Less Miserables #Devlog December 2025
I should probably do a end-year round up, but honestly this month has been so busy it can fill a post by itself!
Briefly, this year we finished 3 months of art dev, went to Paris (!), did our first voice over recording session in July during the Edinburgh Fringe, made a fully playable but janky demo of Act 1 with just sketch assets. Then everything went quiet for nearly 6 months while Lucy and Elena were working on other projects. We sponsored the amazing AdventureX in London in November, meeting many amazing developers, speakers, lovely people and even some fans of The Protagonish (which is currently in the Steam Winter Sale!!). Since then, everything has gone light-speed and it's been both amazing and a bit overwhelming!
The cautious aim was to basically finish Act 1 before the end of the year, with all the near-final art and animations, and working logic and puzzles. And we are there!
It's been a hell of a lot of stuff to put together: looking at the Act 1 demo folder, it looks like we have around 2,500 files in the build, most of these individual frames of animation. But a lot of this work has been forward looking, since the main walking characters are all in Act 1, and their costumes and walk cycles are now done. There are a lot more characters, in Acts 2 and 3 but actually around the same amount of animation, so Elena's made good headway on this. And the file count is before we add most of the voice acting - likely around 800 lines still to record.
But it is looking amazing! All the backgrounds are done, with separate layers and lightmaps, all the character poses are done, and about 90% of their animations. We got people to playtest the game in a pub at GameDevEd last week, and had great feedback from about 6 people, who all finished the whole thing! Average playtime was around 15 minutes, bang on, and it was great to hear people laugh, and find little bugs to fix.
That's also without one major puzzle (that I didn't get time for this week) and the Heads Off card mini-game, so the demo should be at least 20min when it's all done. We've got early layout sketches too!
But much longer if you want to explore the dialogue options, play multiple rounds of cards, or hunt for little easter-egg jokes on the gravestones. I'm still a little nervous about the total run time, as it's not something I want to pad out my making obtuse puzzles or making people running needlessly between scenes once they know the solution.
We are also gearing up for the a bunch of events and deadlines for the new year. We'll be showing off the demo at Pocket Gamer Connect in London in January, Debug Games Festival in April in Norwich, but also a bunch of other events and showcases that have deadlines coming up. That means we need gameplay footage, the press kit looking good, and finally, the trailer!
While the art for Act 1 is done now, we wanted the trailer to have some of the more epic scenes from later in the game, so behold: the barricades!
The teaser trailer will be out next month, we've lined up some amazing music and it's going to be... A bit over the top? Hopefully in a fun way!
All this is building towards our Kickstarter planned for April, and we have a bunch more things geared up to promote this in spring. It's going to be busy! So follow us here, on social media, or even wishlist on Steam!
