Dev Log #1 - Apr 2026

First devlog on the books!
I'll be tinkering with the formatting and stuff as time goes on, but I'm excited to be in a good place to write one of these. My intent is to release these dev logs around the end of each month. I will generally hold myself to not delaying them more than 1 week after the end of the month.


Dungeon Entity Hierarchy

Lots of refinements to this system, with the hopes of mitigating technical debt. There's now a much clearer implementation of the inheritance path, which looks something like this:
Grid Entity
  • Grid Actors
    • Player Character
    • NPCs
  • Grid Features
    • Walls
    • Items
    • etc.

A lot of the changes here have been separating entity capabilities into their own interfaces. For example, some actors might need pathfinding, but others won't if they don't move.

Sequences

Sequences are how I handle any general changes to the game state. For example, starting a conversation, entering a new dungeon, or opening a UI screen. Sequences generally entail changes to how the player interacts with the game.
The original, quick implementation I did was a bit messy, because I didn't fully understand the full scope of what sequences needed to do. A lot of this month was refactoring and fleshing out this system into something that will be usable (and appropriate) for this project in the long run.

Dungeons

I've done a lot of work on the dungeon gameplay during the prototyping part of this project. I'm mostly focused on other things at this moment, but I am continuing to make tweaks here and there.

Hub World

The implementation of this is frequently on my mind, though its not something I want to lock in right away. The demo I'm working towards currently will just be a dungeon with a conversation or two, so the hub world won't be necessary for it.
My current vision is to have the hub world operate with the same controls as a dungeon (grid based), but without enemies. This is subject to change, but figured it was worth sharing my current thoughts.

VN Interface

Again, lots of work was done in March for this. However, there are a few additions for April too, which I think go a long way for production value.
For one, I bought some font packs to give the text a more playful / adventurous / game-y feel. I'm really happy with the way it looks-
I've also done some experimentation with the plugin I'm using to handle this work (PixelCrusher's Dialogue System, which I highly recommend). Its got a lot of features that I want to figure out before writing too much.

UI

The big development for UI this month was purchasing and importing a plugin that has some nice looks buttons and effects. I'm mostly just using it for the assets, which means I have to do some low level UI programming. It's not too bad, but given my priority of making the controls support keyboard-only input, there's a few extra steps I've needed to do already.


Story

Wrote down brief bios for the 6 main characters I want the game to focus around. Searched around for some reference art, I feel like I've got a pretty good idea of what they'll each look like. Still leaving room for interpretation as I continue commissioning designs / refsheets.
I've also got a good idea of what the introductory chapter of the game will look like. For reference, the demo I'm currently building will be scoped to this introductory chapter. More on this later!

Pixel Art

Spent a good chunk of time designing Mak's sprites based on the in-progress refsheet I commissioned. I'm REALLY happy with how they turned out, and ended up doing a full pass on his idle animations.
You can also see a slice of the sprite sheet at the top of this dev log.

Illustrations

Things are progressing well here. Mak's refsheet will still take a couple more weeks to finish, but the WIP is already looking phenomenal (and was enough to do the animations above).
I'll be looking into working with other artists soon to start making illustrations for the demo.

Next Up

Most likely, I'll be working on integrating the dungeon, conversation, and UI modes together. They're each in a good state with the latest refactors, but are mostly contained to their own test environments right now.
I want to also start designing a simple goo / slime enemy, to replace the placeholder arrow enemies I've currently got.
And who knows what else! Excited to share more updates soon- thanks for reading :)
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter / BlueSky for more updates!