Hi there, I hope everything is going well,

I don't know why I like posting updates on christmas, but I guess I do.

In the last update, I said, or implied, I was gonna work on populating the overworld, and that it could have been done before today.

Well, I ended up not working on that, since I didn't feel the inspiration to draw and animate, so instead I started working on the second milestone, this being doing the 100 challenge rooms, which I believed would be what takes the longest of the remaining development.

I still believe that, but, I have to say, it's going faster than I thought it would.

I currently have 70 out of the 100 challenge rooms implemented, and 5 more designed on paper, leaving "only" 25 to design, and 30 to implement. Which is pretty cool, once I'm done with this milestone, I believe everything will flow faster.

My rhythm was a bit slow at first, but I've been picking up steam this last month and I'm currently doing around 10 a week, so if I keep up the pace, I'll be done by mid-late January, which is very good, since I wanted all the challenge rooms to be done by February.

However, once these 100 challenge rooms are all set and done, and the milestone finished, that doesn't mean my work on them is over.

Playtesting will begin, and if any of the challenge rooms feel subpar, I'll come up with another design and replace it. But to be honest, for now, I'm pretty happy with the designs I've got.

Going a little bit more into detail, for these new challenge rooms, I've implemeted 6 more enemies, and some other interesting (in my opinion) mechanics, alongside fixing a lot of small bugs I've found along the way, bugs that weren't game breaking, but tended to create an inconsitent game experience.

The difficulty spread of the challenge rooms have also been finalized, and it will be the following (number of stars: amount of rooms):

• 0.5: 9
• 1  : 21
• 1.5: 20
• 2  : 20
• 2.5: 20
• 3  : 10

And for progress, all the 0.5 and 1 stars are implemented, only two 1.5 stars remain, one 2 stars remain, and then eight 3 stars remain, the rest of the remaining ones being for 2.5 stars.

As of how the difficulty really works, it's mostly a personal feeling, so don't expect super consistency between close star levels, one day I may think something is harder than another day, although I try to keep it fairly close.

0.5 stars are the tutorial  rooms, in which, there's little to no challenge except figuring out the mechanic and getting to know how the character moves.

1 stars are a bit more focused and require a little bit more mastery over the game.

1.5 stars start to maybe require doing more than one thing at once.

2 stars is a small step above that.

2.5 stars now require you to know what you are doing, but without being relentless.

And 3 stars are challenges that I myself find difficult. For example, the current two 3 stars took me two hours to clear the first, and thirty minutes to clear the second.

As you can see, the clear times indicate that some 3 stars may be easier than others, but they are still considered 3 stars all together because of the effort it took me to clear check them.

If that sounds a bit scary, don't worry, there are only ten 3 stars, and you won't even have to touch them if you want to beat the game, but I wanted to add something like them to have a bit of an ultimate challenge of sorts, hopefully it's fun.

Another thing I wanted to mention, is that from February onwards until August, I'm going to be able to set my full focus and attention into the game without any distractions of any type (or that's the plan), so I'm gonna put my hand on the fire and say that I want to have the game ready for August, maybe not completely 100% done, but I want at least all the content I want in the game to be there, the game to be playable from 0% to 100%, not only the story, and in general, in a releasable state. So that if there's anything left to do, it'd just be polish or bug fixing.

And that's everything I wanted to talk about.

As a final note, in January, I'm going to be migrating this game to a new account I made, this being ImaginativeMetaSpace, so if you wanna keep following the game on itchio, please go give that account a follow, because I don't know if after the migration, people will keep getting notifications on the updates. Although not many people seem to be following these updates, I'm putting this here in case anyone is interested.

In any case, that's all for now, I hope you have a happy time in company, or alone, both are equally valid.

See you next time!