2026 Outlook & Dec 25 Update

Happy belated New Year!

Hope you all ‘slipped well’ into the new year, as we say in Germany!

Because the development process of Golembert is now entering its final (couple of) stages, we thought New Year would be a good opportunity to present to you our current outlook for 2026-27!

Our 2026 Outlook

The two major and most important plans this year are to:

• release our first official trailer & announce the release date of our demo in July (at best at Wholesome Direct 2026)

• release our demo in December (at best at Wholesome Snack 2026)

More minor but still important plans this year are:

• the live score recordings of (at least a big portion of) our soundtrack in March

• the start of our closed playtestings in late spring

• the start of our open playtestings in late summer

In 2027 we then plan to:

• participate in the February 2027 Steam NextFest

• announce our full release date in July

• release the game in the fourth quarter of 2027

Hope you are all as excited as we are for this!

Additionally to our outlook, here’s a short update on what we did last December and what we are currently working on:

What we did last month!

1. We playtested approximatley 36% of the game!

We playtested 36% of the game’s main quests for 6h 30m until we reached some immersion breaking bugs. Examples of bugs we encountered and fixed were:

• you lost your poker-like card game against Crane twice if you clicked the ‘accept loss’ button too fast (what)

• inventory tooltips sometimes didn’t close (because they didn’t recognize that the mouse already exited their trigger) when moving your mouse away

• some UI panels weren’t scaled accordingly when changing resolutions (because they weren’t anchored)

2. We added dialogue portraits for Helio, the Herbit, Susu, and Milly!

6/8 main quest relevant NPCs (+ Golembert) now have portraits assigned to their main quest dialogues! The NPCs portraits are final & will be assigned to their sidequests in the future. Additionally there are 3 sidequest relevant & 5 questless NPCs that still need their portraits. Then all portraits are done!

And what are we currently working on?

1. Making the game demo ready!

So far we focused more on the overall game but currently we are refining more demo-relevant things (meaning: mostly things you see/experience in the first 1.5h of the game). We also introduced a ‘soft stop’ to the demo by hindering NPCs from giving you quests from a certain point on. That way you can technically play the demo for as long as you want (since you can run your garden without quests too).

2. Rendering the house interior and reworking Golembert’s animations!

Because some functionalities were redundant/didn’t make it into the final game (for example having a garden layout desk were you can change the general layout of your garden instead of decorating it yourself), our current house interior isn’t up to date anymore.

Additionally we are finally reworking Golembert’s walk & idle animations!!!

And that’s it already for this month!

If you would like to playtest our game THIS SUMMER (well before its demo release!) to give us feedback AND get a chance to receive our game for free, you should consider following us on any social media so you do not miss the start of our beta playtesting program THIS YEAR!!!

xoxo Bertrand Bertington III, Baron of Bert

Haven't watched our last devlog about how we make our dialogue portraits?

Then be sure to check it out on YouTube via this link: