New year, same grind.

First of all I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. Mine was pretty dang good. I got some comic books, game design books, and had a good time with the fam. Check out the awesome art the artist made above!

Now to get you all caught up on development with Age of the deep.

In June I worked on the first ever trailer I've ever done. This involved writing some lyrics and coordinating with the composer, Grant Holzhauer, and the voice actor, Dani Finn. Over the course of about two weeks I crunched learning to work with sequencer. For a first go I was happy with how it came out.

You can see it here. This is more of an early vibe trailer. I even specify it's all placeholder stuff at the start. I can't stress that enough that most of the assets are placeholders. This is a good first attempt and I'm excited to see what I do in my second trailer.

There's also a really helpful video that explains what Age of the Deep is over there on the channel. Feel free to take a look at that as well if you're curious enough.

In July I got the entire game to work with the gamepad. This includes the combat, all the menus, the dialogue, the shops. Everything. Start to finish it all works.

After that I started to dial in the dialogue system by getting even more art. I'm pretty happy with how it came out. We added a faction symbol to the dialogue that is just a minor detail, but I wanted to add it. It updates depending on the character speaking so. For example, each mermaid has a specific faction in their society they belong to, the pirates have their own symbol, and the island survivors have their own as well.

I also did a bunch of skits throughout the second half of 2025 where the actors sent me some lines to practice with that helped me get the dialogue system working how I wanted it to. Those videos are on the tube as well.

Then in September things got a little crazy. I noticed coupling errors in my blueprints. This ballooned memory usage drastically. I thought I had done a better job with organizing my code but it felt like being a sneaky gremlin and came back to bite me.

From then till the end of the year I worked on nothing but refactoring trying to reduce the coupling errors. I didn't finish due to time constraints but I did manage to at least get the reference viewer to be legible.

I managed to get everything big prototyped and submitted to Indie Game Clinic for a test run to see where my weak spots were. Surprisingly he said it ran well. Unsurprisingly I had a lot of blind spots. I took notes though and already fixed the issue with the stuttering music by redoing the way that entire system works. Plenty more to do but that's just how it always is. I've still got to work on making the enemies better as well as working on the rogue. He wanted to play that one first and that was really cool to see. I poured all my hard work into the mage and the rogue is currently the most neglected class.

So she's on the list of things to work on this year. I've also got the sfx kit being worked on right now for a ton of things. That was another bit of feedback. I actually had sfx on my list for 2025 but that was the one item I failed to get done, so I started on that immediately this year.

We also managed to get a couple of really cool custom props made last year. The mermaid statues and some fruit came out really good. So work is being done regarding replacing those placeholders I mentioned above.

The last thing I want to leave everyone with is a look at is a look at the model for Susana. Our first quest giver. Susana will guide you through the early segments of the game in order to get the islands up and running again. We'll work to get the player character models to match her this year. So stay tuned for that!