is one outstanding scene in Act II that I'm not totally sold on. It's paced incorrectly within the context of the climax of the act, so I'm shuffling it around and giving it its own breathing room.

Brandon has been hard at work at some original tracks for the Act I areas. It feels great to work together and finally start to have original, cohesive tunes throughout the game. I can't wait to share these.

• Fixed a day-one bug with screenshake and screen panning. This manifested itself in jerky camera motions after battles, as the game couldn't support both in parallel.

• Moving blocks and toggling switches no longer suddenly put the game in "cutscene" mode for a half a second.

• Enemies won't move to the same tile.

• Addressed some issues with changing then quickly entering menus causing crashes.

There are some exciting things in the works, but instead of waiting around for those I'm going to start the year knocking out more bugs, sharing a playtest with you, and gathering more feedback to make sure the changes made to the game feel right. On the plot/outlining front, I'm hoping to make more headway into drafting out dialogue for Act 3's scenes.

I'll continue to update you as I chip away at everything. As always, thank you for reading and I wish you a wonderful 2026.

-Andrew

Hello and welcome to December!

Last month holiday and work obligations kept me away from game development for a bit of time. (Plug for Deluge, I met up with the author, Riggy2k3, and he's a real one.) When not traveling, I spent a good deal of time (whatever three+ weeks of late nights amounts to) troubleshooting suspicious and random crashes surrounding Starless Umbra's cutscene system.

I won't go into details in this update because there's already a lengthy issue[github.com] on github I've created, but the result of this ultimately resulted in a rewrite of some of this cutscene system, and a meticulous revert of the gamemaker update interspersed with other things I was working on.

I'm tired so let's talk about those other things.

My focus skewed a bit more towards localization as I attempted to release a trailer in Japanese for Tokyo Indie Games Summit[indiegamessummit.tokyo]. Because of the issue mentioned, it became incredibly difficult to record footage for the trailer. I spent some time hardening the tooling and making more of the game UI dynamic, not hardcoded English.

Really all that's left to support now (that I know about) is localizing some character chatter, signposts, and NPC text. Man, RPGs have so much text.

I might have shared this already, but don't look too closely. Placeholder translations while I iron out a localization tool I built. Now this is game development!

By the way, I used the word attempted because I was unable to record the new footage, and the trailer is contingent on re-recording all combat segments again. Maybe this month we'll finally see that trailer. Unless you come across an old version of it somewhere else.

Not a ton here, but I'll note two things.

First, I've adjusted the mine cart puzzles more to make switch changes even more obvious, and made the last of the three rooms less tedious.

Second, I'm experimenting with an optional timed hits/parry mechanic to see how it fits into the battle system. Initial tests are fun, but I'll definitely need to get more opinions on it. It will likely be optional and gated behind a passive. Feedback on combat has been that it's either way too boring or way too frustrating/difficult, and my feeling is that stems somewhat from expectations and assumptions people have on the JRPG genre.

Nailing this has been one of the biggest challenges on the game design front: how do I keep things engaging without alienating a certain playerbase? I've added options to adjust the combat pacing (collectively reducing or increasing cooldowns for all enemies and players) but it's something I really want to continue to iterate on. There's plenty to do here, giving combat just a little bit more variety across enemies, maybe environments, and more. This is important for me to get right before I release a demo and continue working on more content.

Huge shoutouts to SaKo and FJLink for delivering amazing assets for the game last month. Despite the engine issues, seeing these two make progress on portraits and sprites respectively has been inspiring.

I spoke a bit in my last devlog about how in hardening character arcs Amalia had a slight shift to her personality. I try to write her personality somewhere between the trifecta of bright, wisecracking, and cool/indifferent. I approached SaKo about redesigning her portrait and I'm so happy how they turned out.

There's also facial expressions for those portraits and a whole set of redesigned HUD portraits to make better use of the smaller diamond shape.

Yes, Illari canonically has a fang now.

FJLink is continuing his trend of tidying up some character sprites and adding running animations to the main cast. In his own words, "Oskari looks like a main character now!"

I wish I had more to share. This past month was a tough one, but I hope you're finding these updates interesting. Please let me know if there's anything you'd like me to dive into for the next one.

For December, my focus will be very similar to last month: prep things for a demo, maybe try to get another round of playtesting in order, and continue to gather more feedback as I tidy up localization and re-record footage for the trailer.

Thanks for your continued support, interest, and attention.

-Andrew