Hello hello folks! For those in the UK, I hope you've been enduring the heatwave (I AM NOT)!
To jump to the main point of this post: I'm happy to announce the 2025 Update will release on the 12th July. This will come with a price increase to $15.99, and is an update to the existing app (i.e: not a DLC)
Trailers
One big bureaucracy of games is the storepage admin - new store page copy, screenshots, artwork - but the biggest ache I find is trailers. Recording footage, re-recording footage, then editing it all.
When I was making the original release, I wasn't really aware of DaVinci or other video software (on top of that I assumed they were pay-to-own, and I was averse to spending more at the end of a crunch production). So... I made the trailer in blender.
Which was A MISTAKE. With the older version of blender I was working with! It is a tool that works. But with the version of blender I used (this screenshot above is from opening it in 4.3, not the original blender version) I had to fight it a lot to get it to work, even for a simple trailer like the one I was making. A solid percent of that was me being a newbie and time pressure, yes, but I distinctly remember making the original trailer as 'a fight' to get the tool to work.
But today! In our lord's age of {currentyear}, I used DaVinci Resolve like how I did for Day of Maintenance's videos. And the experience was a lot more breezy. It did have some quirks with the software (+ I always put a lot of time-pressure on myself to get things done too quickly, which never helps), but the overall software feels like a tool made for video editing, rather than Blender which is a swiss-army-knife that can do anything (although with the way it's changed so drastically in v3 and v4, I'd argue that I just don't know that software well enough and that it can be capable of video production?)
The end result - with audio engineering by Rowan - is a new trailer that feels a lot tighter
(Which will be published soon 😉)
Finishing Up
As of typing, I've now downed tools and am waiting for the Steam Sale to wrap up before releasing this update. Incoming soon is a fun gamejam that I'm excited to take a part of (but on a much MUCH smaller scale than this big 6-month endeavour). And as this all comes to a close I'm doing last fixes:
Characters can now show their buff status in pips, which is available via settings toggle. You can also see here that Progress bars now have a shadow, to help with readability.
And the intro/outro titles of a level have a small bit of polish to them.
A fair other things have been fixed-up, spruced-up. There's now a Goals Counter in the empty spot where the skip-to-10s button used to be:
I'll still do one last playtest of the build's features, but for now: this is the end of Forgetful Loop's 1st major update (in 5 years!). I'm interested in returning to it in the far future again though - gamepad controls, another level-pack with a new mechanic, more writing, maybe even localisation! - but I want to take a long break and do other projects first.
The update drops on July 12th.
Can't wait for y'all to try it 💙