Dev Diary – January 2026

Hello there, it's me, Baku.

I am the lead designer and also now the main programmer of the game. As we announced in our last post, I am here to let you know what's been going on.

Identity... and beyond

We are currently at the point, where we have enough flexibility with our game engine that we have been trailblazing and designing content behind the scenes. We have been working towards making the adventuring content a reality, and we have two concepts to show off here.

The above are generic entities that can show up during any encounter. As you can tell by their names, their very presence is representing something that current characters are experiencing. They are meant to be physical interactables that restrict or interact with your character(s) in some way when they are present. You can think of them as "living status effects". For example: Loneliness will negate your next friendly action, unless you interact with them, directly. Each of them will probably only have one hit point (or slightly more), since they are not meant to be the main interactions during each adventure segment.

We also have some concepts regarding skills that you'd be able to use. "Inside Out" swaps your current HP with what is missing. Death Pact Signet revives a party member, but your lives are bound together indefinitely – if one falls, so does the other.

These skills are more abstract (except for Punch, which should be self-explanatory) since we chose to go for the weirder concepts as a way to explore the ceiling of skill design.

However... we are at the point, where the question is if these changes would make the game too radically different, and if they wouldn't be better left for a future project?

We would basically have to redesign the entire rest of the game again, which probably isn't worth it at this point. We want to finish the game, and you do want a finished game, too, rather than have us remake everything from the ground up every few years.

Identity – Going Forward

These concepts aren't made in vain, though, since the Reflection Entities above evolved into a different concept: Selecting a character to do an action. A concrete example would be how the choice system is shown in Disco Elysium.

We are still going to experiment, but for Identity, this means that you might get some spirit entities in the UI to choose from that represent aspects. For example: Corvolin and the Demon could be two of these entities that represent choices.

How exactly this will play out, we are still figuring out.

Updates – Going Forward

Our next milestone will be to release the reworked game engine, as at the very least, it is made with Godot 4, but also has a robust and generic event structure. Basically, every event can hold sub-events, which all remember where they are. So, if a content update has an existing day changed, the game will be able to figure out on its own where to take you.

Future content will probably focus on advancing the plot, given that we can have new functionality show up sooner rather than later.

We hope to be pushing out a build either in February or in March.

To finish off this post, we'll leave you with one of our upcoming sprites: