I love it when a game has unhinged patch notes. I’m pretty sure I bought Caves of Qud almost exclusively because its patch notes were always like: “Ape opinion now degrades correctly when the player questions the origin of the moon,” or “player fungal growths are now a valid target for players with the dismemberment ability.” So, to keep myself motivated, I started keeping a “done log” in my team Discord channel. I’ll post some of the more fun excerpts at the end of this post, but first: The Updates!
Functioning Game Loops
I am very happy to report that finally, after six months of effort on TMOB, the mechanical pieces of the gameplay loop are all in place! You can now take complete turns with a variety of actions. Not every action that I envision for the game is available yet, but I do think that all future actions will be permutations on the code we already have, and not entirely new features that require infrastructure. A sample couple of turns might look like this:
- Decide you want to have more influence over character X, so you agree to help them in a ritual
- You have several weeks remaining before you lose the game, so you decide to work towards a nonviolent version of the ritual that requires you to amass Heart aspect, a process that takes some time. The alternative might be faster, but require violence.
- You know that the Harvard Divinity Special Collection has several items with the Heart aspect.
- You elect to either riskily break into Harvard Divinity yourself, or deploy a follower who has the “Access — Harvard” aspect.
- Now that you possess all the ingredients to complete the ritual, you pick up another pact to extend your time in the mortal world. This lets you complete your first ritual freely.
- You supply all the Heart ingredients to the ritual, and resolve character X’s pact nonviolently, increasing their opinion of you and both of your powers.
That might all sound like a pretty simple bit of gameplay, but there are lots of permutations implied by it, and the game is now set up to handle these. For example: What do you do if you don’t know of a location with Heart artifacts? What if you are physically incapable of robbing Harvard yourself? What if you don’t yet have a follower with “Access — Harvard.” Getting all this working in tandem with the visual novel system felt a bit tricky, but if you read the Done Log excerpts below you might see some of how these systems work together.
Publishing and Fundraising
Now that we have functioning game loops, the time has come to actually reach out to publishers with a preview build. I’m unsure of how that’ll go, mostly because of the Community License thing, but there’s a short list of people I think might be interested. Things are on track, though: we have a build worth sending this January, we’re on target for a (very short) public demo or playtest around March, and we’ll be launching our Kickstarter in May or June. We’re looking for around $70K USD in order to keep working on this full time for a Q1 2027 launch.
I’m expecting the game to be a self-published Kickstarter baby, but it would certainly all go better with publisher support. Wish us luck!
Art
Goldstarknight has been hard at work creating some incredible artwork. I’m looking forward to writing a blog on how we arrived at our artistic direction, but until then, please enjoy the gallery below. Soon we should be able to cut a “real” version of the trailer with updated art.
Music
Similarly, work on music and foley continues apace. If you haven’t heard any of the TMOB soundtrack yet, you can check it out below.
From the Done Log
- Characters now contribute a portion of their stats to you based on how much they like you
- Added a moth check to the second murder screen to determine whether or not you get caught
- Characters now properly enter ‘killed’ or ‘captured’ states
- Added a “mission board” for available pacts that allow players to opt in to new pacts to extend their weeks remaining.
- Visiting characters in their dreams now works.
- Wrote Mohammed’s dreams.
- Added the Labrys and Jade Dagger to the Harvard Divinity Special Collection
- Changed how Presence works. Now, high-presence locations summon Hunters that block that location until dealt with. Presence no longer usually modifies stat rolls.
- Made the Ivory irresistible.
My Thanks to You
Last of all, I’d like to say “thank you” to anyone reading this and supporting this project. I’ve been working on TMOB since July 2025, and in September I packed up my whole life and moved to a low-cost-of-living area to make this project a reality. It probably wasn’t wise, it’s often quite scary, but it’s been very satisfying as well. It feels great to be working on something that people are excited about, and the level of support I’ve received already blows my mind.
So, to everyone who hangs out in the Discord or has been encouraging on Reddit: I see you, and thank you so much! This next chapter — the fundraising chapter — is going to be pretty tough, but you all give me the optimism to think it’ll all work out.
See you next year,
BluntBSE
