Seems 2026 so far is still going strong for this project. It is the deep of winter, and the outside of my home is reaching temperatures equivalent to the surface of Neptune right now for some reason. Is there ever a better time for a new devlog post?

To put things into perspective on how things are going, Phase III, the Ashen Forest, will have roughly ~>17 distinct sub-areas. This includes 6 "dungeon" areas. In the last monthly update, I mentioned we were working on designing some of these later-game dungeons - to follow up, they now have all the detailed writing completed, nearly all the sprites necessary, the layouts fully realized, the soundtrack for them made a long time ago already, and are now being implemented in full.

So far, 13 of those 17 sub-areas are nearly fully playable. I would say it is about >3 hours of content, but that is a somewhat abstract number. To re-iterate a point I have said before, Phase III is intended to be the largest.

Of course, there is still content that will be added to a good deal of these areas, but you can go through them start to finish and experience their unique stories and atmosphere. We are currently working on an area that I have been extremely excited to work on for the longest time. It encapsulates some of the points of game-feel that I wanted to nail with Heartless.

Ironically, it's an optional area. Sometimes I feel like it is a little sad to put so much work on something that players can just completely miss, but that's part of the sacrifice; it adds to the magic of discovering a new world in the deep depths, as a reward for your keen eye. It is what makes exploration meaningful -- what could be around this corner? Another jerky, or an hour-long spiral path to lands unknowable? Of course there will be hints to occasionally point to such locations, but it is fun to have one player find this entire dungeon on total accident, and another player finds another, then after finishing, they discuss the two completely different worlds they have witnessed. Ideally you'd atleast once have this sort of feeling of uncovering a large secret such as that. Though with the nature of secrets, sometimes it can't be helped... you could just bum-rush the mandatory areas, honestly, that's also kind of fun in its own way.

I believe we're at over half a year since we started full-force development on the full game. I think we've made pretty phenomenal progress! I would like to shout-out Enana Blanca for making an ungodly amount of sprites almost daily. She has allowed this game's visuals to have the breathing room to expand a great deal, without slowing down the rate of development at all.

Have a good one, thanks for reading!
(Art by Adejny)