Monthly Update #35 🪴

Welcome back for another monthly update, Sleepyheads. We’re about to head into June which is a big month for video game announcements and we’ve got a few for Little Nemo, so I’ll get right into it!

The MIX Summer Game Showcase

The MIX Showcase airs June 3rd, 12pm ET / 9am PT

ICYMI, we’ll be premiering a brand new trailer on June 3rd as part of the online MIX showcase. It’s pretty long at 90 seconds and includes some snippets from the animated intro that Fernando Finamore & Thiago Soares Ribeiro worked on, as well as loads of new footage (all recorded in 4K60, and I believe this will air in 4k60 as well). This new trailer shows off a bunch of the new areas and enemies that are in the game since we last did a trailer (back in 2023 for the Summer Wholesome Direct). There will also be two announcements at the end of the trailer, which I’ll share down below as you keep reading.

So please make sure to tune in on June 3rd (12pm eastern / 9am pacific). I hope you all enjoy this new trailer I put together. This one is quite a bit better than previous trailers because I had some help from David Lucio (founder of Latin American Games Showcase). He planned out the structure for this trailer and did some early sketches for how the trailer should look, which were immensely helpful.

I’ll be hanging out in the Discord when this airs if you want to hang out and watch with me! Hope to see you there. 😊

Timeline Update 🕰️

Okay, last month I went into quite a bit of detail, but I have a lot to share again this month on this front because a lot has happened, many decisions have been finalized, things sorted out, etc.

Production Timeline ⚒️

So following up on this from last month’s update: I have a whole world built up and fleshed out full of secrets and pathways between the different domains. It could stand to use a bit of polish, but that just leaves the major area of focus: finishing up the bosses. Once those are done, the focus will be on end-to-end playtesting of the entire game and polishing things up. There are still some smaller features that I’ll be working on during that time, but they are things that are smaller in scope.

Overall I am a bit behind where I’d hoped I’d be at the start of the summer (I was hoping I would have those bosses done by now as well), but we’re certainly still making good progress and not hitting any roadblocks.

Release Timing 📅

But this is where I have an announcement to make. This month I finally settled into what the release target date will be, and hired a contractor to help out with Marketing & PR as we head towards release. So a lot has happened that I want to share with you all.

For those of you that follow along and read these updates, I’m happy to share with you this information ahead of time, I just ask that you not share these details publicly ahead of our June 3rd trailer premiere. I also know this release target might be a bit disappointing for those that are very eager to play the full game ASAP (especially with me talking about how close we are to completion up above), so I think it’s better to share with you here so you can ask questions if you have any, and so I can give some proper context to the release timing.

We will be launching Little Nemo and the Guardians of Slumberland in Q1 2026. That will be for the Steam and itch.io versions (Switch will still come shortly thereafter and I will announce more about that as things coalesce). The reason it’s a release window and not a release date is that we will be aiming to launch sometime between Steam Next Fest (typically in mid February) and Steam Spring Sale (typically in early March) and those dates aren’t public yet. Sometime after we know those dates, we will settle on exactly which date we’ll be releasing and let you know.

So how did we arrive at this release target? Well I was originally hoping to aim for September of this year, as it could be enough time to polish up the game by then, and it would be before the previously-anticipated October release of GTA VI, and also just generally getting ahead of the last 3 months of the year which generally aren’t good for indies (low wishlist conversion rates for games launched in those months and competition from heavy hitters). But there were a few problems with September as well:

• Slipping on the date a little bit could be really bad because up until after the release target was settled, I was under the impression that GTA VI would be coming out in October (this was something I was thinking about and mentioned in last months update and why a tiny indie game needs to worry about something like GTA VI). There were some other big games coming out around then, but not as scary as GTA VI.
• There are so many great games that are coming out this summer and into fall. It would already be a little scary to launch this year, but with Hollow Knight Silksong announcing a 2025 release target, I figured there would be a good chance that we’d be trying to release at the same time as them, which would probably be even worse than trying to compete with GTA VI. So I worry about a general gaming audience having too many amazing options to play in September 2025, even with GTA VI ultimately getting pushed to May of 2026.
• Shipping in September also probably doesn’t give us as much time as we’d like getting active again on social media and to get the word out. Other than events like the MIX showcase, just getting the word out on social media is how we will find our audience, and it’s important to find them before we launch because wishlist numbers and those first few days of sales are so important for the Steam algorithms. So aiming for a later date gives me more time to be focused on marketing alongside making the game. If I were shipping this year, that would mean heads down working with little to no time for promoting the game.

So tldr; I need more time to be able to properly focus on marketing the game ahead of launch and it also helps to prevent us from releasing alongside some popular sequels launching this year.

I understand hearing these things isn’t going to make a 2026 release seem any less distant, but I want to make sure you’re getting the full picture behind why it won’t be coming out this fall as I imagine many of you probably anticipated (and as I myself was certainly very hopeful for).

So with those things in mind I made the decision to wait until after the holiday season to ship the game. January and February are typically some of the best months for indie games to launch, so this also fits with that general guiding principle. And if we wait until after Steam Next Fest, that gives us one last big opportunity to have a game demo up in a Steam Next Fest for people to try out the game and get excited about it just before launch.

So I hope no one is too put off by this release window. My hope is that people will be excited to finally have a date to look forward to since we’ve been in limbo since pushing the original release target back, but I understand that ~9 months out feels like a long time. If you have any questions or concerns about the date, please leave a comment down below or ping me in the Discord. (If you message me in the Discord about this stuff, please use a Kickstarter backer channel or DM me since most channels are public, and this release target isn’t public yet.)

Upcoming Demo! 🎮

Our other big announcement in the trailer is that we’ll have a public demo up when the trailer goes live. We haven’t had a public demo up on Steam since the 2023 Wholesome Summer Direct, so this is a good opportunity for anyone that missed it then, to finally try out the game. If you’ve already played the demo, this will be fairly familiar because this early content has only mostly seen minor changes and polish, but there is some stuff that wasn’t there before. You can actually see 6 different domains in this demo (most of those you can only get a small taste of though) and there’s an NPC you can reach that wasn’t there before (Captain Sweetbeard), some new enemies (Venus Clamtraps in the Dreamswept Plains for instance), but generally it’s still just the first area, battling the Rocktopus, getting the Yo-yo and then exploring a bit more (you are prevented from progressing further to get more toys or battle other bosses).

Sleepwalkers of course already have access to this and more of the game, but if you don’t have the 💾 Early Builds Access reward tier and want to give the game a shot, this is a great opportunity to do so.

Okay, so those are the big announcements we’ll be making publicly on June 3rd (well, as for the release target, publicly we’re only announcing Q1 2026; you all get the finer details about the timing). So what else has been going on this month?

Things we worked on this month ⚒️

This month I was doing lots of administrative type stuff to get things rolling for marketing ahead of launch. I also recorded lots of footage and edited together the trailer that you’ll see on June 3rd. And I spent some time making sure things were sorted for the demo build (I’ve got a placeholder save slot selection UI in the game now and I needed to make sure that all worked nicely with the difficulty selection stuff and fixed various minor bugs). So lots of stuff that doesn’t show nicely in an update. But I did work on a few things that will be cool to show off.

Spoilers Abound ❗🙈❗

Finishing up Haunted Hollow Layout 🎃

The last of the world layout/level design that I needed to do (aside from polishing things up) was finishing up with 🎃Haunted Hollow🎃. I had a good chunk of it blocked in, but it needed a more thorough pass. This domain is a bit different from most of the others. It’s slightly smaller, there’s no new Toy to find in here, and there isn’t a boss (but the Guardian has a “Quest” for you). But I still wanted to make sure this was a fun place to traverse because you’ll probably be coming back and forth through here.

A view of Haunted Hollow as seen in my authoring tools

There are a few major areas of this domain: the “main” entrance (I tend to think about the map layouts in terms of a “golden path” players will likely take through the world, but people will play their own way and may approach from different directions) comes from Gumdrop Gardens and leads into a haunted house kind of area where Alex, the Guardian of this domain, resides. Below that is a dark crypt area, and in-between those two is a long corridor that connects an “east” and “west” portions of the map. Both connect to the ✨Crystal Caverns✨ on either side, but there’s also more connections to 💨Dreamswept Plains💨 and 🍭Gumdrop Gardens🍭. These major areas of the domain each have their own color schemes: orange, green, purple, and dark.

Looking at the same room, but with the different lighting schemes seen in Haunted Hollow

This area doesn’t have a lot of its own gimmicks like some of the others do, so it mostly focuses on utilizing the game’s lighting systems to give Lampet an opportunity to shine (pun intended of course) if you’ve had opportunity to find him. Otherwise you can carry around a jack-o-lantern. The advantage to Lampet is that he’ll follow you around, leaving your hands free to use your yo-yo or dangle from monkey bars.

There are also Electric Scarabiners providing light in some dark areas. They can be dangerous, so you’ll have to decide whether to avoid or destroy them.

If you destroy an Electric Scarabiner, you’ll lose the lighting it provides in dark rooms

Haunted Amor 🛡️

While working on the Palace level design recently, I had found myself wanting a new enemy for that area, and I made the Haunted Armor enemy. It will just stand guard until Nemo approaches, and then it will smash its sword down hitting you if you try to pass. But if you attack the armor, it gets even worse: once damaged the armor will crumble away leaving only the haunted helmet which will follow you around until it is destroyed, much like the Boo Hoo enemy.

The Haunted Armor becomes even MORE dangerous if attacked

I decided this enemy would work nicely in the Haunted Hollow as well (ghost theming!) so I also incorporated it into that domain in a few places as I worked on it.

Fast Travel Map in Nemo’s Bedroom 🗺️

A new map has appeared in Nemo’s bedroom!

I moved things around a bit in Nemo’s bedroom again (Nemo’s drawing of the cat is back over by the dresser) to make room for a map of Slumberland. Currently this just serves as a normal map, but this will ultimately be a special map that lets you select which bed is your “anchor” or “checkpoint” bed. You’ll be able to select from any beds that you’ve checked in with that are in a domain of which you’ve gotten at least half of the blue moons in that domain (I might tweak this threshold, maybe it will be a specific number, but that’s what I’m thinking is a good starting point).

So that’s some of the stuff I worked on this month that I can share. I’ve also been doing a bit of work here and there on a part of the game I have been keeping from everyone, but you’ll have to wait until you play to see that stuff. Oh and I also have been working on writing up the game’s bestiary for the in-game bestiary, but it’s probably not quite ready to share yet. Perhaps I’ll let you all see it though once it is a little more polished up (it’s very spoilery though as it shows every detail for the 30+ basic enemies in the game).

Back to Spoiler-Free ✅🐵✅

Alright, let’s get to wrapping up this month’s post…

Kickstarter Friends 💚

I found Big Hops on Kickstarter and it looks like a really cute and fun 3D platformer. It even has a demo you can check out. It has a nice dive-jump mechanic that lets you zip around the world and some really fun wall run and wall jump mechanics. Check out the Kickstarter, 26 days left to go and well on its way to being funded!

BIG HOPS is a 3D platformer, action-adventure with deep movement, fresh frog-tongue gameplay, where you can grow veggies to build paths forward! You’ll play as Hop, a young frog who’s been kidnapped from home by a trickster spirit called Diss. He has a mysterious, important mission and needs your help, but you just want to get back to your family…

That’s it for now! 👋

Okay, that’s it for this month. As we get closer to launching the game, I will be spending less time on making cool new stuff and more time on polish, bug fixing, and marketing. I intend to continue doing these monthly updates, but they might get a bit boring if I just talk about what I’ve been up to that month, so let me know if there’s anything else you’d all like to hear more about. Is there stuff you’d like me to revisit or go into more detail about? It could be specific tech, or specific game features, domains, whatever. Let me know. If I get a bunch of topics people want to hear more about, I can plan out specific topics to dive into with each monthly update (and of course I’ll continue keeping you apprised on the general goings on behind-the-scenes).

Thanks so much for reading, and until next month!

-Dave