2024 has been a year, huh? Very buggy. I hope they fix it with the 2025 patch. Ugh! But it wasn't all bad, Soulblaze began in October. I can't believe the project is barely 3 months old. It feels much longer but in that time, I added:

• the whole battle system with 37 techniques, 9 battle tags, and 15 quirks
• 9 consumable items and 18 stickers (formerly marbles)
• three regions with 16 animons, 3 bosses
• gamepad and keyboard support
• TTS-mode and color-blind settings
• save system
• and other cool things I forgot about?!

I'm pretty proud of that. This is the first time I'm coding a whole game by myself and honestly was not sure if I'd get this far. Never give up, I guess. Currently, I'm working on an interactive tutorial to teach new players the mechanics step by step. This takes a bit of effort and will come with patch 0.0.10 which will not come out this year anymore as I'm about to sign off for the holidays but it's number 1 priority in January.

If you want to see what's planned and which bugs are known, you can head over to the public Codecks page here. You can even vote for your favorite features there! Immediate next steps are:

• tutorial
• drawing missing animon and trainer art
• adding missing quirks

What's Next?

I didn't get the game startup funding, sadly, so I need to invest some time into preparing a different funding application and also registering Sword & Quill as the real deal will occupy some time in January. I still hope to have a stable beta version by the end of January with the release of 0.1, which means I also have to draw the animons for region 3 and more trainers. Already excited to do that! 

There are lost of more features and ideas I have for 2025, like the titular "soulblaze" mechanic isn't even in the game! Think digivolution! Or mega evolution! Every rolled double fills your blaze meter and you can also pay your dice to fill it faster, once it's full you get to trigger soulblaze for one animon, turning it into a temporary stronger version. Cool, right?!

This and other things will be added and improved until a planned Early Access release in Q1 2026. If that all sounds interesting to you and you want to support a solo developer (me!) to make independent games without fear of randomly getting stomped by publishers, you can now support me and the project on Patreon. The second tier will give you access to previews of animon designs, features, and more. The second tier will give you early access to patches and you get to try them before the public. And, of course, shiny roles and supporter channels on the Sword & Quill Discord server!

I hope you'll join me on the journey and thank you so much for anyone who has played the game or shared it, it really means a lot! Things are exciting and scary but we're going to figure it out. I hope you all have wonderful holidays / end of the year!