Hello Everyone! We hope everyone had a merry Christmas and/or happy holidays, and are getting ready for the transition into 2026. With the year coming to a close, we wanted to update you guys on what’s been going on with the project. This update will serve as both a recap of information we’ve revealed so far for those that missed it, along with an update on how this last year has been for us!

Art by @kaijurhino , new logo by @kaoskurvea

PROGRESS, AND ABOUT THAT RELEASE WINDOW:

Progress has been going smoothly! Last we talked, the update was planned to be released in 2025. We ultimately realized a couple months back that this goal was out of our reach while still maintaining the high quality standard we have for the final product. 

V1 PORTING:

The time has not gone to waste, however! This last year has been our most productive one yet, and we’ve overcome many of our biggest development hurdles. One such hurdle was coding, where this year the coding team made the executive decision to switch from Psych Engine to Godot. This is mainly because Godot is a more comfortable engine to work with for most of our coders, and it gives us the opportunity to do much cooler things than what would’ve been possible in any Haxeflixel based engine. While that does mean that the entire mod had to be re-coded, which ended up being quite the time sink, the decision has made overall development exponentially faster. The benefits of the switch should be more than obvious when you guys get your hands on the update!

Godot splash screen by @kaijurhino

 In the few months we’ve been on Godot, we’ve already exceeded the progress from over three years of being on the previous engine, and the build is in a very promising state. We actually did our first playtest a couple weeks ago, and have already fixed most of the critical issues and bugs that came up during said test!

Outside of coding, much of the original art and music has gone through more changes than initially planned as well. Most songs have had some extra love put into them, mainly focusing on making each one both feel better representative of their respective games, along with being more consistent style-wise compared to before! While we won’t say exactly what these changes are at the moment (to not spoil the surprise!) you can expect things along the line of stuff we’ve shown before, such as the redone chromatics, pixel sans sprites, and running boyfriend sprites (shown again below, to remind people on said assets). It’s important to us that we preserve what people liked about the original, rather than changing things solely for the sake of changing them, so changes have been made selectively, but in places we think people will appreciate.

Made by @rivermusic

Made by @AurumArt

NEW CONTENT:

As touched upon in the previous development update, what was once the entirety of Indie Cross V2 is now known more specifically as The Hollow Knight Update. This is because the bulk of the original content in the update will be solely about Hollow Knight. This includes, at minimum, Week 4, all the bonuses, and the nightmare song. This means that previously-revealed content such as the one-shot songs for Baldi, Celeste, and Hello Huggy will not be playable in this update. We know this might be disappointing to many, but this ultimately allows us to focus more on getting the main content of the update to you guys sooner, along with being able to give it extra polish that wouldn’t be possible when the entire team was spread thin across a ton of songs (seriously, the glow-ups to the Hollow Knight content are night/day!) 

To be clear, the aforementioned one-shots are not gone, and all the progress we had on them is still there, ready for when it's their time. This hopefully means that once The Hollow Knight Update is out, subsequent releases of the mod will take far less time than this initial one has!

Following this post is a video format version of what's been discussed here on our official YouTube page, which you should check out after reading as it contains both a teaser on the ost for The Hollow Knight Update, as well as a small look into how visuals have changed for hornet via in game cutscenes (https://youtu.be/GZT6Uvxeka0):

CONCLUSION:

We know things have taken quite a while. After multiple years of missing release date promises, it wouldn't be smart to promise anything concrete this time around, as confident as we would be saying it's coming in 2026. When the project releases, we hope you guys will enjoy it!

That's all for now, we hope to see you in the future! Happy Holidays!

Penkaru speaking here:

I just wanted to leave this part separate from the lovely work made above, as the work done by this amazing team deserves its rightful spot in focus, this is more so something I feel would be beneficial to add at the end away from things. I want to deeply apologize for my infamous tweets on promising release dates for this current update over the years on twitter/X, it shouldn't have been something I claimed back then as it gave false hope for those who wanted to see this fan game's release. I understand that the Friday Night Funkin' community tends to poke fun at both base game and some mod's lack of communication on development, and for that I understand and see why people have responded to said tweets in the way they did. Regardless though, I feel like people should remember once again that like anyone else, we are human beings busy with our jobs, college, and families(in my case all of the above + more), and want this out just as bad as you do, so please try to remain patient for next year, as the recent flood of posts regarding indie cross's release date not being met was a big demotivator for the team, as it was all happening during when we were in call writing/working on things for this devlog over this month. Obviously you can't control the internet, so I'll leave it at that, and see you all next year : )

Thank you for your time.