Hey,
First of all: big thanks to everyone who's played the demo, filled out the survey, streamed or covered the game, and hosted us in events (most recently Weird Days: Job Simulator). Many of your comments mean a great deal to us, especially early on when we had no idea if anyone was going to like this thing. Deviating from being a roguelike/RPG like our primary inspiration was scarier than a crab monster (and still kind of is).
Progress
For basic context of where we are: we started development on the game in December 2025 (after months of noodling around on different prototypes and generally winding down after finishing our previous game Crab Attack). When we released the NextFest demo in June it pretty much represented where the game was other than having outlines for the rest of the mysteries and story (we like doing NextFest as soon as there's a solid playable chunk so we can react to feedback. Our previous game needed a lot of changes, but Courier Beware has held up better).
Our general progress so far is:
Summer and fall mysteries have been written/designed (though I tend to do a lot of touch ups and new branches over time as I get ideas, so it might be a bit before they're truly finished).
Winter is in progress, mostly held up by figuring out the mechanics.
Sketches for most of the summer/fall mysteries are done. One of them is in a finished visual state, with another in progress. Most of the art work has been dedicated towards adding more danger events to the Abandoned House as well as the Gold work events that weren't present in the demo, and that work is done.
Writing has ended up being the biggest thing slowing us down (which was a little unexpected given the original text-only prototype was written and scripted in 72hrs, but that's the creative process for you). Putting everything in the game should be faster since most of the engine is already in place from making the demo (though we do have some things lined up that will require new code). Applying sound effects, doing the soundtrack, and revising based on tester feedback will likely be the bigger time sinks. The art has been going smoothly, mostly held back by the writing.
Our target release window continues to be October-March. Given where things stand right now I'd say October is very unlikely, 2026 isn't out of the question yet, and I have little fear of taking longer than March.
Upcoming Changes
You can probably expect the mechanical changes to be minimal. There were a ton of great ideas in the feedback, and we experimented with some of them, but ultimately noticed there were a whole lot more players who just wanted the finished game as soon as possible. So we decided drastic changes are probably a better fit for a sequel or future game. The writing has been the focus currently, so nothing is concrete yet, but I'd mostly expect:
Changes to how danger events (the % chance to fail) and luck works.
Reworking the item shop's balance (probably starting with a smaller shop inventory and unlocking more items over time).
The most tenuous is that I'm toying with the idea of being able to see stat check values ahead of time (most likely just having the game remember them from previous runs, but a mechanism to see them ahead of time is under consideration).
Of course, mysteries and seasons will continue to throw new little mechanical curveballs throughout the game as well.
Localization
For now we're electing to stay fully independent rather than going with a publisher. This means we don't plan on doing translations unless the English version sells well enough to fund them (as a text heavy game it's going to be expensive to get the necessary quality human translations, and we don't really have a budget to speak of). Our highest priority languages are currently Chinese and Japanese, but we'll refer to wishlist data when making decisions too.
Conclusion
Boy that's a lot of words. Thanks for reading to the end, and thanks for following our game. Here's a crab as a reward for getting this far:
