COLONY Update: February 2026

Hello, everyone!

Apologies for the lateness of this post, many extraneous circumstances have been holding us up. But on an interesting note, I (Muir) am back in the writing seat this month, and I’ve got some cool news to share from the past four weeks, so let’s hop into it!

State of the Game

Game dev has been slow this month, but on the 7th, we were lucky to hold an in-person demo day at Deuces Wild Games in Show Low, AZ. As I always do for Demo Days, I brought out the sweet terrain board I made for our commercial, along with the nicely printed beta cards, and my hand-made Sekuta miniatures (are they still considered minis if they’re almost the same size as the actual creature?). Little did this unsuspecting shop and its patrons know I would bring a whole charcuterie board with me, featuring homemade goat cheddar, cured/roasted goat loin, sourdough focaccia, and candied ruby grapefruit peels, along with an assortment of other offerings - because I’m cool like that. All three players who responded to the invitation showed, and some folks who weren't there to play originally wanted to get in once they were finished with their own games. One of them said they were there to play another tabletop game, but had seen the post about our demo day and wanted to see what this brand new guy in their Discord server peddling his game was all about.

Our players sat down, and we began to play. These guys asked great questions, gave great feedback, were enthusiastic, and were cracking me up the whole time. They performed synergy combos between our cards and the environment I had never seen done before in playtesting. As just one of many examples, the Manta player successfully Grappled the Apoi player, then played Escaping Leap, flinging both of them into the stream. The Manta then held the Grapple on the Apoi while forcefully submerging the Apoi's entire body underwater, forcing the Apoi to make Agility Checks to try to break away, and Cling Checks to see if he drowned. This poor player failed every roll. It was dramatically devastating. Absolute cinema.

The reception was so strong that the game shop owner invited me back to run a demo day on the first Saturday of every month, and the group has consented to be my guinea pigs for playtesting. Having this regular source of outside mechanical feedback should hopefully invigorate the dev cycle and help keep us going.

If you are in the White Mountains area of Arizona (or even if you aren’t, you do you), you are more than welcome to join us at Deuces Wild Games on the first Saturday of every month to try out Colony. I’ll be bringing a few pizzas along with me this upcoming Saturday, and you can just kick back and hang with us, even if you don’t play! Hopefully we’ll see you there!

As a small part of this month’s development, we held a low-key community hang out in the community Discord server while I worked on writing a race profile for the Arak. While Arak have been more widely-documented across other parts of our lore, we realized it would be beneficial to build up a proper profile to help us keep all our ideas in one place for the purposes of reference during game design. We had a good turnout of our stream regulars, and it was good to hang with them while we worked! We’ll hopefully have more news on Arak game mechanics in next month’s post, which I’ll be testing in the jankiest fashion this upcoming demo day, so stay tuned for that!

And to address the winner of this month’s poll for the Patron-exclusive Ulukuta, you folks have selected the Kil, known to us as centipedes! Keep an eye out for more polls in the future.

Song of Origins

This month has been very productive on the music end of the Song of Origins, and I am happy to announce that both Movement 7 AND 8 are now fully composed, mixed, and mastered, meaning we now have the entirety of the Song of Origins completed in an audio format. I had a very surreal moment last night as I sat on my porch and listened to the entirety of the Song of Origins front to back. To hear the roughly one hour of lore, music, and voice acting come together in a cohesive fashion - the culmination of four years of work - was a moment of relief and pride to have finally experienced.

While Charles’ work on the artwork for the video is still underway, it’s a huge relief to know the music side of this part of the project has come to a close, which will hopefully open up opportunities for other music in the future.

And with that, lovely readers, I’m gonna sign off! We’ll see you next month for more news and updates, but in the meantime, stay safe and have fun!

Cheers,

Isaac Muir