Hey everyone, I’m back with another update!
It’s crazy to think about, but I have been developing The Book of Prosperity for 7 years now. When you work on a project for that long, the content you created on Day 1 starts to look very different from the stuff you are making on Day 2500. Because my skills have grown so much, I decided it was time to go back and completely recreate one of the earliest missions in the game.
It has the same character and the same overall plot, but with massively upgraded graphics, better battles, deeper lore, and new mini-games!
Recreating old mission
This is the newly redesigned boss fight against Vionysus. She is a high-ranking member of The Circle — the authority that controls this magical world through brainwashing and erasing history. I completely overhauled her character design and her attack patterns. (And of course, Cyrus’s attacks got a massive upgrade too).
For context, this is what this exact same fight looked like 7 years ago:
Yeah... we've come a long way.
Mini game!
As much as I love the hardcore, unforgiving Action RPG combat, I want the game’s pacing to have moments where the player can actually relax and breathe.
Cyrus is still a secondary school student, and today... he got detention. To kill time, he decides to clean the blackboard.
In phase 1, you just wipe out whatever nonsense is on the board.
In phase 2, this is where the nerdy John comes in. John really wants to rewrite the homework assignments that Cyrus just erased. Suddenly, it’s a turf war. You have to erase the board faster than John can write the assignments back on it! (John is not a girl. I still have not updated the dialogue system yet...)
This recreated mission can be experienced in the demo which I will be releasing soon. Please stay tuned.
Trailer sneak peek
I’m currently prepping the official trailer! I recently posted Version 1 on my Discord channel and Reddit to gather some brutal honesty.
Based on your feedback, I just cut Version 2. I fixed the pacing issues, gave the audience more time to actually read the title cards, and cut down on repetitive clips.
You can check out V2 here. Do you have any comments on this?
I'm planning to officially publish this in April 2026!
Plan to redraw old characters
However, reading the trailer feedback reconfirmed one of my biggest insecurities. Someone pointed out: "The walking animation looks off."
They were right. It’s been on my mind for a while. The Cyrus sprites I drew 7 years ago just do not match the current aesthetic of the game’s environments or the enemy designs. A clunky main character animation can absolutely be the reason someone drops a game.
So, I’ve made the painful but necessary decision: I am going to redraw all of the player character's sprites. That is easily over 100+ frames of hand-drawn pixel art.
But, to be practical, I am going to keep the old Cyrus in the upcoming April trailer. If I wait until I finish redesigning 100+ sprites to drop the trailer, it will delay the marketing entirely. It’s an indie dev compromise, but the final game will have the brand-new Cyrus!
New icon
Finally, I redesigned my developer icon! Meet the Asian Koel. (Left is new icon, middle is the reference, and right is the old).
If you live in Hong Kong (or parts of Asia), you know exactly what this bird is. It is the menace that starts screaming outside your window at 4:00 AM every single day. The pitch of each of its screams gets slightly higher and higher. Because of this, in Hong Kong culture, it’s playfully called the "key-rising bird". The old version doesn't seem noisy enough.
In Cantonese, "key-rising" sounds exactly like "SingKey", which is my name.
Thanks for sticking with me on this crazy 7-year journey. Let me know what you think of the new Vionysus fight and the trailer V2!
The Book of Prosperity | SingKeys
