Too Many Teeth

Hello, and welcome back to another monthly devlog, this one covering what we’ve been up to throughout the month of May. In a month’s time, we’ll already be halfway through the year - kind of crazy to think about, huh? I moved house back at the end of January and it doesn’t feel like I’ve been living here for nearly half a year; it feels more like two or three months at most. 

So, let’s address the elephant in the room: the big super special mysterious game which has been mentioned for several months now - hell, since late last year - still hasn’t been announced, despite my hints and promises. The reason is, unfortunately, the same as the reason I gave last month, namely that not all of the assets required are ready yet.

If I can be honest for a moment, this kind of sucks. I want to be able to talk about this game openly, to share ideas from it, and to get people hyped for the demo. I want things to be progressing at a faster pace, and to be seeing visible progress. Some days I feel like making this game might be a mistake, as I haven’t gotten to some of the more exciting parts of it, and so I’m not 100% certain what those will look like, or whether they’ll actually be enjoyable. 

I like keeping momentum on projects, and so I feel like I’m a bit of a failure when I recall that when Artificial Nexus was this far into its development, it had less than a year to go until release. If I got all of the pending assets for this project tomorrow, and could release the demo the day afterwards, I doubt that I’d be able to release the full version within a year - the script for the main game hasn’t been written yet beyond plotting it out, and even if I had that, getting it into the game and refining and editing it will be a lot of work. To be frank, there’s still a lot to go on this project, and it feels very daunting.

Nevertheless, I’m trying not to let it get me down. Plenty of developers take multiple years to make games, and that’s just the way that it is. Game development is a complex process, and I need to remind myself sometimes that it’s not a sprint - it’s a marathon. There’s no prize for developing a game quickly, and if this comes out six months, a year, two years, or even later than I initially anticipated, so what? That just means that it got the time and attention that it needed, and that it wasn’t rushed unnecessarily.

In more positive news, just because things aren’t moving at full speed, that doesn’t mean that the game hasn’t had any progress! Some of the things that were done over this month were:

Several backgrounds were completed

Voice lines have almost all been recorded

Character sprites for the demo have been finished

Character designs for the full game have been worked on, with the majority of the remaining cast having their features and designs finalised

A lot of placeholder assets, features, and text in the development build have been updated or replaced

At this stage, I know better than to make any promises that I can’t be certain of, but nevertheless, things are still progressing, and that’s more than enough to be happy with.

It’s the first of May today, so you know what that means: a new devlog for the month, covering what new updates and changes occurred throughout April. Outside of game development, I saw the Book of Mormon at the theatre, got some comics signed by their visiting creators, and saw several shows at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. 

Most of the big things that happened this month revolved around Artificial Nexus, as you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention to any of our social media. To celebrate its one-year anniversary, we had a bunch of streamers play the game, the majority of whom really enjoyed it and had great things to say about it! If you haven’t played the game yet and are interested in it, please try and catch one of their VODs when you can - you should be able to find them easily enough with a search. If you have played the game - whether because of a streamer, or for some other reason - and haven’t left a review, please consider doing so - every bit really helps.

Thanks to some feedback from streamers, Artificial Nexus also got a few updates. Some of these were for minor things such as typos and bugs, but changes based on the latest round of feedback were large enough that it was worth updating the game’s version to 1.2. You can read about these larger changes in the official notes for further details, but to give a quick summary of them, the notes functionality now integrates with the rest of the gameplay much more gracefully.

“But wait,” I hear you say, “didn’t you say in last month’s post that you were hoping to make a formal announcement about your still-in-development game? What’s going on with that?” Well, it should be obvious that no announcement was made last month - unfortunately some assets for the game are still being created, and I’d like to have more things to show before revealing anything official. Things are still moving along, however:

Nearly all of the initial music tracks have been created

Jobs for voice actors were placed last month, and we’ve gone through all of the submissions. The successful applicants will be contacted soon

Most of the backgrounds have been finished

The prototype has had some visuals updated, as well as some new functionality added in

So, does this mean that this month will be the one where things are formally announced? Maybe! As things are, I feel a bit bad to be constantly mentioning updates but not having anything particularly concrete to present, but I also don’t see the need to keep silent about what progress is happening at this stage. Hopefully there’ll be something to announce sooner rather than later, but if I’m making a similar post this time next month, you can at the very least expect a similar summary to the above.

Welcome to our monthly devlog, covering what we’ve been up to throughout the month of March. In non-development news, I read the entirety of the Dan Slott/Mike Allred Silver Surfer series (it was crazy good), played the entirety of the 2025 rerelease of OFF (it was very good), and saw the play Clue at the theatre (it was alright). In development news: read onwards!

Firstly, let’s talk a bit about the mysterious-still-unannounced-game which has been teased about on our main site for a few months now. We’ve had some new sprites and music tracks created, and finished some large updates to the game’s presentation. A large amount of feedback from beta testing has been addressed, too.

More importantly, we’re nearly at the stage where we'll be looking for voice acting for the demo, and are hoping that we'll have ads up with the requirements by this time next week. The easiest way to know when we have ads up will be to follow us on Bluesky. Something to be aware of, too, is that the game is only looking to utilise partial voice acting for now.

While it’s still a little early to say for certain, I’m hoping that we’ll be able to make a formal announcement about this game this month, once we have a few more assets produced. If you’ve been intrigued by the game’s teasing throughout the dev logs on our main site over the past few months, I hope that your curiosity will be sated soon (temper your expectations, though!)

Elsewhere and elsewhen, as of earlier this month, we’ve now got a Tumblr for the studio! (Which is what you're reading this on, duh!) Why exactly, you ask? In a nutshell: we’d like to expand our social media presence a bit more and Tumblr is one of the less-ick sites out there. If you have a Tumblr, please follow us here, and if you can recommend some more blogs to follow that discuss/cover indie gaming and/or visual novel development, please send us some recs! At present we’ve mostly been sharing some details about our existing games, but down the track we’ll probably be cross-posting blogs and development updates (although don’t count out the possibility of it turning entirely into shitposts).

Finally, this month marks the one-year anniversary of Artificial Nexus! In some ways it feels entirely natural, in others it feels like way too much has happened in that timespan and it’s pretty crazy to look at everything that we’ve done since then. To celebrate the anniversary, we’ve reached out to a bunch of streamers to cover the game. Most of them will be playing the game in the week of its anniversary, so please go and support the streamers if you’ve got the time to do so. (And if you’re a streamer who plays visual novels and would like to be part of this, please reach out and let’s see what we can work out).

Yeah, it's nothing super fancy, but we're pretty pleased with the main menu for Artificial Nexus - it's very matrix-y and sets the tone of the game well!

Hank Emmerich is the main supporting character in Artificial Nexus, and while he can get pretty surly and demanding of Susan, he genuinely means well - he just wants to get out of the facility with Susan, after all. But will he achieve his goal by the end of the game?

Meet Susan, the protagonist of Artificial Nexus! She's curious, bubbly, and perky, and is very keen to find out who she is and how she ended up in a mysterious facility. But will she be happy with the answers she discovers?

The second commercial game we've made is called Artificial Nexus! It's a sci-fi mystery visual novel where you have to solve multiple puzzles in order to discover the identity of the protagonist, Susan. Y'see, she's woken up in a mysterious facility with amnesia, and has no idea who she is or how she got there. Although Susan will eventually find out the answers to her questions, will she be happy with the answers?

This was a really fun story to write and develop, as some of the different mechanics really stretched our programming skills in working out how to implement them in Ren'Py. There's a few different plot threads going on throughout the game, and more than a few lines that have a completely different meaning if you read them with the full context of what's going on in the facility. The puzzles all feel like the right level of difficulty that we were aiming for, and there's a few optional side ones for unlocking bonuses too.