21 Jun 2026Developer post

Hotfix 2 - E2M1 player start fixed

Fixed a duplicate player start in Episode 2 Map 1

19 Jun 2026Developer post

Episode 1 + 2 v2e Patch

Thanks for your kind words and feedback during Project Absentia's launch! Here's the first patch. Previous version will be on the v2d-full branch, for people still playing through on that build (saves for E2M1 and E2M6 especially might break) E2M1 - Fix enemies from flying out of

07 Jun 2026Developer post

PA Hotfix for resolution changing issue

Removes default vid_fsdwmhack setting as it seems to make resolution changing inconsistent for those affected by the issue, open the console and go: vid_fsdwmhack false or append +vid_fsdwmhack false to a command prompt

05 Jun 2026Developer post

Episode 1 + 2 v1.0 is out!

Episode 1 + 2 v1.0 is out! We hope you enjoy it!

16 May 2026Developer post

Project Absentia Full Release Announcement Date!

Good news! Our flashcore movement shooter FPS - Project Absentia - is releasing on 6 June 2026 at 6AM NZST (or 5 June 2026 EST ).

20 Apr 2026Developer post

Project Absentia Price Change

In preparation for PA's 2.0/Episode 2 release, on May 1st we're increasing the price to 19.99USD. Soon after we're going to be announcing a release date.

11 Apr 2026Developer post

QA's finished + Making of Project Absentia - Part 2 - A ROTT-Like

Quality Assurance for PA is done. We'll have news soon about our plans for a 2.0 release. In the meantime, we'll tease with some new weapons, upgrades to existing weapons, and the current state of the levels. The Weapons Project Absentia takes huge inspiration from a game the dir

Quality Assurance for PA is done. We'll have news soon about our plans for a 2.0 release.

In the meantime, we'll tease with some new weapons, upgrades to existing weapons, and the current state of the levels.

The Weapons

Project Absentia takes huge inspiration from a game the director of the project, SanyaWaffles, grew up playing on a shareware disc on an old 486 she had - Rise of The Triad. Many of the features of RoTT were very ahead of their time - massive weapons that you could unload and forget on many enemies, huge levels with huge amounts of verticality, ludicrous gibs, a bit of style, and really cool explosions.

In both Project Absentia and Rise of The Triad, the amount of weapons you can carry on your person are limited, but extremely powerful. You can switch out a weapon for another based on the situation at hand or personal preference for an encounter.

In Rise of The Triad, you could only carry one non-bullet weapon - a single missile weapon or magic weapon. This admittedly is a bit limiting for the player.

In Project Absentia, you have four categories for weapon pickups - shotguns, energy weapons, missile weapons, and big weapons. This is on top of your backup weapon - the Tommy Gun - which has an alt ammo type (high powered bullets) you can find through levels or on certain enemies. While you can carry only one of each category, you have four categories to choose from, each with their own mechanics, quirks, and damage types.

Also, all weapons have alt-fires or modes. Most alt-fires consume different amounts of ammo for the weapon.

Shotguns
- Boomstick - Abby's double barreled sawed off that Abby fires and reloads as quickly as a gunslinger should
- Boltshot - intended to be a welding device that, due to a design flaw, became a weapon for crowd control instead.
- The Six Pack - A massive six-shelled revolving shotgun that fires piercing shots. Secondary fire fan-fires and empties the chambers. New for Episode 2!
Energy
- Hailer - a cryogenic weapon that freezes most enemies easily, allowing them to be shattered with a quick/auto kick or any other weapon
- Plasma Rifle - Updated a bit for Episode 2's release, this will shoot rapid fire plasma spheres (but not as a burst shot of five), or one big electrostatic sphere that sucks in enemies and does ripping damage.
- Popper - A microwave weapon that causes enemies to expand, explode and can cause chain damage to other nearby enemies. Secondary fire is an explosive popcorn bag! New for Episode 2!
Missile weapons
- Missile Launcher - self explanatory. Primary fire shoots missiles, secondary fire shoots grenades
- Heat Seeker - a souped up missile launcher. Primary fire shoots heat seeking missiles, secondary fire shoots a massive firebomb that goes out in a cross-shape
Big weapons
- Rainbowitzer - Taste the rainbow mother[beep]er. For primary fire, shoots a wall of color that can disintegrate most enemies, while the secondary fire shoots a giant rainbow nuke that nukes most enemies. In Episode 1's initial release, it could kill the player if in the blast radius and not behind cover. For Episode 2 we're getting rid of that, so players can nuke the baddies to their hearts content.
- Blitzcraig - a man eating plant that is also a friend. Primary fire shoots energy blasts that leech health off enemies, while secondary fire throws the plant, causing little mini-Blitzcraigs to go out, eating everything in their path.

Here we'll show off one of the new weapons in motion - the Popper - specifically the Popper secondary fire.

And while we're at it, the new look of the Rainbowitzer's secondary fire.

The Verticality and Level Design

Project Absentia is designed to have tons of vertical as well as horizontal movement, and the level design is meant to complement that. Episode 2 will be no different. With huge, colorful locations with tons of combat and eye-catching detail!

Here's a few examples for Episode 2

Abby, with her gliding ability, can firebomb enemies from the air, and on the ground can dash around. She may be small, but she packs a huge punch, especially from above.

Of course, not every part of a location can be vertical, but we still offer enough so Abby can move around.

We'll have updates soon - some pretty substantial updates to be exact about release plans. We hope you all are as excited as we are that the finish line is approaching fast for release.

Cheers!

-SanyaWaffles

Original post

27 Feb 2026Developer post

Making of Project Absentia - Part 1 - Making A Flashcore Game

Waffle Iron Studios' motto is "Home of Saturday Morning Slaughter". We aim to make cartoony games for a mature audience. Since 2021 we've been working on Project Absentia as a commercial endeavour in our spare time. During the early days the art style was rough, but with dedicati

Waffle Iron Studios' motto is "Home of Saturday Morning Slaughter". We aim to make cartoony games for a mature audience. Since 2021 we've been working on Project Absentia as a commercial endeavour in our spare time. During the early days the art style was rough, but with dedication PA's art style evolved into something some ouf our friends and colleagues dubbed "Flashcore".

Making a Flashcore Game with GZDoom (and later UZDoom)

The biggest challenge is drawing sprites for 5 (and sometimes 8) angles while keeping the enemy shape distinct. Also, both UZDoom and GZDoom before it do not allow vector graphics - so the next best thing was hi-res sprites drawn in Flash (or Animate in imperial units) and exported at around 512 x 512. Some sprites are bigger or smaller depending on the actual size of the enemy.

Variants of the high guards in Episode 1 and mobsters in Episode 2 have physical differences and slight colour changes, while still indicative of them being of the same overall type of enemy. Thus, there's no need for palette swaps - something hard to do with hi-res full coloured graphics in the engine.

We decided to experiment with making the weapons stand out more by giving them a cartoony, low-poly model look with brightmaps. For the upcoming Episode 2 update we're adding pickup effects and bobbing to the weapons, to help them stand out. Even if it's not flash graphics per se, it doesn't stand out too much in the end, with people finding the current beta-dev state to be quite cohesive yet unique.

And something in the Episode 2 update is we're doing a brightmap pass to make enemies stand out more. With vivid yet dark, moody coloured lighting, we wanna make sure enemies stand out solidly.

In short, a cartoony, ultraviolent game is what we set out to do, and we're making that happen, while taking care of certain accessibility concerns within our abilities with the engine we chose.

Influences

Project Absentia started as a pony game inspired by Rainbow Factory, a well known grimdark fanfic. When we wanted to make it a commercial project, we obviously had to go a different route. However, AuroraDawnRF, the author behind Rainbow Factory, gave the project his blessing, as long as we made some changes.

He did allow us to use some of his characters as a basis. It was his idea to make the pegasi into Angels, and he even came up with the Orkan Corp's logo. The logo is based on a symbol for tornado vortex signatures seen on some weathermap systems over the years.

As we devloped the story, one thing we definitely deviated from was the grimdark aspect. We ended up going a completely different direction, with Abby fighting with hope in her heart that things will work out in the end. We will continue that, while still maintaining the stakes being high, into Episode 2. Grimdark has its place, but we prefer Hopepunk in this dark, cynical world.

(Pictured above: A teaser drawing of one of the boss fights)

-SanyaWaffles

Original post

31 Jan 2026Developer post

Project Absentia has been content locked, moving to Quality Assurance Phase!

Greetings peeps! We are proud to announce Project Absentia has been content locked and is playable from beginning to end - but we wanna still make sure it's proper (thus Quality Assurance is being done). This is every exciting news for everyone! We aren't ready to announce a rele

19 Sep 2025Developer post

WIP screenshots of Project Absentia Episode 2

Project Absentia is still being worked on despite some delays. Here's a sneak peak of some of the areas and some flavor text. Heaven is in shambles after Hell finally got to Heaven and wrecked Olympus. To get to the Hell Territories, you must hijack a naval battleship - one of th

12 Sep 2025Developer post

Patch for Demo + Episode 1

Fix HUD not appearing + scale not working. For those with broken huds with existing playthroughs, set screenblocks to 11 via the console (press the key above tab on your keyboard). Episode 2 news coming soon.

01 Jun 2025Developer post

Where's Episode 2?

Greetings people, SanyaWaffles here. I am the creative director at Waffle Iron Studios and lead dev of Project Absentia. People have been asking where Episode 2 of the game has been. We announced it back when for a Q2 2023 release date and outside some Twitter (and later BlueSky

Greetings people, SanyaWaffles here. I am the creative director at Waffle Iron Studios and lead dev of Project Absentia.

People have been asking where Episode 2 of the game has been. We announced it back when for a Q2 2023 release date and outside some Twitter (and later BlueSky posts) we've been kind of radio silent.

Unfortunately we missed the mark by a long shot. We should have waited to announce we had anything until it was ready to go, or tote it as a teaser or something rather than a release timeframe.

There are several factors into this. My health was all over the place (I am disabled, I work on PA when my body and mind allow), I had to move apartments in December, and many of the people at Waffle Iron Studios and Hellforge Studios who are helping out have their own stuff going on, such as dayjobs and family and social life stuff to attend to. Some of them also have their own health issues to manage. We should (and try to) prioritize health first.

There's also the addition that I am not the best at social media. For better or worse, I don't gel with the ecosystem, and it's hard to manage a bunch of social media outlets, especially in this climate. This makes it hard for me to tease additional stuff.

When we decided to go Early Access, it was more to release the game episodically (that was when we were going for three episodes, not two).

Also game dev is hard. No matter what engine we use, no matter what budget you have.

At the end of the day, we're a small indie dev team with a small indie publisher circle and we're doing our damnest to get it out the door, but we don't want to rush our game for the sake of deadlines, and we really don't want to crunch either. We want to try to be better than mainstream games which release broken and unfinished at the expense of people's mental and physical wellbeing.

We are sorry for the lack of real development news. For transparency's sake, the game is very close to being done, but there's still content to be added, quality to assure, and bugs that need stomped out in the process.

Sincerely on behalf of Waffle Iron Studios,

SanyaWaffles

Original post

25 Oct 2024Developer post

PA engine update for 1.7.3 - EA and Demo

Update engine to impending 4.13.2 release.

05 Jun 2024Developer post

Indie FPS Summer Showcase

Projejct Absentia has been invited to the Indie FPS Summer Showcase! From now until the 12th, Project Absentia will be 35% off! There will be a live event on the 8th hosted by ZlimBratski! Follow Zlim on Twitter for up-to-date news about the event; Live event happening on Youtube

18 Apr 2024Developer post

Another 1.7.3 hotfix

Fixed green protomoxium terrain flats not damaging player. Also boost Asphodel's new voice clips to be more audible.

16 Apr 2024Developer post

1.7.3 Hotfix

Fix: Miniboss variant of Man-Eating Plants would become nearly invulnerable if attacked too early.

12 Apr 2024Developer post

Early Access Version 1.7.3

Fixed some defaults that were accidentally removed/reverted to stock GZDoom New voice acting for Asphodel Fixed HUD not appearing in some rare instances

15 Mar 2024Developer post

Projejct Absentia - Episode 2 Devlog #1

Greetings! Project Absentia is going along, with a lot of work being done on the maps. There's going to be, at the moment, 13 levels like Episode 1 was. Here's some screenshots of some of the locations, including the ruins of Olympus, a hijacked Orkan naval ship, a topsy turvy fe

28 Feb 2024Developer post

Episode 1 Version 1.7.2

This patch fixes some regressions with E1M3 and E1M10, as well as fixing a critical bug with the final boss of Episode 1 being stunlocked in his first stage, making him hard to hit due to him dodging you constantly. Older versions are on beta branches as usual.

21 Jan 2024Developer post

Hotfix for 1.7.1

-Temporarily get rid of music ducking as it was causing trouble with music fadeouts/fadeins.

Updates & announcements

The Weapons

The Verticality and Level Design

Making a Flashcore Game with GZDoom (and later UZDoom)

Influences