Greetings, foul creatures of the night! Vlad Von Painter here, to give you a development update on Infinivania!

It has been (at the time of writing) around seven months since our first burst of releases during Day9's DK30 project. Since then, we've added a new character, a new level theme, multiple bosses, inter-run progression in the form of angel and demon statues and intra-run progression by filling out the demon shop. We've been able to move this little game along pretty quickly, and I'm quite proud of that!

Today I'd like to set some expectations about what we still have planned for Infinivania.

At this point, we feel pretty confident that most of the core systems are in the game. Balance and bugs notwithstanding, the Infinivania of today from a technical view looks basically the way it will when we are done. Thats a broad statement, so let me try to clarify: The level generator might learn some new tricks between now and our 1.0 release, or sorceress might get a subweapon reworked, but we're not switching to hand made levels or replacing subweapons with a crafting system.

There are a couple of exceptions to that, though! We will add a final climactic showdown at difficulty level 10, which will be an actual end to the game and also mark the 1.0 release of Infinivania. There will also be a way to unlock characters instead of having them all at the start of a fresh save. We have a couple other ideas for core systems that we're not ready to talk about but might worm their way in before 1.0.

Most of what you can expect for the rest of development comes down to new content. We would like to have a total of 5 or more level themes in the game for the 1.0 release, and at least 4 playable characters. In addition to big piles of new artwork, every level theme implicitly comes with its own set of minor mechanical changes - a new set of 4ish enemies, 2 bosses, some unique combination of traps and platforming nightmares, and a theme specific twist (like the manor's key demons or the forest's obnoxious mud pits).

The goal is to have enough content variety to carry the game, obviously. Some repetition of level themes over the course of a run is OK, because we've built systems to try to make the same theme feel different across difficulties - but there is too much repetition in the game right now because of how little content the level generator has to work with. However, we have to get that level of variety without overloading our one artist: me! I especially struggle to get bosses done in a reasonable time frame, which is why we usually add a second boss to a level theme several patches after the theme is released. (I'd really love to have three per theme, but that would delay the game quite a bit!)

Balance and bugfixes form the other big piece of work yet to finish, but our team is all programmers so getting those out the door is much quicker. Between content updates, anything that is bothering us or the community could get changed up at any time pretty easily. In particular, our upcoming patch is going to be a sweeping balance patch - now that angel and demon statues are in the game, the player's power progression during a run is much easier for us to iterate on.

How long will these plans take? Who knows? Our current almost-monthly update cadence feels pretty good so far, and we intend to keep putting one foot in front of the other until Infinivania is done. That said, level themes require several quiet weeks of art work before they make it into the game, and since those are the biggest missing pieces right now, our pace up until this point might not be indicative of the rest of development.

Thanks for playing and joining us on the development journey!