Now that we're done with the holidays and it feels like every week isn't broken up into a random numbering of Days On and Days Off, we're getting back into the regular development cycle. While the Christmas/New Year's portion of the calendar is a nice bit of punctuation to a long year, it's also a no man's land of "What day is this? Am I working today? Am I required to be social today? Do I need to put on pants?"

As you can see by the teaser pics, we're pushing on after the events of the previous chapter. We've also sat down and mapped out what the next five releases will look like in terms of location and how story arcs will play out. This helps in terms of figuring out what future sets and scenarios need to be focused on. It also helps in terms of trying to get ahead, banking some romantic scenes, which usually require more development time to pull together.

Decades ago, when I was fresh out of college, my parents moved out of state and needed me to house-sit their place until it sold. Since I was subsisting on retail job wages, I jumped at the opportunity to not have to pay rent for a while. So, I was living in a house with only one room furnished, out in the boonies, where once the sun goes down, it's all darkness and crickets (and the glow of the nearby nuclear plant). At this time, I banked a little extra cash and splurged on a PlayStation and Resident Evil. Over the next few weeks, I'd come home from work, crack open a beer, and play Resident Evil. I played it so much that I was doing speed runs and challenge runs. As you can imagine, this is a formative memory, and there's a good bit of RE (and survival horror in general) at the core of games like N&T and TOX. 

Thanks for your interest and patronage,
-Kinderfeld

All right, we're sneaking our last update in on New Years Eve (or New Years Day, depending on when or where you receive this). Hope you all have fun and stay safe ringing in the new year. Myself? It'll be a few glasses of something nice and movie night while my neighbors shoot off fireworks in sub freezing temperatures. 

I'll have to say that we had both a busy and great 2025, with so many new faces joining to see what we have in store. Juggling two games at the same time was a bit taxing, and maybe we won't do that again, but getting the Everyone ending version of The Interim Domain was a pretty great milestone. 

2026 will be mostly focused on TOXICity. There are some thoughts that, based on the current pacing and the remaining story arcs we want to tell that we might extend this one beyond the initial 24 chapters. It's not going to be TID, which was stupidly huge, to the point of being overripe and bursting at the seams, but maybe giving some later developments room to breathe would be nice.

Of course, we'll be doing some planning and pre-build work on Game #4, but that won't get active development until 2027. 

Thanks for your interest and patronage,
-Kinderfeld