Update September 2026

General

The final steps and then it can finally go to Steam Early Access.

I have to wait for budget before I can continue, which is why everything is taking a bit longer. So far I have been paying for everything myself and I have to make choices about what is and isn’t important for the game.

Promo material

The minimum required for Steam is promo art. I asked Mayo once again to make a sketch based on my feedback. I know from the many sketches that she is very good at this and that she also has a lot of knowledge about coloring.

There were some requirements that you have to meet at Steam. For example, there are different sizes for the promo art and the logo has to be on it. The style is allowed to be completely different from how the game actually looks.

I have made use of this at the moment and put as many elements from the game into the image as possible.

Below you can see the result from sketch to coloring.

Steam requires the logo that you will use everywhere to be included. So this is what it became.

Pixel art

The next scene that will be included during Early Access looks really good (thanks Lucas). Here is a small part :)

Voice actors

I have mentioned before that I do not want to use AI. Only when it is really necessary or for some experiments can it be useful. Since the budget was too low, I did an experiment with AI voices as a test. I do want Martin, Diana & Nikki to speak in the game.

The result was actually very good, but I still didn’t feel completely happy with it.

Luckily, I found a voice actress who could do the voices of Diana and Nikki, and her husband (also a voice actor) could do Martin’s voice!

For the Early Access version there are 5759 words to be spoken (I pay per word).

Martin 2050 words. Diana 1825 words. Nikki 1818 words. Tiger 66 words.

All spoken sentences are listed in an Excel document with a unique (i18nKey).

That key is also the filename. In the game it is described something like this in yaml:

say:

i18nKey: global-hello

The game then automatically knows that {actor}/global-hello.ogg needs to be played.

I also had to save for a month for this part, but it was worth it.

AI

AI AI AI. At first I kept firmly saying NEVER AI, but now I am almost being forced to use it anyway. The reason is simple: ‘money’/’time’. But so far the use of AI has been limited to a few GLSL shaders and some scripts to build everything. And a few extra parts of the editor.

For this version of the game I will not use AI for the assets (audio, graphics).

And the code is still 99.9% AI free. The only thing is that at the moment it is a fact that AI is smarter for some parts of the code than what I have made. My plan is therefore to purchase AI soon and use it to look for any bugs that I haven’t noticed yet.

I will also have the website changed, because I know there are still a few bugs in it.

And my English has never been perfect, which is why I translate using translate and/or AI.

Finally

I hope to have everything on Steam within 3 months. There are still a few things I want to do:

• Finish the Steam page
• Game testing
• Have AI look for bugs
• Renew the website
• Apply for Steam Early Access and open it