Starless Umbra

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Hi there! September seemed to just fly by. My focus continues to be on getting things ready for a steam demo and trying to release a highly-polished version of the game’s first act by the end of the year. Here’s what’s done, and whats left.

U L T R A W I D E

Instead of constraining the game to 16:9 and just stretching things awkwardly for all other resolutions, I’ve added support for other screen sizes. The viewport and UI is all responsive now, with sensible minimums in place. If the width of the game extends past the width of a map, things letterbox, but I may widen maps later on.

Soon you’ll be able to play SU on that vertical monitor if you really want.

Dynamic Gamespeed

This is a fun one, but the speed of the game can now be adjusted globally. This even affects things like music/sound playback speed. Why? Primarily to support proper pausing during takeover tutorials and correctly implementing pause frames, but I’m also experimenting with it as a combat mechanic. Not sure if it’s fun yet but I’ll share details later.

I was going to upload a gif here showing that gameplay is paused, but 5mb is not enough space for these archaic file formats. You'll have to just take my word that the gameplay pauses here during these tutorials.

Expandable Settings

Instead of hardcoding a few options constrained to a single page, I’ve made the settings screen totally data-driven, supporting different option types (toggles, percentages, options from a set of choices, and more).

I know this seems minor, but adding settings and config options just got so much easier. Expect tons of accessibility settings to control game speed and difficulty, localization options, fine-tuned volume options, friendly skill auto-targeting, and more.

Question for you: What are your must-have settings for game comfort or usability? I want to include them!

So much more

FJLink has been hard at work giving Amalia a much-needed refresh, and I’ve done a pass at improving general game polish: think footstep sounds, weather effects, subtle shaders, and so on.

Beyond that, I knocked out Guided tutorials, compressing game data (to cut down the game filesize), grinding out more support for non-English locales, cleaning up maps, making the first village a bit more directed with a short, fun characterbuilding scene, more dynamic banter between characters, and so on.

I don't know where else to put this but I also shipped out t-shirts, more available!

A lot of this I had put off because I just wanted to steamroll my way through content, but it’s worth taking a step back to tidy up what has been built. It’s inspiring seeing the level of detail and polish on so many other RPGs here on steam, so I have to do my part to make sure I reach the level of quality I’m capable of.

Plans for October

I’m deep in the demo grind. I have some tasks to tidy up maps, improve sound effects/game ambience, cleaning up game UI, and filling out more game settings. I think I’m on pace to knock those out.

Then begins the fun of integrating Steamworks: Remote Play Together, achievements, stats, handling the overlay, and probably other stuff TBD.

Lastly, I need to start testing all this stuff and making sure it’s all ready for localization.

As a stretch goal I might start writing some of Act 3’s scenes again (I haven’t gotten very far) but we’ll see? Thanks for reading!

Locale Focus: Roughlands

Hello! As August comes to a close, I wanted to update you on Starless Umbra. In this update I’ll share more details around the creation of a scene I teased earlier this month, announce some team updates, and reveal the discovery of ancient artifacts with you. ✨

The Dream

Check out a longer version on the blog.

Act 2 expands on our protagonist’s past a bit through a few flashbacks and dream sequences. For one such dream I sat out to create a less comfy, darker, colder version some of my favorite JRPG forests (Phantom Forest from FF6, the Campfire Scene from Chrono Trigger). This scene received some great reception. I wanted to share it here and give you some insight into how I built it.

This is a compilation of a few different assets. The background and foreground parallax layers (trees and fog) I sprited for Heroes of Umbra some 12 years ago (wow!). The map layer trees are heavy edits to Seliel the Shaper’s Gentle Forest. To give the scene cohesion I matched everything to the game’s palette.

Lastly, Gamemaker doesn’t have a simple way (as far as I can tell) to seamlessly wrap maps. So I went the other way around. Characters are stationary and I have two duplicate tile layers, one offset by the room width, that scroll and wrap around. This avoids having to export another parallax sprite the size of my map.

The Team

The team’s growing! I’m finally getting some help again!

Fran, aka FJLink, is helping on the art side, primarily focusing on tidying up some of my very rough sprites and adding things like running poses. In the past, he’s worked on Latka and Broken Alliance, and I’m so grateful to have more help on sprites. Here’s his work on some touch-ups to Amalia, to make her more closely match the concept art and smooth out some of my roughness with the original sprite.

I’m also pleased to announce Brandon McKagan is helping me move away from royalty-free music and writing some original music for the game. Brandon reached out to me way back in 2012 wanting to compose Heroes of Umbra’s soundtrack. His talent spans a jaw-dropping breadth of genres and his music for HoU is really what transformed a simple prototype into a game I wanted to develop and release (over a period of 6 years on train rides to and from work!). I'll share what he's cooking in a future update.

The Artifacts

Okay, maybe not ancient artifacts. But in digging through storage, I found several posters and stickers I designed for marketing at various anime conventions and events. The fabled scratch and sniff stickers from 2011 are back! And because I kept the extras sealed, they still have their scents.

I’m also opening preorders for a first-ever Starless Umbra T-Shirt. I decided on a short preorder window of two weeks. This allows you to get the size you want and order in bulk to keep costs down. I’m tossing in extra goodies for purchasing during the preorder window, so please pick one up.

Check out the Alcuria Games shop!

What’s Been Done, What’s Next?

I’ve polished up a good chunk of Act 2, and it’s coming together. The revisions are all in place and the act feels largely more cohesive. (I talked about this in my devlog this summer, check out The Setback section if you aren’t sure what I’m referring to.) My original plan wrapping up Act 2 was to immediately start on Act 3, but I’m actually not sure that’s the best approach.

I’ve shared demos prior, but I’d consider those more betas. Parts of the battle system are not totally implemented, tutorials are hacked together, controllers & settings are still pretty buggy. It feels like a great opportunity to spend a few months tidying things up and getting to a level of polish that I’m pleased with.

And in the mean time, I can write scenes for Act 3, but I should not be in any rush to implement those. I can’t afford to implement another story arc I’m dissatisfied with. I’ll announce it in a few months when it’s ready, but I’m planning another round of beta tests for Act 1+2. Should be fun!

Wishlist on Steam | Follow on bsky (I'm new!)

I’m back! Another recap. Hope you’re having a good summer and taking care of yourself. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

Final Act 2 Dungeon Flow and Maps

As part of the plot reshuffle, I needed maps leading the player out of the final act 2 dungeon. This isn’t much more than a traversal sequence down the side of a building (for now, maybe a minigame later???) but the boss → cutscene → escape flow is almost there.

I rewrote all of the final act 2 dungeon aftermath scenes to be more in line with the plot revisions. Again, still needs a comprehensive pass and further edits, but I’m more happier with the output this time around. There’s even a tie-in to Heroes of Umbra lore. Even I wasn’t expecting that!

New System: Augment Masteries

This is a fun one, I know it’s not the best to just dump systems in for the sake of it, but I had been thinking about ways to solve some issues I had with skill augments. If you’re unfamiliar, they’re unlockable gems (via leveling, trading, or finding in chests) that adjust the characteristics of skills. Some do simple things like trade more damage for slower cooldowns, others add elements, tile effects, refresh other skills’ cooldowns, and more.

The problem: people tend to just find one augment/skill combo and stick with it, not as many interesting choices as I’d like.

The simple system: Augments can be “mastered” when the skill is used enough times with that augment equipped. Mastering augments boosts the effectiveness of the skill, and mastering enough augments unlocks more slots. There’s more nuance here I’d like to touch on in a future video!

Reene’s Return

I’ve been wrapping up the second scene where you play as Reene. Unlike the first, this one involves actual combat, so it was time to think through and solidify her combat kit. This solves a few design issues I’ve encountered with the combat system, but I’ll save the details for another devlog.

Boss Updates

In a serendipitous moment of plot revisions I found I could introduce an important story mechanic (the umbra) and work it into a boss battle to make the story elements work with gameplay elements a bit. I wrapped up this functionality for the boss battle, but I still need to balance it a bunch.

Battle System Feedback/Usability

I added options to display player health bars above the characters during combat (on-damage or always) and additional skill cues around the player when certain skills may be cast. I’ll probably iterate on the visuals here, but I like these changes a lot already. Shoutouts to CarrotGaz and Wis in the Alcuria Games discord for the comprehensive suggestions here.

Another recurring softlock is these blocks in the first dungeon. Maybe I cave and add a pulling mechanic, but one easy solution for the time is to inject a little worldbuilding into these otherwise frustrating situations. If a player pushes a block somewhere that softlocks the puzzle, the characters will bicker a bit and the block resets.

All in all, I got through almost everything I planned in last month’s update, with the exception of getting a backer build ready. There’s still lots of playtesting I haven’t started yet, and some additional scope worth getting in before I release the backer build/updated demos.

Next Month

This might be a slow one as personal obligations shift my schedule around (daughter starts school), but I still have some things I want to get done.

Playtest act 1+2 a bunch, balance enemies and skills.

Submit a revised act 1 demo to gamemaker’s couch co-op stream in one week

Make edits/writing revisions to the core cutscenes, especially act 2

Release a video tutorial! (How cutscenes are done)

As always, appreciate you reading. Until next time!

Stats

19,212 Words (this includes some scenes I’ll cut next month)

1,565 Commits

196 Maps

Hi! I’m going to try to do spoiler-free content updates at some regular cadence. The goal here is to build some accountability for what I plan to do in the next monthish.

In June I…

Released a devlog!

If you’re reading this you’ve probably seen it already, but if not please give it a watch. Despite having a channel for so much of the game’s life (basically the beginning of youtube lol) I haven’t really posted much meaningful content there. I’m hoping to do more of that, so your eyeballs are always appreciated.

The recording, capturing of clips, editing, and so on took about two weeks working on it whatever evenings I could. The actual script took a long, long time to write (started in late 2024 lol), so hopefully I’ll get more efficient at that.

Cleaned up some cutscenes

Content-wise I’m focused on cleaning up act 2. This one is beefy, it triples the length of the current demo adding 4 new dungeons, expanding on the plot as our friends try to find a way to their friend. Watch the devlog for some of the complaints I have with it, but tldr is it’s not very engaging and doesn’t advance the plot in any meaningful way.

I’m currently working through the act’s final dungeon cutscenes, integrating the boss and wrapping up the relevant story beats. I was hoping to complete this by the end of the month, but a family illness kept me occupied for two weeks.

Final dungeon aside, I’m happy with how the revisions are coming along. The last leg of cutscenes is a meaty one: it’s mostly written, partially implemented, and somewhat challenging. I’ll try to have something in place that’s most the way there so I can shift gears back to act 3.

Swapped dungeon mechanics

The final dungeon of act 2 is pretty long. I swapped out a secondary puzzle for a dexterity puzzle where switches need to be pressed within a time limit. The secondary puzzle was way too similar to the primary puzzle, so it needed a change. I’ll repurpose the secondary puzzle for another dungeon later.

Act 2’s second dungeon also got a bit more content. This was partly to address some of the storyline revisions, but more importantly to introduce some worldbuilding elements a bit earlier.

Next Month

Implement act 2 concluding scenes

Create and add Reene’s battle animations

Update the boss battle with additional worldbuilding-oriented mechanics

Adjust NPC dialogue throughout all of act 2

Test act 2, update the backer build with the latest revised content

Thanks for reading! Wish me luck and take care!

Stats

18,229 Words (this includes some scenes I’ll cut next month)

1,528 Commits

192 Maps

Hi! It seems rpgmaker.net's downloads are still down. I fixed the link on the downloads page now so you can give that a try if you haven't yet.

The game has pretty nice OST, And art at least from what i've seen and heard off of Opera GX, Did you do all this yourself or did you get some help?

Thank you! Assets at this point are very much a combination of my original graphics and sound, royalty-free resources, some artwork done by my wife, and assets commissioned for the game. I am trying to get out of the habit of calling this a solo project, because the truth is I can't really do all of it myself. I'm focusing on content over polish, so writing a somewhat cohesive narrative from start to finish is the focus. I have and will continue to hire freelance help for sprite work, portraits, etc., but that all currently comes out-of-pocket.

With the time SU has taken to release and stuff, will the game, Will it ever be launched on a different platform? Like Itch.io or Steam or even Epic games, maybe different platforms if you'd like (i don't think rpgmaker games can be ported, probably would have to rewrite the whole code in a language like C# or something)

One of my sneaky little tricks comes from a closeness to the classic RPG Maker community: this isn't actually an RPG Maker project anymore. I do try to closely emulate the RPG Maker 2003 style, mostly out of nostalgia, but the game is written in Gamemaker so porting is relatively painless. Confirmed platforms are currently PC (Steam, itch, anywhere I can get) and Nintendo Switch.

What hurdles did you come across that made you restart the development of the game?

The first is primarily technical. RPG Maker 2003 (at the time) couldn't natively export to non-windows platforms. Even on windows support felt waning. I remember the game would crash if I had two GPUs running and the game did this awful anti-aliasing on windows 7. Everything felt dated. (Aside, easyrpg fixes a lot of this! But I feel this ship has already sailed...)

The second is graphical. Starless Umbra started in 2002 before indie games were even a thing. It was common practice to rip assets from other RPGs. And while that did teach me about palette usage, effective map creation, and pixel art overall, the result is the product started to feel like a mixtape of some of my favorite game assets, of varying degrees of quality. Few of which I could call my own.

The final reason is the writing. I started the game as a child, and though I did my best to revise the story as I matured, revisions on the story began to take its toll on the narrative. Interest in the story came mostly through a mystery I was explaining to players that I myself hadn't quite figured out. Overall, there's a lot of cringy moments in these older iterations of the game, but in those moments they felt very genuine to me. It wasn't until I took a step back and approached the narrative from the top-down did I at least have some semblance of a roadmap for a story I wanted to tell.

Is there something that you've been unable to do that still sucks to do/hard to do for the game?

The writing is still difficult for me. Typically, what I plan for an act goes through a series of revisions, some even requiring multiple rewrites if the story doesn't meet the desired pacing or tone. I try to minimize this, but often it takes a lot of trial-and-error.

Striking a balance in the combat system between something that feels like a JRPG, isn't boring, and doesn't require twitchy/quick reactions like most action games is also challenging. People come into the game with certain preconceived notions, eg., "I don't want this enemy to hit me", but in reality by moving away from it and not attacking you're letting its abilities recharge. Trading damage is okay because as long as you survive the encounter your health is replenished. Allowing players to understand that and make combat engaging has been difficult.

How long would you say till SU launches as a whole game?