- Star Child DevLog #45 - 25 April 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Sometimes, life happens. Perhaps this is why there has not been a devlog update for a little while! Ok, it is why. How very vague. Here is what you need to know: Development on Star Child has gone from my full-time job, to my part-time job. So don't ask me when it's coming out! There is no negativity involved here. Just a little pivot, a little time, all is well. The honest truth: I will finish Star Child. I am motivated. I can see the end product. This is a unique project, and I believe in it. Everything is moving forward, just a little slower than before. Whether it is my full-time job, or a part-time hobby, I will always create video games. So stay tuned, Star Child will be here before you know it.
- Star Child DevLog #44 - 28 March 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Star Child will be released in 2026! I have plenty of work left to do, but I am confident that I can get it done. I also believe that when it is finished, Star Child will be a fun, engaging, and memorable experience! Recently, I finalized the story of Star Child. No spoilers here. But as for themes: cloning, life, death, family, pathos, betrayal, and cosmic devastation. I have also managed to figure out how to tie the gameplay and story together. I hope I can pull it off, but I am excited for you to experience the story. Now we know how many levels I need to create. And how many bosses and tilesets. And how many songs we need from our music creator Kyle (Anthrocarbon). We have a lot of music already, and it all perfectly fits the atmosphere that I am aiming for with each of the areas in the game. Kyle also creates all of the sound effect…
- Star Child DevLog #43 - 7 March 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: This week I've been busy setting up a proper text system. This system is used to display controls during the tutorial section of Star Child. However, even more importantly, this is the voice of the antagonist. Well, part of the voice of the antagonist. Our sound designer Kyle (Anthrocarbon) is currently working on the auditory portion of the antagonist's voice. I originally set up a method to display text on screen, for our demo release. But this was rushed. I just set up a Label and an AnimationPlayer. Then copy/pasted onto the scenes that needed to show text, and changed text or animation based on the scene. This system was extremely limited and inefficient, and I knew I would replace it later, when I had time. This past week was the time. Here we have our node tree setup: The Label is there to show our basic text. InputPromptKeyboard…
- Star Child Dev Log #42 - 28 February 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Hello again. We last spoke a couple weeks ago, with Janne filling in on devlog duty. I have been working a lot on our demo, which was released in time for Steam Next Fest. Since the release, I've been doing plenty of little fixes, little balances, and also watching a lot of people play the demo. But really, who has time for work when One Heart One Life mode exists? One of the most encouraging things about this demo release: most people, once they finish the 30 minutes to 1 hour of play in the demo, play it again! I think that with the way the demo is designed, players get the feeling that they CAN beat this on a harder mode. That is good. A few people have finished the game on Hard ~ 1 Heart mode, which allows you to save and reload all you want, and you can even pick up heart containers (for percentage completion), but they will not inc…
- Watch one of the developers play the Star Child demo! - 23 February 2026
Playing Star Child on hard mode to celebrate Next Fest once the Next Fest goes live.
- Star Child Dev Log #41 - 21 February 2026
Janne - the other guy: Last week we had just gotten our demo out, now we've had a bit of time to gather some feedback and start polishing things that weren't still quite ready. Here's a bit of a preview of what you can expect from the demo: In no particular order we've managed to do at least the following: - Rebalanced a few levels, and added significantly more of them - Crouch now takes priority over running - Reduced knockback and stun time - Increased fire rate - Added a bit of inertia to movement to make small movements more accurate - Time elapsed no longer resets to last saved time when you die - Elapsed time for saves is now shown a bit more nicely - Automap design slightly updated again - A bit more consistency for visual styles - Fixed a bunch of little UI bugs like being able to focus buttons that should be disabled or hidden - Clouds now behave nicer and don't pop into the vi…
- Star Child Dev Log #40 - 14 February 2026
Janne - the other guy: We've been working a lot on polishing things for our demo to get it out for people to test a bit before Next Fest still and get some initial feedback that we can hopefully resolve before the showtime. Some highlights: - Improved our level preprocessing tooling to detect which rooms have save points, which are secrets, and where the exits are located for automap - Redesign of automap + some bug fixes - Replaced placeholder art in demo content with proper ones - Completely new set of 25 levels for demo content, which we'll still expand on - Implemented new enemy type - Added music, updated sfx - Updated UI theme and fixed consistency issues - Tweaks based on initial gameplay testing feedback to difficulty of a few levels, knockback, crouch, fire rate, inertia, etc. Overall lots of progress and we're already very happy with what we've accomplished so far. Here's some…
- Star Child Dev Log #39 - 7 February 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: This week I worked on a lot of enemy and environmental art. With our demo dropping officially in 16 days, I don't want to show all of it to you. You can see it for yourself very soon! How about I show you a few little things, and if you want to see more, head over to Steam and wishlist Star Child. Free demo ready for Steam Next Fest Feb. 23rd! Janne - the other guy: I've been trying to help out where I can and some of what I've accomplished recently have been: - Build system updates and export configurations to build both full release, and demo version with unnecessary assets removed - Registration, setup, and testing of the demo build on Steamworks - Fairly heavy reworking of our automap, including some tooling to pregenerate data from our level scenes via a tool script that can be run locally and automatically on our build server - Ref…
- Star Child Dev Log #38 - 31 January 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: This week I was sick! But I worked a lot on our main menu design, and some enemies. Here is the enemy i have named Homer. Doh. This enemy homes in on your location. Could use a little refinement, like only turning a certain number degrees over time, rather than instantly snapping to the player's direction. But just for the direction, and the homing, and facing towards the player, the code is like this: Nothing too fancy there. Now Homer doesn't just move toward you and then explode in your face, he also spawns Little Homers if you shoot him a couple times! These Little Homers are smaller, faster, and could use some refinement code to help them not stack up together too much. A little randomness in direction and speed could help too. There are only 3 weeks left until the Star Child demo will be released on Steam for Next Fest! This coming…
- Star Child Dev Log #37 - 17 January 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: This week I've been doing menu and UI work. This is my least favorite part of game development, however I have found some satisfaction from solving some coding problems. Recently, I have improved my coding. I have been using dictionaries and For loops to set properties as needed. The catalyst for this was the realization that I can populate a dictionary with references to nodes, and iterate thru them as needed. It got even better when I learned that I can use scene-unique names (denoted by the %) in my menus, so that if I rearrange the containers, nothing is broken, and I don't have fix broken references. @onready var menus = { "Options": %CenterMain, "Audio": %CenterAudio, "Video": %CenterVideo, "Keyboard": %CenterKeyboard, "Controller": %CenterController, } So if I wanted to hide all of these menu nodes, I could do: func hide_menus():…
- Star Child Dev Log #36 - 10 January 2026
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Recently I have been implementing the G.U.I.D.E. plugin for handling player input. Godot's input system is generally ok, but 3 things are very complicated to do: disable/enable all controls (like you would want to do when you have a cutscene), remapping controls, and switching between different control devices (such as keyboard, controller). The free G.U.I.D.E. plugin can help make these tasks a lot simpler. It also returns vectors for 2d and 3d inputs, which can be used in movement code, but we already have our movement set up, and won't be focusing on that functionality. Star Child can be played with keyboard, or controller. If you are playing on keyboard, and you pick up a controller, and press a button on that controller, the game automatically switches to controller mode. If you then pressed a button on the keyboard, or moved the mo…
- Star Child Dev Log #35 - 3 January 2026
Kyle aka Anthrocarbon - music and sfx MUSICAL CHAIRS! (Silence is vital.) Months after my previous log, the stars have aligned and some more music has reached Jay for review. I’ve had multiple long sessions keenly tweaking sliders and knobs, until the growing song turned into a distortion-dependent facsimile of any other nameless four-to-the-floor demo track, sitting in a paper sleeve on a dusty shelf, in whatever local CD store still stocks physical media and didn’t notice the ‘DJ’ leave it there. Despite those stepping stones, though, the song I recently sent to Jay had most of what we needed. It only took something like 6 months to break the drought. *kappa emote* That success may be thanks to my chair. No this is not a sponsor spot for G-string C7, Battle Bucket, or Nipplechairs. You see, I have this ongoing ‘bet’ with humankind, that it is not possible for any person ever, to desig…
- Star Child Dev Log #34 - 27 December 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: I recently took some placeholder animations, and made em look nice. Here is the original, placeholder animation: And how it looked in-game: So I created a replacement animation: Certainly an improvement, but it still isn't quite right. This is because to make the flame disappear, we are just reversing the animation. This makes it look like the flame is being sucked back into the ground. It looks kind of odd, kind of alien, and sometimes that is what I am looking for. It looks more like a flame being, than actual real flame. But let us see what it looks like, with a more realistic approach: I'm gonna have to say that this final animation looks the best. I just need to keep in mind that what looks the "best" doesn't always evoke the feeling that I am looking for. But in this case, natural feels better than alien jank.
- Star Child Dev Log #33 - 20 December 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Great news! You will be able to play Star Child, 2 months from now! Steam Next Fest begins February 23rd, 2026, showcasing many new indie games. Star Child will have a playable demo for this event. We will also have an updated store page, and a new gameplay trailer. What can you expect from the Star Child demo? The Star Child demo will be a short, self-contained gameplay episode. A short story. A small journey. We discussed a few possibilities for this demo. One idea was for the gameplay to be the actual start of the game, just less polished, and you would be able to resume your save, when the full game is released. But not for this demo. This will be a separate, self-contained mini-episode, where you will get to experience a few different pieces of the overall game, arranged into a bit of a side story. There will be no spoilers for the…
- Star Child Dev Log #32 - 13 December 2025
Hello. This week I made some plants, and I animated them, and I created particle effects for them. This is Pyxel Edit, which I use for most of the art in Star Child (and I used for all of the art in Toleo). Let's take a closer look at one of these plants. The most important aspect of this animation, and most animation, is how different things animate with different timings. Some things animation first, then other things follow. Even the pixel art tutorial books I read have trouble expressing this perfectly, so let's look at it directly. We imagine the player walking into the plant, coming from the right side. The first thing that happens, on frame 01 is the furthest-right leaf moves to the left. Then on frame 02, the middle leaf moves left. On frame 03, the furthest-left leaf moves to the right, but also, the right leaf moves back to its original position. On frame 04, the middle leaf m…
- Star Child Dev Log #31 - 6 December 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Let us take a look at the process of animating some plants. In the world of Star Child, we don't always have a lot of scrolling/parallax going on, so we need to find ways to make things move, to provide pleasing visual interest. We want all plants to move a little when you touch them, or when a rocket flies past them. This looks neat, but also makes you feel like you are IN this world, a part of this world, affecting things with your actions and movements. We also want plants to sway in the correct direction. Some plants are small enough where we can just give them a little dip, and not have to animate and code them to work in two different directions. Such as these little bell plants: Just a little animation for the little plants. Here is what is interesting: the closer the size of the plant to the player, the more animation is needed.…
- Star Child Dev Log #30 - 29 November 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Let's look at how I animated some lava. Here is my first attempt. Not very smooth, but it does show basically what I am aiming for. To make the animation appear more smooth, I decided to start with moving a ball up and down, and to the side, and then drawing the lava over those areas. Which results in a smoother animation: However, now it appears to me that the up and down motion is inconsistent. So to clean that up, I decided to use a guide line. This helps me to make sure that when the lava moves up, it also moves down with the same number of pixels, following the guide line. However, I did make the top of the lava a bit unbalanced, because I want the slight impression that it is reaching up and trying to grab you. We are certainly improving in smoothness and consistency. I also created a lava spray particle effect, with randomized tim…
- Star Child Dev Log #29 - 22 November 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: What happens when you die? I don't know, hasn't happened to me yet. However, I have died in plenty of video games. What happens when you die in a video game? Dark Souls says "YOU DIED" and lets you press a button to continue immediately. Symphony of the Night makes you wait a long time, plays an unskippable cinematic, then takes you back to the memory card screen, and then lets you slowly load your saved game. My first game Toleo says "UNFULFILLED" and does nothing else, it just waits for you to press the respawn button. A lot of retro games just fade out back to the main menu. So what do we want to happen in Star Child? So far, I've had nothing set up. Well that's not true, I put a 5 second countdown screen with the game over text from Friday the 13th NES, which then booted you to the main menu, and greatly annoyed my playtesters. That…
- Star Child Dev Log #28 - 15 November 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Today we can look at a new environment in Star Child, I call it Fire Mountain! I'm pretty happy with my weird alien plants, and their subtle animation when you touch them. You can see below a decent example of the type of combination-ability platforming you will need to utilize to get those upgrades! We also have animated lava, some random lava particle spray, and some fireballs. I can't show you every environment before release, but hopefully this will wet your appetite for more!
- Star Child Dev Log #27 - 8 November 2025
Jay Ingle - lead developer, designer, and artist: Today let us take a look at the mostly-finished deer enemy that we have been discussing in recent weeks. When left on its own, the deer will run back and forth for a random amount of time between 3 and 5 seconds. When this timer ends, the deer will stop for a moment and play its Idle animation. Then it resumes running, again randomizing the running time. As for the gameplay design of this deer, my idea was to have an enemy that, when it detects you, raises up and shoots you with a laser beam. The raising up action will be the telegraph to the player that the attack is coming. Here we have the Attack animation that plays when the deer detects the player: The first track plays the correct animation frames, at the proper speed and timing. The second track calls functions that show the particles that appear around the laser (these do not sho…
