Spring 2026 Update: New Demo & New Trailer

Greetings from Soup Island! It’s been 6 months since our last development update, and a lot has happened in that time. Let’s dive in!

New Demo

Hello Again has a public demo available on Steam! You can download it here:

Hello Again Demo This demo features the game’s first chapter, with about 2-4 hours of sweet, puzzle-y goodness to sink your teeth into!

New Trailer

Hello Again was recently featured in Thinky Direct, an indie game showcase all about showing off new and upcoming puzzle games. To prep for this momentous occasion, we created a new trailer for the game.

View store page This is the longest trailer we’ve made for the game, so we decided to write a script that would explain the basic loop of the game in extremely clear and understandable terms. I think this is the best representation so far of how it actually feels to play the game. Glad we were able to inject some humor into it as well!

Miscellaneous Updates

The last 6 months have been dominated by playtesting and polishing the demo. As a result, much of my work has trended towards the “kinda boring” end of the gamedev spectrum. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the more interesting bits:

Environment Art

I gave some much-needed attention to some of the more placeholder-esque corners of the game in preparation for the demo:

Dialogue Portraits

All characters in the game have a full set of dialogue portraits, co-created by myself and Agnes (Hello Again’s extremely talented art contractor). Surprisingly, creating the artwork itself was the easy part. The harder aspect was going through every line of dialogue in the game and assigning the correct portrait to it, to match the vibe of what each character is saying. That process took literal months to complete.

Here are some of my favorite portraits from our newest batch:

Music

The game’s composer, Michael Darling, has also been hard at work prepping for the demo. He did an incredible job of taking a handful of spare sketches and expanding them out to fit all sorts of different locations and needs within the game.

I feel unspeakably spoiled to have such gorgeous and fun music to accompany my silly little indie game. Idk about y’all, but I’m personally counting down the days until Michael releases this music as an album so that I can instantly add it to all my playlists!

Settings Menu

The last 4 weeks have mostly been dedicated to creating a new settings menu for the game! I’m just putting the finishing touches on this menu, and I expect to introduce it via a new demo patch very soon!

I always try to theme my menus after physical objects. And what better object for a game menu than a game boy?

As you can see, none of the settings actually work yet. Instead, my goal was to fully build a robust menu that will scale with the game as I continue to build out new features, then hook up each individual setting. Although most of the settings shown in the video above are many months away from being built, it’s cool to see that there’s a colorful menu for them to inhabit when they’re eventually ready for release!

Fun fact: the sound effects for inserting and removing cartridges were captured from my very own GameBoy Advance and my authentic Mario Kart Super Circuit cartridge!

Bugs 🐛 bugs 🐜 bugs 🐞 bugs 🐝 bugs 🕷️ bugs

This game has so. many. bugs.

Or, I should say it had so many bugs. Many of them are now safely squashed beneath my game development boot. But there are still some cockroaches crawling around inside the demo, so if you happen to spot any, please let me know via the in-game bug report button!

Here are some highlights from my recent stint as an exterminator:

• I rebuilt the game’s click-to-move pathfinding system so that you can actually navigate throughout all of the game’s areas via mouse without getting stuck

• I squashed a bunch of issues with the game’s UI, where you could spam button presses to make the whole thing freak out very easily

• I reworked countless scripts to fix a bug that only appeared when returning to the main menu and then returning to the game

• I implemented keyboard/controller support in several menus that were previously mouse-only

• I defeated some spooky miscellaneous bugs that would get your character stuck and generally ruin your life

But alas. There is one bug which is currently making my life a living heck. This, my most formidable foe, is the “7% bug”. I have yet to slay him.

The 7% bug appears on certain devices when loading the game. Basically, when you start or load a file from the main menu, you’ll be taken to a loading screen that gives you a percentage as the game loads. For a lot of lower-spec devices, the game will crash when this loading bar sits around 7%.

It took some outside help to figure out what was going on here, but I’ve determined that the cause is a good old-fashioned memory issue. Basically, the game uses a lot of high-resolution textures in order to present clean, crisp-looking graphics on all displays, including 4k monitors. Turns out that high-resolution textures take up a lot of RAM, and if your computer doesn’t have enough RAM to hold all those textures, it’ll just crash the game. It immediately became imperative that I create some graphics settings, so that players can load up smaller-sized textures based upon their computer’s visual RAM capacity (hence why I’ve been going so hard on making a settings menu).

My boot is hovering inches above the 7% bug, ready to squash it at any moment. I’m just trying to wrap up the addition of graphics settings to the game. So, if the demo crashes on your computer, expect a new patch sometime in the next week or two that will (hopefully) get the game running smoothly on your device! That is, unless this bug ends up being mightier than I anticipated…

Closing

That’s all for now! Play the demo, wishlist the game on Steam, and check back in a few months for the next development update!

Thanks, Dwight :)