Development Update 5/13/25 + Dev Note

Here’s what we’ve been up to this week, with a quick state of development note at the end.

• Finalized and started optimizations on alternate path from last week: Added an additional narrative scene, and cutscene to the path. Started general optimizations including reducing geo, polishing LODs & Nanite, and finalizing lighting scenes.

• Improved atmosphere in CM: Similar to the updates done last week in WW, we added litter, various childhood toys, etc. scattered throughout the playplace.

• Finalized full Prologue script: Added in our very last additions and modifications to the Prologue script. We should have our final recordings by the end of the week!

• Added in full DLSS & FSR menus: Added in fully customizable DLSS and FSR Menus into the graphics settings. As well as NIS settings.

• Started expanded GPU and CPU testing: Continuing our GPU and CPU testing for the Prologue build we expanded testing to a range of Nvidia 30 series & 20 series cards, as well as expanded our AMD cards. This is mainly to test and setup our custom settings profiles we'll have for the “tailored” graphics setting. As well as catch any card specific bugs.

• Added in additional path in Deep Storage: Added in an additional lore filled path in the Deep Storage of WW. Added in 2 additional narrative scenes as well as 1 memory loop puzzle.

• Added in Ventilation ending path: Added in a path through Ventilation to extend an ending in the Prologue. We're not 100% on keeping this in yet, for chronological and lore reasons, but hopefully we're hopeful we can connect a few gaps and keep this in since it will extend the Prologue with 4 additional narrative scenes, 1 light shift puzzle, 1 memory loop puzzle, and quite a bit of lore:)

• Continued Ending Animations: Continued the remaining animations of Smile and Mime for Ending scenes. Just a few more days here!

• Continued Remaining 3D & 2D assets: Continued work on the remaining few assets currently blocked out in the Prologue build. Added 4 models!

• Bug fixes: Squashed ~13 various bugs in the Prologue build. Not quite our normal 30ish range, but as we're getting close to release, we're getting to the few we've thrown on the back burner as well as we're picking off the last of the semi-obvious/common ones in the Prologue build. So seeing this number go down is a good sign:)

Upcoming Focus:

• Continue Main Debugging (For Prologue) Focused on Optimization: Continue debugging with our main debugging team getting deep into optimization.

• Finish Last 3D & 2D assets: Finish last few assets currently blocked out in the Prologue build.

• Finish Ending Animations: Finish remaining animations of Smile and Mime for Ending scenes. 

• Pass on Polished Build to Playtesters: Pass off the polished Prologue build to a new team of playtesters to get rough estimates of playtimes, benchmarks, and last minute changes. (still in progress, we’ll let you know when it’s time)

Dev Note:

Hey everyone! (It's Sven btw) Just wanted to drop a quick note this week to give a general dev update and a bit of a forecast for what things are looking like moving forward.

If you’ve been keeping up with our highlights over the past two weeks, you’ve probably noticed we’ve kicked things up a notch and gotten a lot more done than usual. I wanted to give a bit of context around that, or rather, why we haven’t had this level of output prior.

To be transparent, a big part of the slowdown was due to some complications on the publishing side. Between delays and some unexpected cuts to our provided funding, we had to be extra careful with budgeting and planning to make sure we could still deliver everything we want for the Prologue. It took time, but as of a couple weeks ago, we were finally able to lock in the budget through release. Since then, we’ve really been able to hit our stride.

Thankfully, we’re now in a solid place to keep this pace up moving forward, so expect updates and highlights as good (if not better) than what you’ve seen these past couple weeks :)

While I don’t want to get too specific just yet, we’re hopefully going to start our release marketing push in the next 1–2 months. That’ll include daily (or every-other-day) shorts including a mix of gameplay clips, renders, and some new development dives.

These will be little ~60 second shorts diving into the past year we've had piecing this project together with myself or one of our team members jumping on and explaining interesting development topics (making procedural animations, lighting scenes, making cutscenes, modeling, etc) we've come across so far along with some nice visuals.

At the end of our push we'll very hopefully have a release teaser out on YT to compliment our first official Steam release! Now as exciting as this all is, I have to say that this is our hopeful plan and not set in stone. With everything that has unfolded with our publishers in the last year we want to be as cautious as we can and not start our official market push or set dates until we have our complete final build uploaded and localized on Steam. With all that said, I can't wait to finally start sharing everything we've been up to to you all!