As GLaDOS said in the trailer: It's been a loooong time. How have you been?

First off, the silence over here is my fault. Instead of writing updates outside of Discord, I kept working on the game in silence. To address this issue, I want to try to at least compile what I did in a week and just copy & paste it here. After all, there is no reason to force you over to Discord just to read my commit messages.

Now on to the more exciting things, because we did some cool things.

We left November 2025 with two biomes (I think) done, which are levels 6 to 15. At the end of February 2026 we finished all remaining levels, which included updating the first five levels to our current workflow. The levels are no longer in a purely blocked-out state, but about 90% finished gameplay-wise. That means the monsters scale according to difficulty, we placed loot and pickups so that they fit the levels better, and put down all the environmental objects to throw around. Going over all of these allowed us to tweak a bunch of levels which were too easy, boring, or difficult.

Let's have a small showcase of some later levels. They still look bland, because we haven't done the visuals yet, and the graphics you see are also still very baseline and unpolished. The three levels we have here are Drone Mainframe, Foundation, and Resort.
During the blockout phase the Resort in particular was a real bummer. The rock was just a round pebble and the monster a lump that was too easy to defeat. Now the resort is a hollowed-out asteroid with these artificial biomes inside.

One thing we currently put on hold are the level gimmicks. These were unique things for each level like a rock shredder in the stardust mine or using the zen minigame to calibrate weather towers, and if you do it right it rains cats. The problem was that making these gimmicks was no fun and it took a long time as well. On average it took me 3–4 work days to make one whole level. Without them I was able to make the more complex levels in two days. Sometimes I was even able to make two simple levels in one day. The plan now is to only add gimmicks which we can use multiple times. The rock shredder is a good example that can reasonably be placed in many levels, since there are quite a lot of caves.

After the levels were finished we did a bit of bug fixing, and last week we started implementing the story logic. Originally we thought it would take about 2–3 months to implement all story arcs. But about two weeks later we had already finished the logic for 7.9 story arcs, while being slowed down massively by improving our workflow and spreadsheet parsing.

I'll give you a screenshot of the spreadsheet we've made to figure out where we have essential dialogs and story branches:
Yes, I keep it blurry on purpose. I am already dropping a lot of spoilers everywhere. Anyway, the rows with a purple color are already done. The biggest part of the story arcs will be the dialogs, and we will need a lot of them. We think that the logic for all arcs could be done by the end of April (which is a rather pessimistic date), and afterwards we will spend until August doing nothing but writing dialogs. August to October (I think) will be all about art, and afterwards we will work on making the game ready to play.

That's all so far. Have a good one.