End-of-Year Dev Update

Developer Update - Closing Out 2025

The game began as the idea of a single person almost two years ago. Small spark that quickly grew into something much bigger. Soon after, two brave souls dove into the project full-time, building the foundations of what Underkeep would become.

Over the past year, the team expanded with several wonderful people who stepped in to help. We are genuinely grateful for their contributions in art and music, which elevated the game far beyond what the two of us could have created alone.

What started as a compact retro project gradually evolved into a fully featured modern dungeon crawler - with class systems, unique races, reactive dialogues, a hand-built world, complex combat, animated spell effects, and hundreds of details that are easy to take for granted but had to be created from scratch. Throughout 2025, we added many things that were never part of the original scope, yet became essential to the experience we want Underkeep to be.

Release — When?

Early on, we hoped for a 2025 release. By now, it’s clear that would have been unrealistic. More importantly, it wouldn’t be fair to the game or to you.

We want to release Underkeep as a complete, polished, and enjoyable experience.

Our current outlook:

Showcase build - nearly ready. This early “alpha” will be shared with a small group of testers to gather first-hand feedback on pacing, combat flow, and general feel.

December & early 2026 - finishing the remaining locations, visuals, side content, and the game’s finale. These are important pillars of the adventure, and we don’t want to rush them.

Public release date announcement - once we’re absolutely confident we can commit. The unofficial internal target remains Q1 2026, but we won’t promise anything until the whole team is certain.

The last few months have been extremely productive - to the point where we often didn’t even have time to show everything that went in. But behind the curtain, the game has grown enormously: new biomes, new enemies, spell effects, Blood Mage class, interactive shop systems, dialogues reacting to your race and class, updated UI, improved animations, a new title theme, and more visual polish than we ever imagined adding at the start.

We’re proud of how far Underkeep has come and even more excited for the moment when you finally get to play it.

Thank you for your patience, support, and all the comments you’ve shared with us on Steam.

We wish you peaceful holidays, plenty of warm nostalgia, and we look forward to meeting you in 2026.

— The Underkeep Team