Book of Abominations is back!
Hi all, if you're reading this, first off thanks for sticking around!
We're back with a small demo update that we released in April for everyone to enjoy, it contains a few small additions to the content, that being 3 new abominations and 1 new area.
If you're only interested in what's been added, feel free to scroll down to the bottom of this post.
However, we would love for you to read a little bit about what's been going on behind the scenes and where we will be going from now!
July 2023 - October 2025
For some context, this project started back in July in a competition between 6 different game development teams to make a 10 minute vertical slice. This project ended up winning that competition and we did our first showcase down at EGX London 2023 in October!
Since then, the primary developer worked on this solo, however with no funding and being a solo developer; not a lot of progress was made. The demo continued to get shown at events, it got refined, polished, and bug-fixed over and over again. That period of development is what made Book of Abominations feel so good! However it was never going to finish.
October 2025 brings in a new team member
In October, the studio went to an accelerator in Italy to develop some business skills and have some time to bring on board the lead programmer of the project, Tanapat.
The first course of action for us was to wipe the tech debt that accrued over 2 years. What this means is that we completely restarted our project; wiping out 90% of the code, optimising the asset creation pipeline, and changing the production workflow completely. This was no longer a solo project, but a team project.
In a matter of 4 months, we managed to completely rebuild the game to what it once was AND add even more mechanics! This meant having to redesign some things as well.
Since then we've focused on stabilising the build so that we could update the steam demo. We would never be happy with releasing something that would break on other peoples machine so we took the time out to try to ensure as much as possible the stability of the demo.
During this time, one of the original developers came back to do some final bits of audio work with us before leaving for his new job in the games industry!
What's in store for the future?
So while the demo hasn't received much in terms of content, the entire underlying tech is much more scalable to match a real monster taming game.
We're very exciting to continue working on this, and to make up for the issues we've had with the lack of content and lack of communication, we are dedicated to releasing another demo, one that we call the content demo.
This content demo is planned to allow you to play the game up till a little place we call 'Rover's Bay'. This will involve really introducing a story to the world, more combat mechanics and more exploration mechanics too!
We're almost there in terms of features, however we need time to build the content and test the stability of the build afterwards.
During which we're planning on approaching funding sources like grants and publishers. We want to get this game to the finish line! So it's no longer just develop develop develop, we'll be networking, pitching, communicating, and more. The difference is now that there is a team behind the project, we can better share responsibilities on the business front and development front.
We're optimistic about the future of Book of Abominations, while development may be slow as we don't have funding, our drive to deliver is not! We want to ensure that the painful wait that everyone's had to endure will bear fruit.
Keeping communications
We are trying to use our social media more. Currently while we don't really have official handles, you can find the main spokesperson Alex on his handles below:
Twitter/X: Alex de la Cour
Instagram: bookofabominations
We will be posting on our steam community when there are updates to give!
We will also be posting announcements of when we're going to showcase events. These events will ALWAYS have the most up-to-date unreleased build we can offer.
We are trying to figure out how to run a discord server so when we're ready to do that, we will be announcing that here and on our social media. That will hopefully allow everyone to receive more regular updates and sneak peeks at what we're doing!
We want to once again thank you. If you've stuck around, that means the world to us. We hope to be able to deliver to you the world of Book of Abominations!
Changelog
Content Additions:
New Abomination Shroompa and Shroog, the mushroom in a log
Abomination Criminally Insane renamed to Deadhead
New Abomination Headhunter mutation from Deadhead, the headless rider
New Abomination Astig'muh, the floating eye
New area above Warbler Woods Crossroads
Reworked combat attack menus, now show more information contextually
Reworked combat effects and new ones added
New Pause Menu in Overworld Roaming after choosing your Abomination
Allows you to swap monsters, heal them, inspect them and inspect items
New Post Combat scene
New Miasmoth Combat music
New overworld music states inside house and outside
Additions (system additions that would not normally be visible):
Abomination Stats now affect combat and scale with level
Now uses a save system
Added partial support for mouse controls
Added support for localisation
Changes:
Petrify animation changed
Multi-Attack animation changed (Miasmoth and Deadhead)
Showcase photo by Giorgio Perrotino.