Hello! It’s time for another development progress update!
Like always, this update is written by both Megalo (Director + Main Artist) and mook (Project Manager + Systems Programmer).
For anyone who hasn’t already, you can read our previous development progress update from December 2025 here.
So, there is Bad News and Good News.
The Bad News
MINDWAVE is NOT coming out in 2027.
👽 mook:
The September 2027 estimate was a short-sighted prediction of mine based on what other Kickstarter games listed for their estimated delivery dates because Kickstarter requires you to list one.
I did my best to communicate that it was essentially an educated guess, but due to being the only available answer to the “release date question”, it ended up catching on in peoples’ minds (understandably so).
In hindsight, it was irresponsible to give any kind of estimate when we hadn’t experienced enough of this game’s development process to get a good sample size that we could base a development timeline on. So, for that, I personally apologize.
We won’t be ready to announce an updated release window estimate for a while, so please continue to keep up with these progress updates for a look at how far along development is.
🌙 Megalo:
All that being said, no one wants this game to release more than we do! MINDWAVE is coming out no matter what. If development takes longer than expected, it's because we're making sure the final game is nothing short of amazing.
👽 mook:
Lastly, we plan on getting in touch with Kickstarter backers who pledged at the Credits Doodle, Inbetween Appearance, and Minigame tiers for their pitches sometime next year.
The Good News
🌙 Megalo:
In the July 2025 progress update, I mentioned experimenting on lobbies with a secret buddy. In the December 2025 progress update, mook and I brought up the lobby experiment again, mentioning that it was in an early state and that it involved our custom scene system.
Now we’re ready to show off the experiment!
The secret experiment is this. Lobbies will now be 3D! And the secret buddy helping us with the experiment was Nyrusine!
Before we officially brought on Nyru as a full-on team member, we were considering the idea of 3D lobbies and how, if we fully decided to go full steam ahead on them, we would bring him onto the team.
Midway through last year, small work was started from Nyru on modeling a test mockup of the lobby including Abbie as a test NPC to put in a Godot engine mockup, which he would eventually deliver to us in a couple months.
nyru's lobby 1 proof of concept
After that, we fully brought him on! We swapped 3D focus to some minigame art stuff for a bit, but at the start of December, Nyru and mook shifted their focus to actually implementing the 3D lobbies into GameMaker. Now we’re here! And while the 3D lobby system is still not 100% done, it’s at a good baseline state to optimize and visually improve.
our current lobby 1 in-game work-in-progress
🌙 Megalo:
Why such a big change now? Well, the 2D Lobbies were cool, but not as immersive as I would've liked. In 2D, everyone’s just right in front of you to choose from, and to me it felt like picking from a list when talking to characters rather than really being in Pandora’s position.
I want it to feel like being in this ocean of people to talk to, exploring your surroundings, and coming across people as you look around, finding stuff but also being able to miss stuff completely. A 3D first person perspective just feels right for this kind of feeling, and to me is more engaging than a 2D screen that you pan around.
As we were discussing the possibilities, we started getting excited about how we could place the NPCs, lay out environments, and more. It felt like If we didn't go with it, we would've later felt like we missed out on something really cool. So, we followed that excitement and I feel like we made the right choice so far, even if it was a lot of work.
i can’t show our concept art for any other floors, but here’s an early scrapped floor 2 concept
nyru’s initial abbie model was off so i made this to help him fix it lol
👽 mook:
But, wait… GameMaker isn’t an engine built for 3D… right? It doesn’t even have a 3D level editor!* How are we doing this???
Well, GameMaker does support 3D, but you have to do a lot of the ground-level work yourself.
Over the past 8 months I’ve put together a system that lets us load 3D scenes built in Godot (a game engine that is built for 3D) into MINDWAVE!
I won’t get too deep into the specifics of how this system works, but it essentially looks at Godot Scene Files, replicates all of the included Resources and Nodes (Godot’s “objects”) on GameMaker’s end, then plops down all of the Nodes into the scene. Like Megalo mentioned earlier, this all runs on MINDWAVE’s scene system, which I detailed in the previous update.
This Godot-to-GameMaker scene loading system has a lot of limitations, but at its core, it allows us to use Godot as a 3D level editor. So, this will not only be used for lobbies, but minigames too!
Shoutout to TheSnidr, whose ColMesh system we’re using to facilitate 3D collisions!
TheSnidr’s SMF Model Animation system was previously used in the demo to animate the 3D Starlight Elevator (but we’ll probably have that migrated to our new Godot-based skeletal animation system now for greater system consistency)
5 months of work in 24 seconds
*A few months ago, GameMaker announced their plans to improve their built-in 3D support… huh!
Well, I’m pretty happy with the system I’ve made (I love Godot so much) so I’m not too beat up about that. If anything, their 3D system additions could possibly help us improve the performance of our own 3D system later down the line. Big if true!
Overall Progress (The Good News, Part 2)
🌙 Megalo:
As mentioned in the previous update, Mind 2's song has already been practically completed, a chunk of the minigames and score animations have been made, and we have a structure to follow for it.
All that’s left for its Alpha state is for mook to implement the Brain Fog mechanic, some more minigames, and some other structure/pacing-related things that we already have the rubric for.
With Mind 3, we have assets for a chunk of minigames and score animations done, and a structure/arc for it to follow. Mind 3’s song is still being made by Dorkus right now, we’ve stuck with one of the demos and have been building it since to be perfect for what I wanna go for. Right at this exact point in time we’re getting over one of the major hurdles in the song.
Music is very important for knowing what the finalized structure for a Mind will look like, down to determining how certain score animations will look. This, and the fact that a Mind’s song has to carry the specific tone and feel I want to capture, makes it a delicate back-and-forth process that requires a lot of experimentation. This is partially why Mind 2 and 3’s songs have taken more time than expected.
🌙 Megalo:
Alongside progress on Minds 2 and 3, there's also been major progress on laying out strong blueprints for Minds 4 and 5 before we get into the Alphas for them. As we work on the game, part of the process is taking the ideas I had for Minds from the beginning of the project and developing the concepts further so we have something solid to work with.
Minds 4 and 5 are in a state where music and assets are ready to be worked on at any moment to start their Alpha stages (we’ve already done a bit of work on assets for both). For a Mind to be ready before starting an Alpha stage we want to know:
What the imagery will be like
What the music should sound like
The “arc” of the Mind (how tone and mechanics change as you play)
The story we want the Mind to tell
The feeling we want to convey
And more that I won’t say.
This doesn’t mean that these Minds are ready to have development start on their Alpha states tomorrow. It just means that the old ideas have been developed past loose concepts and will be ready to execute when the time comes.
The “time” usually begins around when the Mind's song starts getting made, with the Mind's final direction being locked in when the song is finished.
And More!
🌙 Megalo:
As a last note, there's been more progress on the story side of things! The writers have continued to write NPC interactions to get a feel for each floor. The sections of the game we’ve focused on writing so far are starting to feel less draft-y and more like something solid to keep building around.
Alongside that, Starmy and I have also done a good bit of work on miscellaneous cutscene storyboards. Some of it feels like it could be final and some of it is still experimentation to see what fits and what doesn't for our story. As mentioned in the previous updates, we’ve gone harder on more focused writing and fleshed out major story beats, and right now we have a solid big picture view of the arc of the game. The exact execution has just been requiring lots of experimentation.
Until Next Time.
👽 mook:
Hi I’m coming in at the end to say I moved recently which put physical Kickstarter rewards shipping on pause. I live close to a post office now, and now that we’ve successfully got this update out, I’ll be returning to physical rewards shipping! Sorry if you’ve sent messages about shipping and I haven’t responded. I’ll get back to you soon! Between programming and management, I wear a lot of hats :P
If you haven’t received your rewards yet, please send a message via Kickstarter! Please help me finish this once and for all!
(Remember that the Soundtrack and Art Book are digital, not physical.)
(Also we still aren’t handling credits name changes until closer to the game’s launch. I don’t respond to messages about this.)
🌙 Megalo:
That’s gonna be it for now. Again thank you guys a ton for reading and thank you for sticking by the game’s development. We’re very happy people are still excited and eager for the game, and we’re happy that the game only seems to get cooler and the vision more tight.
