Hey once again Kinoko fans!

It’s the afternoon of the 31st of December here in England, which first and foremost means my Christmas break from work is sadly coming to an end. Boo! But, perhaps more importantly, I suppose it means it’s time for a recap, since I didn’t get the opportunity to write one last year. In this blog post, then, I’ll be having a look over all the things we achieved in 2024, and offering a glimpse into some of the things we hope to achieve in 2025.

Now, I know it’s a crap way to start a blog post that’s supposed to highlight our successes and accomplishments(!), but there’s no other way for me to put it: 2024 has been the worst year of my life, and it hasn’t been the most kind to Chelsey either. We both went into 2023 with enormous ambitions for Kinoko and the Cult of Galaxy, and for the most part we achieved them. We made massive progress on our game (even despite having to largely start over, when we made the switch from Unity to Godot), and we grew a community from nothing. Due to the way in which 2023 ended, however, my only ambition for 2024 was to somehow survive and force myself out of bed every morning or else lose the house. I didn’t have any plans for the project. I didn’t much see how I could ever work on it again. I suppose it’s fortunate, then, that distracting myself through my work on the game turned out to be more helpful for me than I found grief counselling to be.

(Chelsey, meanwhile, has found herself dealing once more with the ghosts of her past which is, in itself, a special kind of hell. I’m not going to go into that in this blog – but if you’re here poking about for information, I suggest leaving this website and looking up the definition of the phrase ‘flying monkey’.)

Still, you know what they say about clouds and silver lining – and that’s why, as the year’s drawn to a close, I’ve tried to look at it this way: whatever 2025 has in store, it can hardly be worse. Not when the worst thing that could possibly have happened to me has already happened. There’s a certain feeling of invincibility in that if nothing else. And hey – with some luck, 2025 might very well be better! Although 2024 hasn’t been a great year for us, we’re still both very proud of everything we did manage to achieve, even if it wasn’t quite as much as we’d have liked to have been able to do, under kinder circumstances.

So let’s think positive! What exactly did we achieve in 2024?!

On the game development side of things, I think the big standout thing for us has probably been the reinvention of combat and the starsprites. These are still a work in progress, and as I’ve mentioned before we still don’t actually have a game design document yet (though we do have a private wiki now, which is a step in the right direction), but we feel – in all of our designing and playtesting recently – that our game’s starting to come into its own now with more of an identity. Starsprites have unique effects now, which we’ll be talking about in more detail next year, and the various combat styles have each come a long way.

Something else that I’m particularly happy with is our objectives system; it basically allows us to start adding all sorts of conditions and switches, and ultimately it will enable us to implement a narrative, ensuring that X happens before Y which ultimately leads to Z and so on. It’s super simple in its execution, but versatile, so I can’t wait to keep building on that and seeing what we can do with it.

We got Chelsey up and running in Godot herself this year, enabling her to take the reins on level design and enemy/obstacle placement and stuff like that, which she’s better at than me. That means that my focus is more on creating the mechanics, whilst she thinks about the best way to actually implement them. (I often find that a lot of her best ideas for the game are in her head. She brings them up occasionally, speaking of them as if they’ve always been the plan, but they’re usually news to me, which probably does highlight the urgency of our need for a game design document!)

Oh, and I’m really happy with how the skills/upgrades system is coming along too! That’s something Chelsey’s designed and I’ve been recently focused on implementing. It’s a recent thing, and there’s still a good bit of work to be done on it, but we’ve settled firmly now on starsprites being upgradeable rather than Kinoko himself. We’re calling it a ‘friendship’ system, the idea being that it is Kinoko’s bond with the starsprites that drives the acquisition of new powers.

We’ve been talking a lot recently about our plans to release our first playable prototype in early 2025. Although we’re being quite vague about the whens and the whats, we’re pretty set on it now, and we do plan to launch something playable by the end of the first quarter. We’re focused for the moment on all the things that our demo can’t possibly release without, like further combat improvements and more of the starsprites’ abilities. Once it’s out there, we can build on it. It’s not going to be a ‘public’ demo – so don’t expect to see it on Steam or Game Jolt or anything like that – but at the same time we want a wide range of opinions too, especially from our longer-term followers, so I don’t believe we’re planning to gate it behind a Patreon subscription either. We’ll probably just drop it on Discord and have done with it. The main thing is to release it and not overthink it. Once we’ve done that, we can iterate and improve it.

And that, right there, is what leads us into our plans for 2025. Our first playable demo is our number one priority. We’re not ready to put a precise date on it, but the release of our demo is something we’d really like to have done by the end of winter if we can manage it, or by the end of spring at the very latest. We don’t know yet what we expect our demo to cover, nor how long we expect it to take to complete, nor any of that. Like I said, the purpose of the demo is simple: release something, and work from there.

So, then! All being well, we’ll have more news about our demo in our very next blog post. We’re both enjoying what little remains of our Christmas break at the moment, but we’ll be back to business later this week and hard at work on the Kinoko and the Cult of Galaxy game once more. You can expect more news about our demo very soon, along with details of how you can be part of the committee that helps us shape it.

But until then, happy new year!