Happy New Year! - Progress Report (Patreon)

This is a repost of the most recent devlog on Itch

Happy new year!

Hope everyone had a good bit of rest over the holidays. I ended up working more shifts than usual since some of my family is overseas atm and there wasn't really any reason to take the time off.  But I did let myself take a bit of a break from working on Project Red.  At least, I let myself work on it LESS haha.

I wanted to take a moment to go over the current state of things, and discuss what will happen next.  This month will see the release of Early Access Wave 2 over on the patreon, as well as an update to the free demo here on Itch.

First off, let's run through what I've accomplished in 2025.

2025 Recap

January began work fleshing out Chapter 6, introducing the proper Crow Bandit enemies, and creating the related CG arts for the chapter. I also added the reworked Divine Scale and placeholder Goddess Skill Trees.

February saw the addition of mana ponds, mouse support getting a massive boost, the fleshing out of the SFW mode to include alternate scenes, and the addition of Chapter 2's content finally getting produced.

March then added Chapter 1 and began the work on the crafting and weapon upgrade systems.  The Golem, Plague Rat, and Imp enemies were added to the game as well as a whole bunch of new icons.

April was then focused on pushing out a demo, but behind the scenes I did a lot of work on future content, creating bosses and enemies for later game chapters.

May saw the game cross 10,000 downloads! We're already pretty close to 20,000 now which is honestly mind blowing for me. May was largely spent on the games 8th chapter, including making Witch a playable character, a large amount of CG's and I plotted out most of the related dungeon.

June was a very busy month! Chapter 9 got a LOT of work done, new tarot cards were created, the games new menu arts were first designed here, and systems like the CG gallery were finally set up.  Tinman also received his finalized character design and bust.

July then saw the first real hurdle I had to deal with, with the still ongoing attack on nsfw content. Super fun stuff. Still I pushed through and stuck to my pacing and produced Chapter 10 of the game. Tinman's character sprite, moveset and his related locations were all designed and set up.

August had me return to Chapter 3 and 4 to replace the placeholder content with finalized versions. Goblins, Moths and Slime Fiends got added and just generally quality of life changes.

September was more of the same, with the launch of the Playable Teaser and the reworked combat mechanics to get the game up to speed with the finalized intended design.

October of course, saw me take a break to participate in Jamsepticeye, where I created the concept pitch for Alice In! Not much was done for Project Red on account of just making an entirely different game. I briefly started on the Dead Carnival/Chapter 5 work but didn't get too far.

November then had me create the revamped trailer for Project Red, as well as revealing one of the games two original vocal tracks. A large part of the prior months was also spent working hard to produce music, aside from the end credits songs, the final boss also got a lot of love here, but of course I wouldn't be spoiling that.  Aside from that I completed Chapter 5 with the Dead Carnival's finalized layout, and the enemies all being added.

And December saw me approach the final placeholder chapter, Chapter 6. I completely remade both the Sewers dungeon as well as the Crows Den dungeon. New mechanics were added in, new classes, multiple new tarot cards and multiple new enemies.

It was a VERY busy year.  I was pretty happy that I largely maintained my 1 chapter per month schedule, in spite of also doing tons of UI and mechanics work. Combat got its massive update to match the new artwork at long last, and the first 5 chapters of the game were brought to 100% completion. From here on out, things will get MUCH faster. As beyond Chapter 6, there is no longer placeholder content that needs to be replaced. No playable version has EVER gone past chapter 6, and as such there was no reason to include a placeholder in these sections.

So for the most part Chapters 6-13 just need to have the enemy spawns worked out as well as the additional enemies added. There's VERY little left to do in terms of CG's and actual game mechanics at this stage. So, I'm going to layout my current plan of action.

2026 Plan

January will see a new demo as well as an update to the Early Access.  The demo will not include new content but will bring the demo up to date with the additional mechanics present in both Early Access Wave 1 and 2.  This will include the healing flask, updated respawn mechanics and other such things.  A dedicated post will go live when the demo is ready.

Early Access Wave 2 will then add the entirety of Chapter 6 for patrons and those who have paid for the post directly through Patreon. At this stage the first 6 chapters will be 100% complete in terms of content.

This will not take the rest of the month, and so I also intend to complete work on Chapter 7 this month. Chapter 7 requires a handful of enemies, as well as the fleshing out of a particular, stalker style enemy, but is otherwise largely complete already.

February onward will all then depend on how quickly Chapter 7 goes. It's possible that Chapter 8 will also get worked on to finalization this month.  It's also possible that coding the stalker behavior will be very difficult.  Too hard to say right now.

But going forward the pace of 1 chapter per month should shift to 2 chapters per month. At least for Chapters 7-12.  Chapter 13 itself will take a dedicated month I imagine, as it's the last real chapter that has only a handful of its assets created.  It has several enemies and its boss ready to go, as well as 1 CG, but the actual level and map assets are nonexistent at current.  Voice work for the game has long since been completed. Music for the game is also essentially done, though I could add more tracks if I decided I wanted to.

Early Access Wave 3 will likely launch in February. This will be the last Wave and will be sold for the games full price. Purchasing this wave will entitle you to the full game, and chapters will be added as they are completed. 

I've been debating launching a separate page on Itch for the games SFW version with the adult content removed, though I'm not entirely sure about this choice yet. I do think I've settled on the game's final price, but I will refrain from mentioning it too early in case things change.

The game will be completed before summer. And after 3 years of work, I intend to take a little break once it's done. 2025 was a bit of a tough year. There were some really great highs, and some really bad lows. But I'm very optimistic of things going forward. I'm going to get this game into your hands, no matter what it takes. And I can't wait to see the reactions to the full work.

Thank you for your patience, kindness, and support over this past year. And I hope to deliver to you a satisfying experience with Project Red later this year.