Hello! Been meaning to put together a little update like this for a while now. I'm a solo dev and I'm very hard at work on making SongRunner as good as it can be. I've been sharing some gameplay vids on Bluesky, YouTube, Tiktok, and Instagram to help gauge excitement, and have actually been blown away by how supportive and encouraging people have been. For the past 6 weeks or so I've been posting 3 videos a week. Combined across all platforms, those videos have somehow gathered up almost 10 million views. It's incredibly exciting to see this kind of reaction to SongRunner. This past weekend, SongRunner broke 4,000 wishlists on Steam (!!) which is already like 5 times more than You Have To Climb Out ever had, and we still have quite a ways to go before SongRunner launches.
Oh wait that's a good segue. Ok, so here on Steam, I list a vague "2026" release date. I was very loosely aiming for that to be true with a November/December release, but I am also extremely aware that solo game development is really really really hard and sometimes you spend a whole week on the screen where you select a save file (hi yes it's me). SongRunner could easily slip to early 2027. Just wanted to put that out there.
As for the demo that's currently on Steam - I said in a previous post that I'd likely keep it up indefinitely. However, the game naturally evolves quite a bit as I keep working on it, and it's getting to the point that the demo that's on Steam is not a very accurate representation of how it will feel to play the game when it launches. At the same time, I want there to be a demo always available so that people can see if this wacky little platformer is up their alley or not. The bottom line is that it's looking pretty likely that I'll be taking the demo down for some period of time and then putting up a "demo 2.0" within a few months or so.
That's all I've got for this post! Excited to share more details in the future!