January 2026 Progress Update

Happy New Year! Time sure flies doesn’t it? We hope everyone had a good holiday season. Let’s talk about what we were up to during November & December, how 2025 went and what our plans are for 2026!

November & December 2024

As we outlined in our last update – we’re working on two key areas: Debates and “redoing” some older overworld locations. If you’re interested in what “redo” means here we recommend you read our last post to get the gist.

There isn’t too much we can talk about the debate changes at this point but we sorted out a known “plot hole” – which is a good change.

Otherwise we’ve been chugging along with redoing Lakure. We started by wiping out all of the vegetation for the whole region and started to fill in some areas. Here’s a comparison of before and now + some close ups.

Some beaches have been upgraded.

Did anyone ask for Sheep and Shepherds?

Fields of flowers, different road design, and lots of greenery.

Upgraded our purple flowers!

2025 in Review

2025 is over and did we ever get stuff done. As per usual though, it feels like it’s never enough. On the plus side we became reemployed which meant we could spend time on the game’s development; on the downside, many health-related things came our way. That being said, we got enough done to now switch to bimonthly progress updates which means things are getting done and we’re moving into secret things. So let’s get on with what we completed!

  • Created a minigame prototype which was featured by Gamemaker
  • Added all the NPCs to Myranova and Ziacia
  • Added all the Passive Animals to Olvia and Vescha provinces (~50% of the game’s overworld)
  • Began redoing Lakure province’s overworld vegetation
  • Finished designing all of the in-game Kickstarter backer custom NPCs & Houses and adding them to the game! In-game Kickstarter rewards are now fulfilled!
  • Created some cutscene-specific sprites
  • Created custom boss sprites
  • Redid all of the water in the game + related performance improvements & toggles
  • Improved other shaders (ex. House Shader, Cave Shader) + added performance improvements & toggles
  • Created and added SFX for the remaining TTBattle Skills
  • Reviewed all of the TTBattle sprites & fixed anchor points, missing sprites, missing shadows, etc.
  • Removed the timer from Debate Battles
  • Began rewriting Debates
  • Upgraded to Gamemaker Version to 2024.11
  • Misc bug fixes

And here are some gameplay videos we released during the year:

2026 Plans

Now let’s move onto our plans for 2026. To be honest the plans are fairly light because they rely heavily on finishing the Debate Battle rewrite. Not only do the battles need to be finished for the game to be done, but how the battles change will influence which quests become main story quests and which quests become side quests- let alone if we have to write new ones or adjust those. So with that in mind we will be planning on:

  • Finish redoing Lakure’s province’s overworld vegetation
  • Redo Wynoa’s province’s overworld vegetation
  • Adding Passive Animals to Lakure & Wynoa’s provinces
  • Upgrading the Gamemaker Version
  • Releasing one Beta and Demo update with the new graphical changes
  • Rewriting the Debate Battles
  • Rewriting, adjusting or writing new quests depending on the Debate changes
  • Implementing new Debates
  • Implementing new quests, cutscenes, etc.
  • Implementing the minigame prototype into the game (if time is available)
  • Rebalancing economy, enemy placement, treasure placement, etc.

We hope you look forward to the upcoming changes and see you again in March!