Hey Kinoko fans!

It’s December tomorrow, which means it’s time for yet another monthly update on all things Star Heretic. Without further ado, let’s get into what Chel and I have been up to over the past thirty days…

One very exciting thing we’ve been working on is our game’s first boss encounter. Without wanting going too deep into spoiler territory – we’d rather you just experience it for yourself, when our next demo is released! – Chel’s come up with the outline for a really dramatic, three-phase boss to mark the end of the game’s Fungaia chapter. This isn’t going to be a boss at whom you can just throw punches and hope for victory. Across its three distinct segments, this encounter will put everything you’ve learned about Kinoko and his starsprite companions to the test.

At the same time as designing the encounter, the rest of Chel’s focus has been on producing some of the assets for it. Mainly, she’s been focusing on the background art for the scene’s environment, though she hopes to hire a second artist to assist her soon and take on some of the busywork so she can spend more of her time designing. We thought we had someone for a little while – they turned out to be an art thief who also uses generative AI and lies about it! – but we’re hopeful we’ll find an honest, talented human replacement soon enough.

Whilst Chel’s been doing that, I’ve been busy working on some of the boss encounter’s necessary mechanics. The good thing about having a pre-designed level to work from is that I’ve been able to ask Chel to drop in notes on what she wants to happen and where. There are things that happen during the encounter, for instance, such as exploding platforms, and ledges that Kinoko automatically slides down with no way of climbing back up, so I’ve been working on those, at the same time as working on loads of the other stuff that needs doing in time for our game’s next demo release.

Just this past couple of weeks, we’ve been trying to make better use out of our team Asana subscription to try and come up with a better approach to project management. Something I’ve personally always found myself struggling with is knowing what exactly I should be working on next, in order to be working towards our goals most efficiently. That’s why I spent a fair bit of time this week going through our game’s design and breaking up some of the functionality I haven’t covered yet into a large number of project areas and individual tasks.

In addition to the other work I’ve been doing recently, I also spent a few days this month working on a new merchandise shop for our website, since we had to shut down our original, Shopify-based one several months ago. In our previous update on the subject, I mentioned that the cost of the Shopify subscription had become untenable, since we were spending more on the subscription itself than we were earning back in sales. I figured that we could cut our costs dramatically by building our own shop, so that’s what I set about doing this month. I have everything complete as far as the shopping basket so far.

I still have a little bit of work to do integrating one or more checkouts. This is the one thing I won’t be do myself from scratch, since it’s safer and generally just better on both the customer’s side and ours to integrate with a trusted solution like PayPal or Stripe. It’s not my number one priority, what with the game and all, but hopefully I’ll get it finished sometime in the next couple of months.

Chel already has some nice new sticker sheets ready to sell, when it’s finished. If you want one of these sticker sheets, featuring the Star Heretic himself, make sure you keep an eye out for an announcement when they go on sale in the new year!

Anyway, that’s about everything I have to update you all on for this month. Hopefully next month we’ll have even more to tease about the boss encounter we’re working on, even if we do want to do our best not to give too much away. Since it’ll be our last blog post of 2025, we’ll likely also have more to say about our general plans and ambitions for the game and the wider Cult of Galaxy project as we head into 2026 too.

Until next time!