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In just over a month you'll be able to experience the world of Mudborne and uncover it's secrets - however if that's still too far away, I've also released a new demo for Mudborne that you can play right now!
This demo takes you through the first area of the game - the Spawning Pools, and contains all the lovely feedback and QoL changes that came from the playtest (thanks again for everyone who got involved in that!)
Whether you played the old demo or not, there's plenty of fresh content for you to experience. (Playtesters - this is just the first region of what you already played so you're not missing anything!)
If you want to chat with other players, the "🛝-mudborne-playtest" in Discord
This will be a playtest of the full game, limited to the first 3 regions - Spawning Pools, Central Junction, and Kindergarten. If you've played the demo this will still be quite different, as the demo has it's own map. 
The playtest is limited to 3 areas and only contains 1/3 of all frogs, mushrooms, and bugs of the full game. I'd say there's maybe 10 hours of content-ish but I genuinely have no clue!
It's worth noting that playtest saves will NOT be able to be used in the full game, as like the demo they also have their own map.
With a lot of APICO's gameplay, I just did what I personally thought would be fun, and the end result is a weird combination of things but those who get it, love it. With Mudborne I've been trying to do the same thing, but I have a lot more worries about certain mechanics or moments that I wouldn't have if it wasn't tied to keeping the lights on.
With APICO done, all the games I'm making are all in my own engine built on top of the LÖVE framework, and it's made things so much quicker to create. At the time of writing Mudborne is very nearly finished up, and it's taken only 8 months in total working full-time on it.
I've also done a few little bug fix patches here and there which I'm sure gave you all a bit of false hope on new content when the download queued!
I'd love to come back to it one day, in a seperate game. When I drew up the new credit postcards (above) I had fun invisioning a game where you do go to the mainland and help clean up the environment using your bees. I think it'd be nice to take the same APICO gameplay, streamline some of it and make it all fit better (especially the money making side), and then expand the bees to all have functions in restoring nature.
I was really happy with the end result - 'Synthesis'. I wanted to make a puzzle game with different modules like what you get with old patch synthesisers. As you mess with the different modules it changes the patterns drawn until you eventually come across the combination needed to match the required shape.
It was really fun to put this together! I had 10 days and pretty much used them all. I also did the music for it because I wanted to start practicing music creation for Mudborne, and was interesting in having the music 'evolve' with the puzzle progress.
I think it'd be cool to revisit one day as a 'full' game, as you could have lots of different module types and interactions, and let players connect modules themselves in different orders which then affects the outcome.
It's been an interesting process, first I did like concept art for the rough game, and worked on all the individual mechanics - then I worked on the actual world development and story and tied it all together.
I wanted something players could piece together themselves, and get clues from all over the place to work out certain things, so there was a lot involved in making sure it all fit together nicely. At the time of writing this I've just finished up all the final dialogue lines, and now it's just a lot of drawing and polish left to go.
Once the playtest is over it'll just be some last little bits to tweak and any changes to make and it'll be ready to release! Crazy to think it'll be my second published game. If you haven't already be sure to give it a wishlist! You can also check out the demo still:
If he is free, then I imagine Snacktorio will get polished off this year, maybe an early 2026 release! If not then I'll just have to work down the list to the next game idea and get started...
At the start of this month I finished up that area, spending some time to make the snow look pretty, or add some details like the player breathing or skating around on the ice. 
The main mechanics of this area (apart from yeeting around on the ice) is using heaters and coolers - heaters so you can melt frozen paths or objects (or frogs), and coolers so you can create new ice.
There'll be a few puzzles to work out using the heaters/coolers, but they also affect the nearby environment, allowing you to make the extreme ends of temperature for your mushrooms to find some new species.
I also wanted a way to let the player turn on/off weather, as it does have some uses and although you can sleep until the next day for a different weather pattern, I like to give players full control over stuff like that as they progress.
I finished up some other bits and bobs and then that area was good to go! Now it was time to move onto what I thought would be the last area...
I've tried to make all regions have some unique characteristics but I wanted some extra stuff with this region, hence the large purple lilypads and special pink trees, and the light pink pollen falling over the area.
This region has a lot of different research labs, and is focused more in the dream area with lots of 'dream' research being done - there's a few different machines for this area but I don't want to spoil them too much so I'll just show their designs instead.
There's also quite a few big important lore things here, so you can't actually access it right away and instead have to come back later when you've progressed enough.
With that done I was about halfway through the month - now it was time for the biggest task of the entire game's development, actually designing the full world map.
I then taped together a bunch of grid paper so I could have one 'main' map rather than keep swapping between what was already like 7-8 sheets of sketches, and started to pencil out the first couple regions together.
As a final step I then went over the area with a pen to mark some key stuff - where lilypad crossings would be, gates, doors to rooms etc. I could then use this later for mapping the actual content or paths.
It took me about 8 days but eventially I had the final map! Technically it's still not the final map as there's a couple areas I didn't want to put on the map for spoiler reasons and I knew I'd be taking photos of it and posting it around.
With that done I could start plugging it into Tiled - I tried to not be too strict with blocking out the areas, at first I was doing like exact square by square, at great eye-straining cost, but then I realised really I just needed to make sure the regions were roughly where I expected them to be and got a bit more loose with some island shapes.
Blocking out all the other regions took me all the way to pretty much the end of the month, on paper (lol) it doesnt sound like much to have a 500x400 map, but after actually drawing it all I can say it really is!
With all that done there was still lots to be done - for each region I need to add all the stone + grass "decor" (cracks, bricks, grass patches, posters etc).
It took me about 2-3 days to go from the blocked out version of the first area, to a 'finished' area (that still needs a few last bits added to it) - to give an idea on the scale, there's about 15,000 objects in the screenshot below, including all the plants and grass and decoration, all placed by hand.
Adding all the extra decoration and scenery is something I can do quickly at the end while doing playtesting/qa/localisation, so I don't want to spend too much time on it, but I wanted to get at least the first area fully finished off so that it's clear what each area will look like when finished up!
Originally when doing the overworld design I didn't think much more than what the waking vs dream world, but now I knew roughly the size of the world and the areas in it I knew I couldn't get away with just using the same "biome" style throughout the game - sure I could do a few different flora/fauna and setpieces to match the utility of that area in-game, but I wanted to make each of the regions more unique and interesting.
2. More detailed flora + grass that you can see in the first two green areas, can also start to see more interesting tree designs + stone decoration for the islands
3. Settling on the third "residential" area and the dream counterparts for the first three regions, plus starting to narrow down the snowy + central region styles
4. The current designs, with the first 4 regions implemented while I still tinker with the final central region
Lots of the color changes were tweaked slightly over time too - the first concept was drawn towards the start of september, the fourth one is what is currently used in-game (although still working on the 5th one)
The main thing I wanted was to have lots of variety and interesting plants and flora to make each region feel more unique outside of just palette changes - some areas also go a step further with some larger unique stuff, like the algae in the swamps or the flooded rooms in the residential district.
As I was designing them I changed the grass style to be an actual texture - darker blades that are part of the tiles themselves, and then lighter blades that I actually individually place.
And here is a normal building in the full game with the newer designs:
It's a bit more work to create the levels now as I have a lot more stuff to place manually - but I think the end result is worth it and let's me have much more interesting and pretty areas to explore, which is important for a game where I want players to explore and find all the secrets.
With hybrid mushrooms the idea is that you can combine any two standard mushrooms together to make 1 mushroom with the effects of both - this means you could have up to 6 modifications within one generation!
You can then use this paper in your farms - so instead of waiting for spores to form naturally you can just set the spores you want. You wouldn't even need to use a hybrid spore paper for this either, so it's a bit more control on exactly the spores you're farming.
This will get a bit complex, but it will be useful for a bunch of reasons - you can counteract 'bad' modifications you don't want into one mushroom, you can do more changes quickly in less generations, and then the main reason to solve more complex genetic puzzles.
This is the region where frogspawn+tadpoles are raised at the pond, as well as where mushrooms and bugs are farmed for resources and food.
It also introduces the first overworld "obstacle" (not counting the puzzles like the gates or the pressure pads or lilypads) - algae blooms.
These deadly blooms can't be crossed, so you need to clear them. Luckily you have a whole hoard of frogs at your disposal, and by boosting the "Edacity" trait you can make some very hungry frogs that'll eat anything not nailed down.
When you come to this region you'll get to learn about how to handle algae and given the tools to clear it - but you would of already come across some smaller blooms in other regions. So once you have the machines and the frogs from this region you can go back and explore those other areas.
While testing all of this I've been using a "dev" map - which is just a bunch of different regions slapped together each with a mini-island.
It's helping me visualise the look+feel of each region and means I've already implemented the gruntwork for adding that region - when it comes to designing the map of the full game I won't have to do much more work outside of just creating the areas, the rest is ready to go.
This is hinted at in the demo with the standard cultivators - that there'll be mushrooms that require the extremes of moisture and temperature, and this is the first region to cover those extremes.
An even more extreme use of this trait comes in with "croakwork" machines - automated machines powered by the sound of frogs, created by the Engineer. The first of these machines is the Drainer - a powerful croakwork machine that uses minimum saturation frogs to drain the flooded rooms of the residential district.
You can enter these rooms at first, however you can't interact with any of the flooded objects until you drain the room - revealing the objects plus anything else that might have been hiding under the water...
Other croakwork machines introduced here include the "Masher" - an automated grinder upgrade, and the "Harvester" - an automated machine that will harvest nearby blooming mushrooms and renewables automatically.
There's not a lot in Mudborne that needs to be automated, so there's not too many machines, but there's a few that should be useful and as I play more I'll be able to spot any processes that might need an upgrade that can be added to the Engineer's stock.
I tried to give both the wooded flooring and wooden piers a bit more interesting textures to them too rather than being perfect repetitive planks, as the original texture (ripped from APICO) no longer matched with all the new design stuff I'd done with the environment.
I had to do some messing around with the flora in the water and the new grass, as due to how I render the order of certain things the flora would be on top - so when placing tiles you temporarily disable any flora underneath so it's not causing issues.
I've only just now started to get the region loaded into the game - there was a lot of design stuff I was doing first. However now it's here I can work on the new machines that utilise the temperature and let you freeze water or melt ice. There'll be other things to unfreeze too - frogs, gates, and NPC...
As it's the region themed around storage you'll also get a whole bunch of new storage themed upgrades and advancements, like a big box to store all your frogs and search them easily, or an upgraded cauldron that can store all of your powders inside.
I was hoping to have done all the mechanics this month and implement them all, but I ended up not getting through them because I was sidetracked by adding the actual regions themselves - I didn't need to for most of the mechanics (and even flooding/ice I could of tested without the region itself), but I think it helped me see how the region would look and tweak things with the mechanics to fit better into the world that I wouldn't of done otherwise.
With that done I'll then be able to leave the developer map behind and start designing the actual world itself - which is going to be most of the game development time I think!
For each region I narrowed down the details seperately to give me a rough starting point, as well as a list of the items/machines the player would find there.
From here I could then plot out all the new items + machines as well as their related mechanics, and start drawing them all out. This helped me a lot as I could focus on one specific region and worry about the whole picture later.
Each of the coloured regions in both the scribbled map and the aseprite image above represents an area of the game, which will introduce the player to certain concepts...
There'll be a few tweaks to some of the machines that exist in the demo, like the cultivator having a seperate output bucket slot, and a few new bits too, like a new "breeder" machine for making lots of frogspawn/tadpoles for a given species.
(Sidenote: the bright green outlines in the larger screenshot of all regions isn't part of the game - it's actually just to help me keep track of what I've implemented/changed so I can quickly see what I still need to do!)
This is the "goal" of the game to open to help bring back the Pondmother and all the frogs in hibernation, with one really big genetic lock to open, but you have to go do a bunch of stuff in three "key" areas to open the path first - will be one of the salvage team here to speak to and teach some advanced stuff like ancestry (which I introduce a bit "earlier" in the demo just to show where things are going)
The algae blooms are a physical thing that prevent you moving past them as well as stop any growth or bug spawns, nasty stuff! But once you get the mushrooms of this area and boost your frogs you'll be able to eat it up in no time, and also go remove some of the algae you find in other areas that you might have already come across.
Hybrids essentially let you combine any two standard mushrooms, meaning 1 powder can have 2 effects (so up to 6 effects in one magic mud!) - lots of brain melting in your future I'm afraid :D
There'll be some other uses too, by mastering saturation you'll be able to provide extremely dry and extremely wet environments for your cultivators, giving you access to some new mushrooms you couldn't get before.
This is also the region you'll be introduced to "croakwork" machines - some lite automation machines powered by ribbets that remove a bunch of the "manual" labour from the game (harvest mushrooms, grind mushrooms, chop trees etc).
By mastering the "Umbrage" trait, you'll be able to produce some very angry frogs that give off so much heat you can start to thaw the region, and access stuff that's been frozen over for a while now.
You'll also be able to access the climate extreme mushrooms (1/7 temp), plus better storage upgrades thanks to the blueprints in this area.
By this point you'll have also come across "forgotten" sections of the dream, places where the memories of the hibernating frogs have failed. You'll be able to restore these regions with memory fragments, allowing you access to stuff that's been forgotten, or repressed...
I haven't 100% narrowed down exactly how this mechanic works yet, but I don't need to right now - I just know there'll be these "barriers" to restore and you'll have a few tools to do so. Whatever it ends up being I'm sure there'll be some puzzle elements/maths involved, as you know I love to do!
There's also a story to follow along and history to uncover, so exploring will reward you in not only new stuff but new secrets too! It'll be a lot to design but it'll be worth it in the end.
It's also not 100% set in stone, I'm sure a lot of stuff will change, like who you meet and where, or how certain machines work, or how some of the mechanics might work - but in general this is roughly what I'm thinking right now. Once I start implementing stuff it's easy to see what's wrong/missing, so I'm not too worried that I don't have it all nailed down!
I also have a list of like 100 odd misc. stuff, like decoration or your own house or fast travel or pets or fancier frog furniture which all has to go somewhere too, but that's a future ell problem :D
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