Dev Update: December 2025

As we begin to close out the year, we wanted to take a moment to sit down and look back on some of what the past twelve months have brought, and share a bit of what’s ahead.

It’s been a big year for the team, filled with some fun reveals, experiments, closed playtests, and a lot of foundational work that’s really starting to come together in some exciting ways.

And honestly, seeing how many of you share your excitement for every screenshot, every concept piece, and everything else we share has been a huge motivator for us.

So let’s take a look at where we’ve been, where things stand today, and where we’re headed next.

Looking Back

At the start of the year, our partnership with Haenir was still in its early days. Blight: Survival began as a passion project built by Mads and Ulrik at Haenir Studio, whose original vision set the tone and captured so many people’s imaginations. That early work is what made all of us fall in love with Blight in the first place.

The first task at hand was all about taking the foundation built by Haenir and laying down the structural groundwork needed to support a much larger, long-term project with expanded resources. It wasn’t the kind of progress that shows up immediately in screenshots, but it was essential. The careful, methodical phase that ensures Blight can grow into the experience it’s meant to become.

Since then, we’ve been able to start sharing more of that work with you.

The Marshlands

Steam post imageYour first look at one of our most atmospheric biomes. Bleak, heavy, and rooted in our alternate 14th century world.

We followed that up with our first in-game footage since the reveal, featuring the Wailing Tree, a key landmark within the Marshlands.

Dungeons

Steam post imageWe also shared a glimpse at the darker underbelly of Blight: tight spaces that increase tension and the kinds of encounters you’ll face.

Concepts and Visual Exploration

Throughout the year, we’ve also shared a number of concept pieces from Ana and Mathieu. This kind of work quietly shapes the look and feel of the game before anything makes it in-engine. It’s how we align as a team on the tone, mood and artistic direction before our 3D artists bring those ideas to life.

One of those is an early concept of the Wailing Tree, before it made its way into the game.

Alongside that, we shared one of Ana’s explorations for the Nightstalker. While this formidable enemy is already present in the dev build in an early form, its final visual design is still being worked through. Internally, the Nightstalker has become one of those encounters we want players to approach with caution. This concept is part of the ongoing effort to make sure its eventual look matches the role it’s meant to play.

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Beyond the Marshlands

We also marked the spooky season with another in-game clip, this time showcasing a seaside environment built by the team, along with a brief enemy encounter. It was a small moment, but one that helped highlight the range of environments that we’re building toward.

Dev Blogs, AMA’s and Ongoing Conversations

Along the way, we also published a few dev blogs like this one, digging into how different parts of Blight come together behind the scenes. We also ran our first Discord AMA, where we tackled a lot of your questions directly and shared more context around the project. (We’ll link those here for anyone who missed them!)

[dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1774880/view/502836144430383218"][dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1774880/view/832716485248948024"][dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1774880/view/577134669776028691"][dynamiclink href="https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1774880/view/545603039390598280"]As the team grew to include several dozen devs specializing across different areas, aligning everyone around the vision became a major focus.

Making the Foundations Scalable

As the team expanded, an important focus this year was making sure everyone had a deep, shared understanding of the foundations Blight is built on. What began with Mads and Ulrik needed to scale across a much larger team, spanning multiple disciplines like programming, game and level design, combat, systems, visuals and more.

This work supported several key internal milestones throughout the year, including visual benchmarking, combat foundations and core runs. This concept art from Mathieu, of a late-game area (which also serves as the current main menu screen) has helped keep the team focused throughout, acting as a visual anchor to translate ideas into something tangible everyone could work toward.

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What We Focused on This Year

2025 was the year where we focused on the foundational systems and tools which will support Blight’s development in the long term, the parts that make everything that we’re creating scalable and able to grow into the experience you’ve been waiting for.

A major part of this was bringing Blight’s core gameplay pillars to life. We worked on the core fundamentals of melee combat, enemy behavior, and environments, ensuring they all support the tension, grit, and brutality this medieval world demands.

In parallel, we worked on shaping the core mission experience: how you navigate through a run, how challenges escalate, how resources matter, and how choices impact your survival.

We also made significant strides in worldbuilding and visual identity, led by our Principal Art Director Pascal and his team, where we refined the look and tone of the human factions like the Writhen, environments, and building the tools needed for the team to create more varied and reactive spaces at scale. Check out this concept piece from Ana, as she explored ideas for some heavy writhen armour sets.

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With the addition of these new systems, we reached an important turning point this year: Blight became something we could actively test and play. Having these foundations in place means the next phase is all about going deeper. Refining systems, expanding content, and gradually opening the doors for more players to get hands-on with what we’ve been building.

Recent Progress

As level design expanded the playtest areas, we’ve been crafting interior spaces that give us room to experiment with encounter pacing, tighter combat, environmental storytelling, and player movement.

At the same time, we’ve been exploring early gameplay systems and features. This includes the dismemberment system, first showcased in a dev blog earlier this year, which is a collaborative effort between our 3D and technical artists, including Léo and Hugo who’s worked on the in-game implementation.

We’ve also been developing the wounds system, adding layers of visual and tactical feedback to combat while bringing more variety to the enemies you encounter.

Léo, our Senior 3D Character Artist, has been leading much of this work, and he’s put together timelapse showing his process sculpting and texturing some of these wounds, if you want a closer look, check them out here:

Environmental storytelling is another key focus. Our 3D Artist Alexandre has been experimenting with how the Blight spreads in the world, and how it can add atmosphere to each area.

..and of course combat remains a central focus. We want every strike to feel grounded and weighty, so encounters carry real tension. The team has been iterating on these core systems constantly, ensuring that each hit, parry, and enemy interaction feels meaningful.

We’ve also been iterating on combat moments like finishers, the kind of moves you’ve seen in the trailer, such as that iconic shield bash. Check out this very early version of a Nightstalker finisher, created by our Principal Animator Richard, to get a sense of the visceral, weighty interactions we’re aiming for in every encounter. Everything in this clip is still in development, from the animations and enemy to the VFX.

GIF compressed for size.

We know you’re eager to see more combat, and while we originally planned for a bigger reveal by year’s end, we’re taking a little extra time to make it shine. Keep an eye out in 2026, there’s plenty more to come!

Community Corner

This year, your support has blown us away. From fan art and memes to Discord events and community milestones, even a community contest that turned one of your ideas into a fully realized official concept art piece by our concept artist Ana, you’ve made the world of Blight feel alive long before release.

One of our favorite moments was a community contest created purely for fun and creativity.

We invited members of our Discord to share ideas for a Blight-inspired armour set, with the winning concept being turned into an official piece of concept art by our concept artist, Ana. Community members submitted ideas and voted on their favorites, and the winning design, the “Mad Knight” concept by Feckless Cur, stood out.

While this piece was created as a celebration of the community and isn’t a guarantee of in-game content, we’re excited to finally share Ana’s interpretation of the Mad Knight here. We’ll also be creating a limited number of prints to send to a few lucky community members on Discord. More details on how to enter will be shared there soon, so make sure to join so you don’t miss out!

This year, our Discord community has grown to over 44,000 strong, and we love seeing all the ways you bring the world of Blight to life, even before playing. Here are some of our favorite highlights:

r/Usual-Television-269 from Reddit created a 3D printed and painted model of the player character from our reveal trailer. It’s incredible to see such dedication and talent!

Conlash from our Discord built their own 3D model of the Swelter, based on a piece of concept art from Ana that we’d shared previously. Insane!

We’re also seeing content creators making videos, and other media to share Blight with their communities, helping spread the world we’re building far and wide, and we truly appreciate it!

Looking Ahead

2026 is shaping up to be an exciting year for Blight: Survival. This year, we started to break the silence and pull back the curtain, giving you a first glimpse of what we’ve been building, and that was just the beginning. In the new year, the reveals, playtests, and content will only ramp up.

The team will continue refining core systems, animations, audio, expanding the world, and deepening melee and ranged combat, and encounter design to make each run feel more tense, and rewarding. We’re also laying the groundwork for a solid co-op experience, replayability, and progression so that every decision matters. While there’s still a ton of work ahead, every step brings us closer to sharing the world we’ve been building.

And yes, public playtests are coming in 2026! If you want to get in on our ongoing closed playtests, you can sign up through our Playtest Squad at https://bhvr.com/playtest

From all of us on the Blight: Survival team, we want to wish you very happy holidays and a happy new year, and we can’t wait to welcome more of you into the world in 2026!

-The Blight: Survival Team