Monthly Update #42 🎄

Merry Christmas, Sleepyheads! 🎄❄️

imgA Christmas strip from the original Little Nemo in Slumberland

This month’s update might be a bit short because I didn’t get time to write this ahead of time, so I’m writing this on Christmas Day so that I can make sure to share it with you all on the final Friday of the month (when I’ll be busy traveling). But there’s not much detail I can go into without spoiling too much so I’ll just cover generally what’s been going on this month. I don’t have a behind the scenes look at anything for this month, but perhaps I’ll do one when I’m back in January, so let me know what you’d like to see in the next of those!

Alright then, let’s get into what’s been going on this month:

More Playtesting! 🎮

This month, I finished getting the last third of the game in a fit enough state for playtesting and have had some of the playtesters in Discord helping out with that. This involves three different boss fights, of which I haven’t talked about much or at all. We’re close enough to launch that I’ll probably just leave the details on these bosses vague and let you learn more about them when you encounter them for yourselves in the game. But the bulk of the work this month was just getting the last of these in a state ready to test (I’ll just drop the name of that one which is “Knightmare Armor”).

Boss Names 📢

Speaking of boss names, now you’ll actually know the names of the bosses because I’ve added an announcement banner that shows up at the start of boss battles telling you their name. This isn’t the most exciting thing, but I like that players get to see the boss names now.

imgThe first boss’ name being announced when the battle begins

Final Pass on SFX 🔊

I’ve been working with Jonathan Baken this month as well. I’ve been preparing a document of all the things that still need some sound effects, and he’s been making loads of new sounds for me to try out. That’s been going really well, and we should be finishing that up early in January. If you’ve played any of the recent playtests, you may have noticed lots of missing sounds, especially with later domain enemies and bosses, but those are all sounding great now.

So what’ll be happening in January?

What’s Next ❔

In January I am going to be getting things polished up a bit more, incorporating more feedback from playtesters, and then having some people play through the game from start to finish to get some more broad feedback about the game experience as a whole. Aside from that, there are a few things that need to get wrapped up before we can launch:

  • Implement Achievements I’ve already built an achievements abstraction layer, and have a doc of the achievements I’d like to include, but they actually need to be implemented.
  • Rank System I’ll need this in place for the start to finish playtest. This mostly involves making variants of the enemies that are “ranked up” and more challenging.

And I think in January I’ll probably have things firmed up more so that I can share with you backers when we’ll be launching (or at least when I’ll be sharing the exact date).

Looking forward to 2026 🥂

I will be around a little bit next week working on things, but you probably won’t see another update from me for at least another week, which means it’ll be next year! We’re getting so close to launch, I hope you’re all as excited as I am. Sorry for the lack of screenshots and animations in this one, but hopefully I can sneak a public update deep diving into something in early January so that you don’t have to wait until the end of January for another of those. If you have suggestions for what you’d like to see me dig into next, leave a comment below!

Okay, Sleepyheads. As always, thanks so much for reading along. I hope you all are having wonderful holidays and are able to enjoy them with friends and family. Have a Happy New Year and I’ll talk to you soon in 2026!

-Dave

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