Dreadwinter - November 2025 Devlog

Welcome

Hey! It's that time again, another Dreadwinter development update! There's quite a lot of small changes added to the game, alongside working on filling out the rest of the game's content, so let's go through it all.

Demo Updates

I recently released another update to the Dreadwinter demo, it's mostly bugfixes, but there's a few little things I added as well! Here's some mini patch notes:

Gameplay updates:

• Move speed increased by around 25%

• Added sprinting (hold Shift)

  • This is mouse and keyboard only right now, but the next update will add it for controllers

• You can buy a special coffee bean from the merchant on Wednesday evenings

  • This was already in the game, but the shop option was bugged (sorry!)

• You can now read books in the library

  • There's only one right now, but I'll be adding more over time

  • The library is located inside the observatory

On November 18, there was a brief period where the player's combat animations were broken in the demo, which was due to the sprinting animations messing with the sprite. This has been fixed, but if you were unlucky enough to be playing during that time and saw it, that's why!

From November 18-19 combat was broken altogether, so you probably wouldn't have noticed any issues with the player sprite in combat (what a day!ːsteamsadː)

There's a lot of bugfixes as well, I'll leave them at the end of the post if you want to check what's been fixed. If there's anything missing, let me know and I'll do my best to fix it!

I tend to push updates once there's a lot of things done, since it's a bit of a long process to update the demo, but they should happen regularly enough.

Gifting

I've added a gifting system into the game! In line with the spooky theme of the game, I made the gifting process slightly unusual. There's a gift box you can buy and place in the café, which is really a mimic.

Once per day, you can feed it a drink you make during your shift, and it will deliver it to a person of your choice. Each character has their own set of tastes, with drinks ranging from neutral, liked, loved, disliked and hated. You'll have to do a bit of sleuthing to find out what they like!

I'll also add some other ways to gift items to characters, it's just a matter of fitting it into the game.

Mail System

You can now receive mail! It's a pretty minor feature, but it should be useful from time to time.

New Locations

I'm currently working on filling out the rest of the town, hopefully by the end of the month all of Lunara will be explorable. There isn't too much to do, but it's still quite time consuming.

Here's some screenshots of the new places:

Kazuho's Home

Nought's Apartment

The Mayor's Manor

The Mayor's Manor is also the location of one of the seasonal events that happens in the game, which is what I'll be working on next!

Seasonal Events & Festivals

Each season has a few events and festivals going on, some are just for fun, and others will have practical value, such as things you can buy for the café and your other business ventures.

One example is The Murder of Mayor Moon, a fun little event during the spooky season. It's a murder mystery event, where the Mayor