Starless Umbra Wrapped 2025

Thanks a bunch for your attention and interest this past year! I wanted to take a moment to quickly recap what happened and what's coming. Some highlights for me though:

• The team has grown - SaKo has been helping for a few years but we've collaborated closely beyond portraits to enhance the battle system, improve the game HUD, and more. FJLink joined to help with that next level of polish to the sprites and long-time collaborator Brandon M. (Trepang2, Heroes of Umbra) returns to help out with providing original music to the game.

• 427 code commits across the year - It was a bit of a slow start, but I feel like I'm making decent, steady progress (again, I only really have time to work on this nights and some weekends as I have full-time work/family commitments.)

• Full localization support - I want the game to reach a wide audience, so building tools and infrastructure that work seamlessly with my game's cutscene engine to support this is important to me.

• Clearer direction for the game's plot - Writing is hard. I hope I'm getting better at it, or at the very least identifying when things aren't working much sooner.

2025's Year In Review

Rough Starts

The first half of the year was spent reconciling some plot changes to the ending of Act I and redoing a lot of Act II, trying to salvage what I had. I'm sure you're sick of me linking it by this point, but I touched on this in the devlog from about six months ago.

View store page Following this devlog, I've started doing these monthly updates. The cadence gives me plenty of time to reflect on what I've done, plan for the following month, and try to build some accountability. These started on the blog, but I prefer having them on the steam page. Maybe they can be on both, but uploading the same content in two places feels tedious. I'll briefly link the updates and recap each here if you missed any:

June

Act 2 improvements, cutscene reworks, gutting a redundant puzzle.

July

Act 2 work: more Reene, cleaning up boss battles, improving game combat and puzzle usability.

August

view FJLink (aka Pipasdefranilla or Fran) joined to help with sprites! Game quality immediately goes up as the main cast gets running animations. New cutscenes. (PS, buy a shirt!)

September

view Work at this point pivoted to refining existing content. The idea is that instead of steamrolling ahead on more story, it's worthwhile to take a step back and make sure the fundamentals are sound: is combat fun, does the game look presentable enough visually, is the game adequately outlined, is it ready for localization, does it support a variety of setups and playstyles?

October

view Continuing the refinement train, I improved the battle HUD, made a dynamic settings menu to easily configure settings options, added tutorial support, and more. I began recording footage for a new trailer. (I need to re-record most of this for the English version still...) One miss here is I thought I'd be ready to announce a demo date soon.

November

view What seems to be an engine bug caused havoc on development. Despite dozens of late nights trying to get a trailer in order, I ended the month with little to show. Amalia's new portrait and the sprite updates from SaKo and FJLink respectively came out amazing.

December

You're reading it right now! And I'm pleased to report, there's been lots of movement. I downgraded Gamemaker and haven't bothered to upgrade. 😤

Localization Pipeline

I've removed most of the hardcoded English text. In addition to story scenes, which are sequenced in rough plot order (it's sort of semver -style, but I'll talk about it more later), identifying speakers, tutorials, and so on, are now localized. The stylized vertical text also got an overhaul for Japanese, since it's not enough to simply rotate the text, it needs to handle vertical text rendering differently. And IYKYK but it's not enough to simply add a newline after every character.

I've added translation approve functionality, review queues, and context notes affordances as well. These small quality-of-life changes hopefully make this pleasant to use.

Game Experiments

These are things I'm testing and looking for feedback.

• Stab skill rework - Stabbing adds a stack of the Marked debuff to enemies (increased crit chance). Stab will instead become Double Strike if three stacks are on the enemy. Leaping on said enemy with 2+ stacks will stun them.

• Dynamic Combat BGM - I'm working with Brandon on this one. Battles can have their own intros/themes/outros which are more intense versions of the field/exploration music. These are tempo sync'd to make their inclusion and transition cleaner. Field music position is also saved.

• Exp and Money Drop - This will probably be gated behind passives, but enemies can conditionally drop money/items/exp to collect mid- or post-combat.

  

• Dodging and Timed hits - More ideas to spice up mid-combat.

Japanese Trailer

I recorded a trailer for a few festivals in Japan. Shoutouts to えなじ～ for helping with the localization work. I'm waiting to see if I get any bites before sharing these on socials.🤫

Steam Playtest Submission, Game Build Pipeline

Soon after steam approves the new playtest builds, I'll announce dates for an open playtest. As part of this work I've built a pipeline to automate game updates, which builds the app in "Demo" mode, compresses game data, removes unused assets, and pushes it all to steam. It's a bit tedious to worth automating a bit to save time in the future.

Act II Scenes

There is one outstanding scene in Act II that I'm not totally sold on. It's paced incorrectly within the context of the climax of the act, so I'm shuffling it around and giving it its own breathing room.

New Music

Brandon has been hard at work at some original tracks for the Act I areas. It feels great to work together and finally start to have original, cohesive tunes throughout the game. I can't wait to share these.

Notable Fixes

• Fixed a day-one bug with screenshake and screen panning. This manifested itself in jerky camera motions after battles, as the game couldn't support both in parallel.

• Moving blocks and toggling switches no longer suddenly put the game in "cutscene" mode for a half a second.

• Enemies won't move to the same tile.

• Addressed some issues with changing then quickly entering menus causing crashes.

Here's to 2026!

There are some exciting things in the works, but instead of waiting around for those I'm going to start the year knocking out more bugs, sharing a playtest with you, and gathering more feedback to make sure the changes made to the game feel right. On the plot/outlining front, I'm hoping to make more headway into drafting out dialogue for Act 3's scenes.

I'll continue to update you as I chip away at everything. As always, thank you for reading and I wish you a wonderful 2026.

-Andrew