COLONY Update: October 2025

Hello, everyone. Apologies for how late this has been, we've been dealing with a variety of issues, both technical and otherwise.

Hahli is writing this month’s post, as Muir is unfortunately ill and indisposed at the moment. He’s going to need time to recover, so it may be a while before he can work on the project again - please send some well-wishes his way.

In the meantime, the rest of the team continues to work on the game; I'll be available to answer what questions I can. Let’s go over what we've been up to this month:

State of the Game

In case you missed last month’s post, we’re working on another demo, this time showcasing our game’s Adventure Format. Whereas Arena Format focuses on pitting players against each other in small-scale combat, Adventure Format is a cooperative mode in which players collaborate with a Game Monarch to explore and tell a story together in the world of Aoiama. (If you need something to tide you over in the meantime, the Arena demo is available here.)

In order to populate that world, we need to create a roster of Creatures: non-player characters (NPCs) who the players may encounter on their travels. Muir and I have been working on a lot of the background aspects of NPC development for some time - assembling lists of insects we want to include, figuring out where and how they fit into Aoiama, crunching the numbers to set up their basic stats, and drafting mechanics for their abilities. However, up until recently, it had been a while since we touched the statblock layout itself: I started to dig into that this month, and we ended up making some reductions to the level of granularity compared to what we were originally envisioning for the statblock. Now that it’s been streamlined, I’ve completed the first pass of all of the standard Fora statblocks (yes, all three Tribes!) and am now starting on the Tera. Exactly which of these statblocks will be in the Adventure demo is yet to be determined…

…and speaking of which, we’re running a poll over on Patreon to help determine which NPCs will be in the patron-exclusive version of the demo, starting with the Wild Beasts! If you’re a patron, go place your vote, and if not, please consider supporting us as we continue to develop the world of COLONY: https://www.patreon.com/posts/patron-poll-demo-141681821

Song of Origins

Nash is closing in on the end of the musical composition for Movement 7 of the Song of Origins, and Muir has been working on arrangements as his time permits. Charles has started drawing the next scene in the Movement - which you can see an in-progress sketch of in this post’s image - and I’ve also been able to start animating and editing the first few shots of the Movement.

That’s everything for this month. Thanks for reading through all this, and please stay safe out there, wherever you may be.