Cloudscape

Cloudscape Development, wrapping up 2025
3 months ago – Wed, Dec 31, 2025 at 02:26:34 PM

Hello all. The end of the year is here. This year has been quite the rollercoaster for me. I've gone through a lot of hardship (especially since the previous update) and honestly I'm kind of glad to be wrapping up this year and hopefully having a much better year to come. With that said, I'm going to cover what I've been working on since the last update. I'll just preface this by saying yes, the game is STILL in development. I'm not stopping. The game's scope is extremely big, but I'm chipping away at it. I hope these updates help you to see that the development is still moving along, even with a lot of road bumps in my way this year.

Skill Reward Artwork

I'll start with where I left off last update, the Skill Rewards. I've been working intermittently on the Skill Reward icons. I'm halfway through them now. There are 20 rewards per skill with 12 skills, so a total of 240 total icons need to be made. So I'm around 120 of the 240.

Marriage/Spouse

Moving on from skill reward stuff, I spent quite a bit of time locked in on getting the marriage/wedding/spouse features implemented. I'm happy to report that it's now all done! You can bring up the heart levels for 18 different villagers and then propose to them. When you propose you get to choose the wedding date. The venue will be the town square of your spouse's home island.

After the wedding event takes place, your spouse will immediately move to your island. Cloudscape is a dynamic style of game, so you only simply need a house as a requirement to assign your spouse somewhere to live. One interesting result of this dynamic style, is that your spouse will look for a place to sleep each night. Now, being a good partner, you'd likely want to place a nice bed down in your house for them to sleep in. Which they will absolutely do. But if you're a bad partner, well... they will begrudgingly sleep on the floor! This can lead to you losing relationship points with them. Things like this I like to keep flexible to allow you as a player the opportunity to have more impact over your environment and what happens in the game.

But if you treat your spouse well, you will unlock the ability to assign them tasks to do around your island. They can harvest crops, forage for items, care for your animals and more. Your spouse can also follow you around wherever you go, so you can always have them by your side.

Children

I haven't gotten around to implementing children just yet, however they follow a similar functionality as your spouse, where you can build your relationship with them to unlock new features. Much like your spouse, you can assign your children tasks to perform, so they don't just sit around idling and doing nothing. I'll be implementing having children into the game soon.

Events

I've also been busy working on various events that take place during Holidays. This includes Bug Catching, Fishing and the Chick Corral event that takes place during the Chick Festival. This mini-game is fully complete and implemented into the game.

Gravelston

More work has been put into the second villager island, Gravelston. I've finished all of the Blacksmith functionality where you can repair your tools and upgrade them at Sandy's Anvil. She can also crack a variety of Lodestones for you, which is the only way to get some of the rarer gemstones. Upgrading your tools will take Sandy several days to complete. A new feature is the ability to choose to have your upgraded tool mailed to you on completion. You have the option to go pick it up directly, or receive it in the mail.

I've been working on the building artwork for Gravelston as well. Here are some WIP shots of some of the various buildings in development:

Horses

An exciting feature I finally finished implementing is Horses! You will be able to raise a Baby Foal into a full grown adult Horse that you can ride. Once you equip it with a Saddle, you can not only ride the horse, but it doubles as a mobile storage container as well! You can stock the saddle full of items, and the saddle is fully accessible for crafting and cooking, so no need to worry about pulling items out. Just like with all storage, you can also lock it to prevent that from happening if you don't want it taking items from there!

A neat feature of the Saddle is that you can pick up items as you ride around on your horse, and items you put away will go into your Saddle Bag storage immediately when your own bag is full. This means it truly acts like a secondary storage system. While not riding the horse, you can also drop items directly into the bag for convenience.

Horses, like other animals can also follow you around. So you're free to ride it around, dismount it and then have it follow you if you want. Since horses still need to eat and drink, and Food and Water Troughs are not always available where you might be, you can always feed your horse an Animal Meal item which counts as it's food and water source for the day.

Stratus Island

I've been slowly putting some work into the third and final villager island, Stratus, as well. Here are some of the currently finished villager portraits for Stratus.

I don't want to go into too much detail about what Stratus holds in store, just to say that it's going to be very "magical". :)

Customization

I did a little detour to work on something else that I've put off for some time. That's character customization. Now, it's always been implemented for a long time, but I haven't really touched it in terms of adding more artwork or customization options. I recently build custom Aseprite scripts to help facilitate in the process of creating new hairstyles and faces for you to choose from. Since the Kumo sprite sheets have hundreds of frames of animation, it would take me ages to hand place every hair sprite on every frame to make just a single new hairstyle.

This script I made allows me to focus on only having to draw a handful of sprites per direction, and then I just push a button and it does all the work of repositioning and masking out sprites to fit perfectly on the character's sprite sheet. This took me quite a bit of time to fully put together, as I needed to get the position data for every frame and put it into the code, along with accounting for a bunch of other things. Even though this took a few days of work to do, I think the end result will be well worth it, as it's saving me possibly hundreds of hours of work doing it all by hand.

The end result is that I can now create completely new hair styles and faces for you to choose from, and it only takes me a couple of hours instead of entire days.

I plan to do this method for all of the clothing and accessories as well, so the time saving is exponential. For you as a player, you'll just see lots of fun accessories and hair styles to pick from, but for me as a solo developer, it's nothing short of a miracle to be able to even do it.

Looking Ahead

The development of Cloudscape has been a very long labor of love for me. I know the game is far behind schedule at this point, and all I can do is apologize for the delay. As a solo developer everything is on my shoulders. I went through quite a lot of personal and family issues in 2025, which certainly didn't help speed up the development of the game. Whenever there's a life emergency, or I get sick, I don't have anyone else to fall back on to keep development going. It's just me. But I'm pushing through and continuing on. I want this game finished more than anyone else could imagine. It's a true passion project for me. I've devoted countless hours and a lot of my own money into this project and I just want to see it completed.

I really truly wish I could proudly announce a release date for the game today, but due to the unforeseen things that pop into my life like I described above, it would be very naive of me to reveal a date when I know there is still more to do with the game and I can't guarantee nothing in my life won't get in my way. 

I'm currently trying to secure more funding to keep up full time development. It's my number one priority right now. I don't want to release an unfinished game to you as I don't want to disappoint you just to get something out. So as sad as it is for me to say, the release date will have to wait. I'm very optimistic for 2026, though, and the light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter every day.

Thank you all for your immense patience and positivity. You don't know how much it means to me to see people still supporting this project and excited to see it release. I will do my best to not disappoint.

Take care and I hope everyone has a great start to their new year in 2026!
 

-Koni

September Update! Progress being made. Streaming development!
7 months ago – Mon, Sep 01, 2025 at 09:28:26 AM

Hey everyone! It's actually been only a bit over a month now since the last update. (an improvement over many months between updates, I suppose! I actually had this update written up a while ago but just got busy and didn't record the footage for it)

I've been hard at work on developing Gravelston Island, the second villager island you will visit. I'm happy to report that ALL villager portraits for Gravelston have been finished!

I do plan to add a few more expression options for all villagers, but that will roll out a bit later. Right now I'm just focused on getting the primary expressions for all portraits completed.

I've also been working on the smaller sprite sheets for each villager. I've completed ALL OF THESE as well! (17 full villager sprite sheets, showing only a few with idle directions)

I've also been streaming the creation of the portraits and sprite sheets on YouTube and Twitch. Feel free to follow me on either one (or both!) if you'd like to watch me develop the game in real time!

As for the island of Gravelston itself, I've been working setting up all building placeholders, some villager waypoints, and overall detailing and decoration of the island itself. That's all a bit too work in progress at the moment for me to feel comfortable showing (it's rough), but that should come in the next couple of updates here.

What I can show, is the upper cave floor layout, and the cute little train that now runs through it! The train (also a WIP) travels around the island and into the upper cave floor. There is a purpose to the train but I don't want to spoil that, so just know it isn't just there to look nice. :)

(don't mind the very WIP town area or cave inside!)

I can also show the WIP mineral/fossil/artifact museum. It will have over 100 things for you to find and donate and will award you various prizes for each donation and also for completing entire sets. The dialogue and functionality for donating is all done, I just need to add the rewards and also finish the museum interior to look a lot nicer (this is just a rough layout with no detailing or special art added yet)

Gravelston also is home to Gravelston Gardens, which is the landscaping shop run by Cooper Clast. I've developed the terrain modification tools, which you can purchase to raise and lower your island's terrain to terraform it exactly how you want it to look. You can also purchase items that can fill your lowered divot areas with water to create your own lakes, along with various other terrain items. The shop also carries a wide variety of decorations for your island! You'll need to get your island up to a high enough quality Star Rating to meet the demands of some villagers, so you'll likely be stopping by here more than a few times.

With Gravelston comes more furniture options, including the Wooden Furniture Set and the Steel Kitchen Set which is now nearly completed!

Over to combat, I've added two new Glob variants, the Oil Glob and Fire Glob. When Oil Globs slam down to attack you, they also leave behind an oil patch on the ground. If you step in this you'll go sliding! The Fire Globs are much worse, as they will leave fire on the ground after slamming into it. The fire lasts for a few seconds and will damage you if touched. I'm soon going to also add the functionality of a Fire Glob slamming on to an oil patch to ignite it for a longer burn.

Oh yeah, and both the Fire and Oil Glob's abilities get cancelled out if they slam into shallow water! So you can use that to your advantage to get an upper hand. :)

Moving on to more general updates, the Town Board located on each villager island has now been updated and improved. The Town Board offers you a place to accept tasks from villagers in exchange for money and items. But now it also rewards experience points toward a skill. Each request is now linked to a specific skill, such as Fishing, Foraging, Woodcutting, etc. This is a great way to level up your skills quickly so you can unlock more Skill Reward Tiers!

Speaking of Skill Rewards, I've added a quality of life tool tip feature to the Skill Reward menus so you can easily see at a glance what each reward provides. I still need to do the icons for each Skill Reward here, but you can see some of the fun upgrades you can unlock.

I've also made sure it's easier to track exactly how much experience you have in any skill, as now the Skills menu displays both the progress bar toward the next level, and also the exact number of experience points you're currently at and how much more you need to gain. This is great for all those min/maxer specialists out there who really want to pump up their numbers efficiently. 

To top all of that off, you'll now see a little status indicator pop up over your head when you gain skill XP for all skills. This way you can see exactly where all your experience is coming from. Finally, I've just recently finished up the leveling up functionality, so now you can properly level up and see your accumulated experience push you to new levels!

Along with all this development, I've also continued to improve and optimize the game and try to make sure it will be as bug free as possible. I've added full keyboard only/controller support for the Crafting menu now, along with a few other UI elements that were missing it before. I'm making it a goal to ensure the game launches with full controller support and key rebinding options.

That's it for this update! I'll be continuing with the development of Gravelston for the rest of this month. The goal is to get it mostly wrapped up as soon as possible so I can move on to the final island (Stratus) and that will bring us much closer to a release. Thanks everyone for your continued patience and support. The feedback and comments have been quite wonderful and supportive and it really helps me as a solo developer to keep pushing to finish this game and not let everyone down.

I plan to stream more development over the coming weeks so if you want to see that, be sure to follow, but of course it's absolutely not necessary! I just want to share a little bit more of the game's development and talk with the community, so feel free to lurk or say hello.

Until next time!
 

-Koni

July Update! Catching everyone up on Cloudscape's development
9 months ago – Mon, Jul 07, 2025 at 12:03:43 PM

Hey everyone! It's been some time, but I'm here with a new update on the development of Cloudscape!

I've been working tirelessly on this game for the months since the last update. I want to actually make this update quick so I can get back to focusing on development, so I'm going to bullet point the development that's been done here since the previous update!

• Wimnim Island is nearly finished! This includes multiple shops, a ranch, a farm, an insect museum, a bait and tackle shop with fishing record chart, a carpenter's shop and more. There are currently 18 villagers inhabiting the island, each with their own routines, dialogue, personalities, and more. This is nearly finished, aside from adding some cutscene events and filling out more of the villager's liked/disliked items.

• Players can now complete projects around the island. Including a bridge repair, a cliffside staircase and upgrading their raft. More to come!

• Villagers can now travel to other villager islands and into different areas other than their own home island
• Chickens, Pigs, Cows and Sheep all can be raised from baby to adult and breeding system is in place with unique breeds/colors available

• Fences now have alternate styles available! For some fences you can choose between a repeating fence, alternating fence, or long fence. This determines the spacing of posts between tiles, allowing for a more interesting look. Fences also now have working gates you can place down, to open/close for accessing fenced in areas or allowing your animals to come in and out. There are currently 3 fence styles in the game with 3 alternate styles per fence. More to come!
• Animals can now follow you around! You can choose for one animal to follow you wherever you go. If you stay in one place for a while they will begin roaming around, but once you move too far they will run to catch up and follow you again. You can also send them home at any time.
• You can feed animals and give them treats directly

• Monster code has been revamped with some bugs fixed. I've also added a new monster, the Rolydillo, which will roll into a ball and attack you. Mud Globs have also been added, which will slam down and leave mud puddles behind, which slow you when you walk through them.
• For mining I've added 11 new minerals/gemstones. There are also 6 different Lode items which you can break open to obtain a variety of minerals/gems

• Revamped screen shake to be more consistent and feel better
• Added the Bomb item, which you can place down to blow up lots of stuff! The bomb can blow up trees, rocks, grass, and even soft cave walls. It of course can also damage enemies (and yourself) so be careful!

• Villagers can react to what colors of clothing you're wearing, what fragrance you have on, and more
• Some villagers wear unique outfits for holiday events
• Items crafted from recipes now automatically have their cost values based on the required ingredients and time/energy to create them
• Cloud Guide panels have been added to help you through your first playthrough of the game. These are basically like a tutorial, which you can disable in the game settings if you don't need them.

• All Holiday decorations/artwork have been finished!
• Lots of bug fixes and improvements to the audio system. There's now a limiter for repeat sounds to prevent noise distortion when too many of the same sound play at once.
• Item loading optimizations have been greatly improved. Using the Collections page to view hundreds of items now happens instantly instead of having a delay
• Fishing system had a MASSIVE overhaul to greatly improve the feel of fishing, and the fish behaviors. Fish now struggle more realistically, creating a fun tug of war type feeling while fishing. There is no mini-game for fishing, you just catch fish like you would IRL. They pull away and swim around fighting you while you reel. You need to relax on reeling when they pull hard or they will get away or break the line.

• All bait and lure works for fish properly now. There's a variety of bait and lure which can have different effects on fish biting behaviors.
• Added 21 Shipwrecked artifacts to collect from fishing!
• All Skill Rewards for fishing have been added and tested. This completes the fishing skill in the game. It's done!
• Limbo mini-games have all been finished/updated/improved. Limbo is now 100% complete as well. There are 6 different mini-games to play in Limbo
• Added Boomerangs! This is fully feature complete, with various Boomerangs, skill reward unlocks, and special abilities. There is a snake strike ability that throws the boomerang in a big S shape. There's also a quick tempo ability which rewards continuous hits by speeding up the boomerang each time up to 5 times. Boomerangs can also pick up items at a distance.

• Added Shields! You can now hold a shield out in front of you to protect yourself from front facing attacks and projectiles. Skill Reward unlocks give the shield the ability to stun monsters who melee attack your shield at the right time, and you can reflect projectiles by shielding at the right time.
• Added Sword skill reward unlock abilities. If you land consecutive hits with the sword you build up a charge which releases a big slash wave that wipes out everything in front of you. There's also a sword spin attack. Holding and releasing the sword will cause you to spin fully around, damaging everything around you.
• Finished the ocean/lake/puddle shader. Oceans now have crashing waves, water distortion and ripples. All water now has a nice animated edge that meets the land

What all this means is basically the first 10+ hours of the game are ready to go. With finishing Wimnim and pretty much all skills implemented, the last things left to finish the game would be the final 2 villager islands (which are in various stages of completion already) and more late-game things like marriage/having children.

There's also some work to do on the seasonal islands and seasonal dungeons. Finally, I need to finish up all of the promised Kickstarter rewards for things like monsters, villagers and furniture sets.

I can finally see the end of the tunnel on Cloudscape's development. It's hard for me to estimate exactly how much longer this last leg is going to take. All I can say is I appreciate everyone who has been patiently waiting for the game to release. I promise to you I'm working on this game non-stop. It's pretty much my only priority outside of taking breaks for a few hours for my hobbies and to reset myself. I understand I haven't been making these updates frequently enough and I apologize for that. I'm just trying to focus fully on the development but I understand that from the outside it looks like nothing is happening here on Kickstarter.

You're always welcome to follow me on various social media or join the discord, where I post more frequently as I'm just doing little quick updates or showing off what I'm working on at the moment. If you really want to know what I'm working on at any given moment you are free to message me here and ask, but please be nice about it! :)

I also would like to stream development soon, so if you're interested in seeing that, check the discord or twitter/facebook/bluesky social media accounts for updates on when that might happen.

Thanks everyone for your continued support and patience. I know that this game is way behind schedule but I'm working as hard as I can, and I'm happy that I can at least see the manageable chunk of game left to develop.

As for if the game will come to Switch 2 I'm unsure, but the game *should* work fine with a Switch 2. The game is still planned to release on all platforms that it was meant to release on.
 

~ Koni

2024 Cloudscape Development Wrap Up
about 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 10, 2025 at 12:58:33 PM

Hello everyone! Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a wonderful year! This post will wrap up everything I've been working on for Cloudscape since the last update. Speaking of holidays, I think that would be a good place to start off this post.

Holidays

With the holiday season wrapping up, I just wanted to show a bit of the Jolly Day décor and stuff I've been working on.

I also spent a day adding Snowmen to the game! This is just a fun little winter activity to do which I really wanted to add. You can find tiny snowballs randomly while digging in the snow. You can then push the little snowball around until it gets bigger and bigger. Eventually it will get so big that it will no longer be pushable. This is the base of a Snowman! You can then roll two smaller sized balls into the big one to stack them. Once you have a three ball stack, you can interact with the stack to craft a Snowman! You will be able to obtain more Snowman recipes to have different styles.

The best part is that you can use your Hammer tool on a Snowman to dislodge it and turn it into a normal decoration item. You can then place your Snowman decoration anywhere, during any season! You can even put him inside if you really want to.

You can also pick up snowballs and throw them as projectiles, so if you're ever in a fight with monsters you can always pick up a snowball and hurl it at them!

I've also worked on other holiday events and items, including Heart Day and Frog Day. Islands will automatically decorate for holidays that they celebrate, and different shops will have various holiday related items available only for that holiday!

There's a full set of Heart furniture and Frog furniture for you to collect. You can even get a Frog Hat on Frog Day or special Heart shaped Animal Treats on Heart Day which can boost your animal's affection more than usual.

Buildings + Decorations

I've worked more on buildings/decorations, including the ability to change the Flooring and Wallpaper inside a building. I've also added Rugs which can be placed down and resized.

I've added Sinks and Waste Baskets which actually have functionality. You can turn a Sink on and use your Water Can to fill it up with water.

The Waste Basket allows you to discard unwanted items (instead of just throwing them on the ground) This works like a single slot storage object. You can directly place items you're holding inside, or you can interact with it to drop items into the storage slot from your inventory. The cool part is that the last item you drop in can be retrieved, so if you accidentally throw away something important there's still a chance to get it back! Just be careful, throwing away a new item while another item is currently inside will completely erase the existing item!

I've also added a new type of Storage object which is the Cabinet. These work much like normal storage, except with the addition of also being a hybrid Display object! The first row of slots in the storage will actually display on top of the Cabinet while the rest will just be stored inside.

Speaking of displaying items, I've finally added Wall Shelves. These can be placed directly on walls and accessed like normal storage to display items on your walls!

Last but not least, there's of course a Wall Calendar you can place on your wall to quickly access your Calendar (if you feel inclined to do that). Your Calendar is always available directly in your Journal at any time, but you know… it's fun to have an interactable one. :)

I've also added a bunch more wall decorations like paintings, portraits, mirrors, etc which you'll be able to obtain.

Wimnim Interiors

All of this helped me flesh out the interiors for all of Wimnim's villager houses. These have all been finished up and reflect the personalities of the inhabitants. I'll add more little personal touches to these as development continues. Here's a couple of the interiors I've created:

Oak Trees + Tree Tappers, Resin and Syrup

I've finally got around to adding one of the remaining tree types to the game, which is the Oak Tree! With this addition I've also implemented Tree Tappers which can collect Resin or Syrup from trees.

You can craft a Tree Tapper and then place it down directly on an untapped tree. These will automatically produce Resin or Syrup after some time which you can then collect. You can use your Hammer to dislodge the Tree Tapper at any time to move it if you'd like.

Oak and Pine Resin will be used in a variety of crafting recipes and Maple Syrup will be used in various cooking recipes.

Shipping and selling items

Speaking of recipes, one way to obtain new recipes is to ship new items in your Shipping Bin! Some items when shipped for the first time will result in special rewards from the shops. These can be coupons, different items or recipes that use the item you shipped.

For example, shipping that Maple Syrup for the first time can reward you with a recipe for Pancakes! This is a great way to incentivize shipping items (aside from getting the most money for items) Some recipes will ONLY be available through shipping rewards, so you'll want to try shipping at least one of everything you produce!

Animals

I've finally finished up the interface and functionality for purchasing animals. This was actually a far more complicated process than it would appear. This is because each animal needs to be assigned to a Barn, Stable or Home, which requires the game to pull up all the info on your owned buildings and keep track of what goes where. Since you can have multiple Barns on up to four different islands, this required a bit of planning on my part to work out the logistics. With that said, it's all working now so you can finally purchase animals! (instead of me using a debug tool to spawn them in to test, haha)

On a final Animal note I've added Animal Sickness along with Medicine and Treats. If your animal goes without food and water for 48 hours they will become Upset and no longer produce anything. This can be easily fixed by providing them with food and water and they will return to a neutral mood the next day and produce items again. At 72 hours without food and water, your animal will become Sick. While Sick they will not produce items but simply giving them food and water will not fix the issue.

You will need to obtain Animal Medicine and administer it to your animal directly. It will then take 24 hours of being medicated before your animal is healthy and able to produce items again. So it's important to always provide enough food and water for your animals as it's very easy to go adventuring for several days and not return to your island to care for them. There will be methods to provide them with longer term food/water (bigger troughs, automated troughs, etc) but even then you'll eventually need to return to refill these.

Upset and Sick animals will also lose Affection daily, which will result in lower quality animal products.

Bug Fixes/Optimization

As always, there has been an absolute ton of bug fixes, optimization and quality of life improvements that I work on pretty much every day. That list is incredibly long and I won't bore anyone with looking at it. It's the majority of my build notes on any given submission. Just know that the game is always improving and I'm working hard to not have the game be a buggy unplayable mess on release.

Speaking of release….

Early Access and Release Date Information

I'm sure most of you are reading this update because you're eager to play Cloudscape already, and you've been waiting a long time. I understand your frustration and I'm glad that you're still excited to play the game. Unfortunately I've realized I'm quite terrible at predicting how long any given thing is going to take me to finish. This is something I'm trying to work on, but it does appear that I've fallen into the same problem as many Kickstarter game projects in that the deadlines I've set just are not realistic for the scope of the game I've planned.

With that said, I'm sad to say that Early Access did not happen in 2024. I can't give a specific time when it will happen at this point. All I can say is I'm still making a lot of progress on the game and I think it will be worth the wait. All of the development money from the Kickstarter has been used so I've resorted to eating up my own savings to continue development of the project. The money for physical merch has been safely set aside with my publisher, so there are no worries that this stuff will get produced once the game is completed.

Just to give you a timeline of Cloudscape's development. It's been only me working on the development of this game since 2020. I realize 4 years seems like enough time to make a game, but to put it into perspective, Stardew Valley took at least 4 1/2 years to make, and I believe Cloudscape will actually release with more content than SDV initially did. We're heading into the 5th year of development now, so I actually feel like I'm close to the same development speed in that regard. My initial 2 year development timeline (releasing in July 2023) was extremely inadequate for a game with Cloudscape's scope.

Wrap Up

Once again I just want to thank everyone who contributed to the campaign which has helped me develop this game over several years. I will be starting the new year working harder than ever to deliver everything I've promised to you all. Here's to the start of the new year, and hopefully the conclusion of the game's development.

-Koni

Summer 2024 Update. More frequent updates to come!
over 1 year ago – Tue, Sep 03, 2024 at 10:00:54 AM

Hello everyone! It would appear I might have missed a *couple* of updates over the past months… For that, I apologize, and I'm going to try doing better with the update frequency moving forward. I'm being put on an actual update posting schedule, so new updates should be flowing on social media, here and even the Limbo discord channel moving forward!

The lack of updates has not meant that the game is not being worked on, in fact, what it really means is that I've been consuming my time with working on the game and really pushing it to be the best I can make it. But I'm only a single person doing the job of like a dozen people, so it's just been slow-going. If I could hire other people to help, I would do it right away. However I simply don't have the funding and it would take too much time to incorporate new people into the development process. Anyway, let's get on with the updates!

Limbo

There has been massive work on Limbo, with a prize shop and a half dozen or so mini-games added. For anyone not aware, Limbo is a realm which you go to when you run out of Health. In Limbo you will be able to play games using Spirit Tokens which you collect for every hour you're alive. You can spend your Spirit Tokens on fun prizes and upgrades in the Spirit Token Shop located in Limbo. I wanted to add this sort of feature because I've always felt like games where you simply die and respawn somewhere with less money or items is a bit boring. I wanted to make it interesting/exciting when you die, instead of feeling like a negative experience.

Here's a quick glimpse of some games in Limbo (not all are 100% finished) and also the prize shop!

But no worries, you don't *have* to die to get to Limbo, you can also drink a suspicious looking potion which will "transport" you there without doing any permanent damage. :)

Skills and Skill Rewards

Moving on to Skills. This is a feature I've been wanting to overhaul for a while, as my initial concept for Skill Goals and Rewards felt a bit boring after extensive playtesting. Before, you'd have to complete very specific requirements/achievements in order to unlock rewards for each skill category. However, the rewards felt very underpowered, such as ever so slightly increasing tool swing speed, or slightly increasing a chance for an additional item drop.

I've since moved to a more enjoyable system. The new skill system rewards you with Effort Drops, just for performing various skills. Whether it's chopping a tree, crafting a recipe, defeating a monster or catching a fish, you can now earn Effort Drops. Each Skill Category (of which there are 12) has multiple tiers of rewards. You'll be able to spend your Effort Drops on any rewards you want, in any Skill Category you prefer. These rewards are much better than what I had planned out previously. These can unlock entirely new abilities, and really feel like they make an impact when you acquire them!

Here you can see Effort Drops being collected from various activities and then spending Effort Drops to unlock mining cave walls!

I don't want to get into too much detail, as I'd rather leave it all as a surprise, but I will just say that it's a much more fun and robust experience to play, and now just doing everyday tasks feels good because you're earning towards fun unlocks no matter what you're doing.

Excavating, Fossils and Artifacts

Last update I also mentioned working on the Excavating skill in particular. Well I'm happy to report that it's now a fully fleshed out skill! With over 40 different Fossils to uncover (on top of the loads of Artifacts already added), and a color coded buried item detection system. Higher tier Shovels can now detect more types of buried items and indicate what type of item is buried using a color system. This means as you walk around with your Shovel equipped, you'll be able to detect from a distance where an item is buried and what type of item it is!

Decorations

I've also been busy working on lots of Décor options for Cloudscape, including rugs which can be dynamically sized, flower displays, potted flowers, flooring, paintings and portraits and more!

This is only covering about 2 months of work. I'm still leaving out TONS of work done to Villagers, Towns and Events which have taken up a good bulk of the development time.

Other Development

The list of bug fixes/optimizations/overall general improvements is about a mile long, so I won't bore anyone with the details, but I can confidently say I've touched practically every crevice of the game at some point over the last few months. I also had to take some time to completely update the game from Unity 2019 to Unity 2022, which involved quite a lot of fixes/code changes to get everything up and working again. The update was a long time overdue, as I wanted to be able to access some newer Unity features and just get an overall more updated Unity engine for the game itself.

I also switched from using Rewired as a control system to the new Unity Input system, which should lead to a nicer key rebinding interface and better platform compatibility. This change also took several days to implement but I believe it's 100% worth it as I'm no longer relying on a third party tool for controller support.

As for where the development completion is at right now, I still find it incredibly difficult to give an actual clear answer, as there are just far too many things I can't account for. I don't really want anyone to be anticipating a release around the corner, and I don't want to set a false release timeline that I can't keep, as it's clear that it only tends to make people upset when that day comes and goes.

All I can say is I'm working constantly on this game. It's a labor of love and I'm pouring everything into it. At the same time, I recognise everyone's anticipation for it and also quite frankly, given how many other developers have kinda stumbled on the Kickstarter path, to see signs of life and proof the game is being developed. So, because of that, I'm going to start taking a more structured approach to these updates, as well as a more regular social media schedule where I'll be posting about the game so everyone can witness what's happening! Please look forward to more frequent updates across social media and here. I hope you all will still be excited to play the game once it's finally released!

On a final note, due to the above, it's still not possible to put an exact date for an Early Access preview for backers. I don't want to rush getting the game into people's hands when it's simply not ready, and getting into a situation where I have to deliver something that isn't the ideal experience for you - just for the sake of just meeting a pre-set date - wouldn't be the best way for you to witness what you've helped me build. I sincerely appreciate everyone's patience on the matter.

-Koni