Monthly Update 19 🥂

Happy New Year, Sleepyheads! We’re into a new year working on Little Nemo and we’ve got lots to share with you this month. A quick breakdown of what I want to go over this month:

• We’ve been getting tons of art done thanks to having João on board helping out, so I’m gonna show some of the fun stuff he’s been working on this month: backer rewards for new toys in Nemo’s bedroom, Pet Statues in the observatory (you can see a bit more about the Observatory in this previous update), and new dialogue portraits.
• I’m also gonna talk a bit about what Sleepwalker backers can expect in an 💾 Early Build that will be coming very shortly.
• And I’m also gonna get into where things stand with the TBA release date (sorry, I don’t have a date to share yet, but I will go into detail about why).

And I think we can talk about all of this without the need for a spoiler warning, so if you’re avoiding spoilers, this entire post should be safe to read!

Nemo’s Bedroom 🛌

We limited the Playful Sleepwalkers tier to only 15 backers because we didn’t want Nemo’s bedroom to get overcrowded, but Nemo clearly hasn’t tidied up in some time and the floor is a mess of fun and cute toys and plush creatures. Here’s a peek at how the bedroom looks with all the toys added.

It’s a bit dark here in the middle of the night (and the gif encoding isn’t doing us any favors), so let’s see how things look at dawn:

Don’t mind the fact that Leo is floating in this shot >___<

The Playful Sleepwalkers were very generous in their support of the game and I hope they enjoy getting to see their chosen toy in Nemo’s bedroom anytime they return after taking too much damage or just coming to swap out their Little Buddy or PJs. 😊 Share your feedback about your toy down below!

New & Improved Dialogue Portraits 🗣️

The dialogue portraits that you’ve seen so far in the game I have not been very happy with. So I’ve been looking forward to getting help from another artist and I’m excited to show off a bit of what João has been working on for these.

And here are some static shots of the new Nemo and Minerva portraits.

And there will be many more characters to come as well as different expressions so that their portrait properly expresses the mood that the character is conveying with their dialogue.

Much of the charm of this world is the characters that inhabit it, and the dialogue scenes with them are very important focal points for helping bring this world to life.

Pet Statues in the Observatory 🐕

And here’s some more art that is getting done for backer rewards, Pet Statues! For those of you that backed at the SUPER Starry Sleepwalker tier, the 🐩 Statue of your Pet rewards are getting wrapped up and put into the Observatory. Here’s a look at all of the statues that’ll be on display in the Observatory:

For all of you SUPER Starry Sleepwalkers, what do you think?! Are you able to recognize your animal friends here in statue form without their nameplates? Each statue is interactable so you can read the animals’ names, and of course they’ll be available to spot in the constellations above using the telescope as well. (And to be clear for the Starry-Eyed Sleepwalkers reading whose animal friends will be getting just the constellation without the statue, I’ll share more of those in an upcoming update!)

We’ll be getting some more backer rewards done next month as well. I hope to get all of the 🗿 Your Statue in the Palace rewards into the Palace foyer to show off in the next update!

💾 Early Build Access

For the Sleepwalkers reading, I’m working on getting an update to the build currently available on Steam. This will include your first real look at the Gumdrop Gardens. That means, a full area to explore, peeks at other areas it is adjacent to, a new toy to acquire, a new boss to defeat and a new Guardian to rescue.

Now that a lot of the domains have fully developed environmental designs and tilesets, we’re working to flesh out the “level design” for each domain and give you access to them as we do. As we move forward, I’d like to give Sleepwalkers access to areas that may even have very rudimentary greyboxed-in content. So for now it’s just the Gumdrop Gardens, but I also hope to follow up in the near future with more zones as they reach a (rudimentary) playable state.

I was also hoping to get the first properly usable Little Buddy into the Gumdrop Gardens, but it’s not quite ready yet, so that’ll have to wait (B.O.B. is still in the current build, and actually works now, but he’s very well hidden and most players don’t even find him). But as it develops, the intent is to introduce the player to their first Little Buddy shortly after they arrive in the Gumdrop Gardens (if you head to the Mushroom Marsh or somewhere else instead, you could of course find a different Little Buddy first, but this particular one is intended to likely be the first the players find). I’ll share some more about it, perhaps in next month’s update (but I’ll keep that marked as spoilers for you!)

The Timeline to Launch ⌚

This is something I want to at least make a point to bring up in each update, but I have a bit more detail to go into this month about the timeline for Little Nemo. As I mentioned above, I’m still not quite confident enough in the timeline to announce any firm dates, so the official release date remains TBA. We’re still looking at a good amount of boss and enemy implementations which tend to require a fair amount of development time and animation time, both of which are bottlenecked by what I’m able to personally work on. The good news though is having João on board to help with the static art assets has been a tremendous lift, and I’ve been getting help with the level design as well.

The thing I want to stress though is that I continue to make solid progress every month. I know it’s probably a little scary to hear that the release date is TBA, but I really appreciate the patience and willingness to follow along with development from all of you. I will continue to keep making these monthly updates so that you can see this steady progress, and I remain committed to getting this game into its best state for release.

To give you a generalized look at how I’m planning the timing of things: there is still plenty of production time needed on the game to get it to “content completion.” That would mean having a fully playable game with all the intended content included. After that comes a post-production timeline that would be all the work required to actually get the game launched (QA, bug fixing, console porting, achievements, etcetera). As you can imagine, planning the production timeline is tricky enough on its own, but I’m also trying to factor in a realistic timeline for getting Little Nemo out the door after production is done.

So for now I’m pushing on ahead with an aggressive and optimistic production timeline I am keeping private. I don’t want to share that rough timeline with you because it could be misleading as it has its fair share of uncertainty baked into it.

I hope this is a transparency level that you all are comfortable with. I’m happy to take feedback on all of this either here in the comments, in the Discord, or via DMs.

That’s all for this month! 👋

Thanks so much for reading along! I really love getting comments and questions from you all down below and in the Discord, so please leave some feedback below or come find me in the Discord. Also, if you’re a Sleepwalker and not in the Discord, you should definitely join because it’s a great place to collect your feedback as new builds get pushed. Until next month, thanks for reading, Sleepyheads!

-Dave