- See you at the Triple-i Initiative showcase! - 14 September 2026
Join us by the campfire on the 8th of October at 4pm UTC for the Triple-i Initiative showcase, where we’ll be showing something you won’t want to miss.The show is back-to-back trailers of games from other studios like us - all in 45 minutes - with world premieres, gameplay reveals, launch dates, demo drops and more.Watch on YouTube or TwitchCheck out https://iii-initiative.com/ for more information.We’re super excited to show you what we’ve been cooking up!
- Dandelion Void Is featured in Steam's PvE Survival Crafting Fest! - 31 August 2026
Dandelion Void is featured in this years PVE Survival Crafting Fest! This event runs 31 August @ 5:00pm UTC to 7 September @ 5:00pm UTC PvE Survival Crafting Fest is for games that are primarily PvE titles, that have survival elements like a hunger bar, that also feature complex and/or lengthy crafting trees. Check out our trailer below! Why does Dandelion Fit into this fest? Adrift in space, the derelict ark Pergola has been overtaken by a lethal, crawling jungle. To survive this hostile PvE environment, you'll need to gather scarce resources, build secure shelters, and craft your own arsenal to fight back against the flora. Dandelion Void is the ultimate deep-space survival crafting experience.
- Music Reveal & Bass Performance! - 25 August 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we have a special treat from our composer Catton Arthur!Some of you might remember a previous post where Catton walked us through the dynamic audio tools he used to create Dandelion Void’s multilayer combat music. Today we’re showing off a brand-new track from Catton, which will play during our character creation menu. We call it “Autobiography.”I’ll pass the mic over to Catton to say more about his piece:“"This is a one-take performance of our character creation screen music. It's kind of a tough piece to pull off all at once without edits! I've always been interested in the open harmonics on a 6 string bass. They're like a secret, higher pitched melodic instrument hidden on top of the bass. I need to move my left hand around freely so I attach a strap to the butt end of the bass and sit on it to hold it in this more clas…
- Worldbuilding Workshop - 11 August 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Over the past few weeks we’ve been doing a lot of story development work, and last month the team gathered to review a story overview slide deck together. This makes for a great opportunity to show you all how we manage our process for building the world of Dandelion Void! Throughout this post we’ll be showing you a series of (heavily redacted) slides from this deck to guide the discussion. For those concerned about story spoilers: This post is focused on the process of building the world of Dandelion Void, rather than any particular lore details. We’ll be sticking pretty closely to information that we’ve already discussed publicly, such as our Steam page description and in other devlogs. To this end, we’ve blurred out certain details from the slides we’re showing off. Don’t expect any huge spoilers or lore drops today!With that…
- All it Takes is a Snap - 28 July 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we’re telling the story of one of the “faces” of Dandelion Void, which is ironic because they have no face at all. Let’s talk about the twigsnapper! Some of you may have already seen this creature’s art update mentioned in the recent MrAtomicDuck interview of our game director Brian. If you enjoyed that section of the video, please look forward to much more detail in this article. If you missed it then no worries, because we’ll be starting from square one! Underground Beginnings The original idea for the twigsnapper came from a conversation between Manzanita Interactive’s two R’s: Roland and Robin (yours truly). Our original enemies, the uproots, were pretty basic behaviorally: they camouflage in plants, and chase you if they see you. We wanted to give our enemies more of a relationship with their environment and feel more…
- Interstellar Ephemera - 14 July 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. This month we’ve been focusing our efforts on some restructuring of the game’s codebase. This helps us make the game we want to make, but the details are all technical and not quite “devlog material.” Instead, today we are offering a peek into a collection of mostly unrelated images that we’ve accumulated through development. This includes screenshots of interesting-looking bugs, messages from our team’s Slack workspace, and pictures of editor tools. Some of these images even include previously unannounced (and certainly still work-in-progress) content from Dandelion Void, but we’ll leave it to you to decide what’s a feature and what’s a bug. “The ? Farm” “Punishment corner” “Now with more Void” “Field Trip” “state: PLAYING” “Target audience”: “Chunk loading” “TV Carts” {STEAM_CLAN...
- Cooperate, or Perish - 7 July 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to a special edition of the blog.Today’s post won’t touch on any Dandelion Void content. For those just interested in the game, don't worry: today’s post is an extra entry in between our normal two week devlog schedule, so this blog isn’t taking the place of a normal game-focused devlog. Please look forward to more exciting updates on the game next week!For those interested in how our industry works, and how our experience as game workers has shaped us, this post is for you! The News of the DayIn light of yesterday's layoffs at Bethesda, Obsidian, and Id, subsidiaries of Microsoft, we’d like to start by sharing a link to the Game Worker Hardship Fund. This fund is for game workers in the US and Canada who have been impacted by record layoffs and other hardships in the games industry since January 2024. We at Manzanita Interactive contribute to this fund every mo…
- DANDELIONS CONFIRMED FOR DANDELION VOID - 30 June 2026
HI EVERYONE AND WELCOME TO ANOTHER DAND *clears throat* Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Earlier this month we previewed some exciting new assets related to food and culinary furniture. Today we have some more visual treats to show off in the form of new foragables. As you may have heard, this includes the titular dandelions of Dandelion Void! But before we get into that, we’d like to call attention to a new video from our good friend MrAtomicDuck. Earlier this month he recorded an interview with Dandelion Void game director Brian Ostrander – you can find that below! When the video went live, Duck asked if we could monitor the comments for any questions or comments. One stood out to us in particular: @user-ne9sd4ow1o, this devlog is dedicated to you. Roadside flowers of Interstellar Space Dandelion Void obviously has a heavy plant theme, and so we’ve always lik…
- Tales from the Junk Drawer Vol. 3 - 16 June 2026
Fresh from the Asset Kitchen Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we’re showing off a wide swath of new art assets, including a variety of new lootable and craftable props, as well as new furniture you can find in the map! Tales from the Junk Drawer Vol. 3 Those following the devlog might remember our two previous entries in the “Tales from the Junk Drawer” series, where we show you an out-of-context list of items along with their names and descriptions. Today we’re happy to bring you volume 3, with a special focus on food! What are these different items’ gameplay properties? We will leave that to your own speculation. Area spotlight: cafeteria and kitchen! In a previous post we discussed the different types of environment art you can find in Dandelion Void, and noted that we were hoping to expand into more domestic and civilian areas. Meanwhile, part of upda…
- Ooey-GUI Goodness - 4 June 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we’re showing off a long-awaited update (certainly by us, and possibly by you?) to our inventory UI! Old-time Overlays As shown in a previous post, the game’s appearance has gone through several iterations before we landed on our current visual style. By contrast, the most prominent user interface in our game – our inventory screen – has looked largely the same since its first iteration. This is what the UI looked like around when Brian first got inventories working, in roughly fall 2023: Hitting the tab key (or opening a container through the context menu) shows the inventory UI overlay. On the left are the items your character is carrying, whereas the contents of nearby lootable containers appear on the right side. Now let’s see what it looked like just a month ago, in April 2026: As you can see in the screenshot, we’ve…
- FMODernizing our FMaudio - 19 May 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. In a post last year we introduced the 4 members of our engineering and art teams: Brian, Dara, Roland, and Robin (yours truly). Today we’re (re)introducing the audio team for Dandelion Void: Catton Arthur, our composer and audio director, and Frenchy Francois, our sound designer! Catton and Frenchy both contributed to the game last fall, and as of April they’ve resumed work on Dandelion Void for a long-term basis. The game is already sounding scores better thanks to them, and today Catton will be showing us how. I’ll pass the mic to you, Catton! FMOD Demo: Combat and Pollen! Hello! This is Catton Arthur speaking and I'm the composer for Dandelion Void! I joined the project a little over a month ago. You may have heard my work before in Fields of Mistria, Sorry We're Closed, and Impaler. Today I'm gonna introduce you to the tool…
- Debugger’s Delight - 5 May 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Usually this blog is about the game features that we’re making for our players. But today we’re showing off a shiny new toy that we made for ourselves. We’re excited to introduce the Dandelion Void debug console Consoling Ourselves “For ourselves” is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – we’re sure that Dandelion Void modders and tinkerers will enjoy playing with this powerful feature. But it can’t be overstated how much having a debug tool like this helps us speed up our work. On a game session with debugging enabled, the console can be pulled up and dismissed with the ` key, also known as a backtick or grave accent. With the console enabled, the player can type a variety of commands, hit enter, and watch the game world change around them! First we’ll watch a quick video showing off the power of this feature. Then we’ll break i…
- A Little Worm’s Glow-up - 21 April 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we’re going to be showing off the evolution of our Root Whipper enemy, culminating in a brand-new model! Spoiler label: this post goes into detail about one of the enemies you will encounter in Dandelion Void Worm’s eye view Those of you who have seen some of the creator coverage of Dandelion Void (i.e. MrAtomicDuck and Splattercatgaming!) will be familiar with the vine antagonists who dangle from the ceiling and swing themselves at the player. These are tentatively called “Root Whippers,” and they are one of the newer enemies in our build. All game design is iterative, and our workflow at Manzanita Interactive team is especially focused on rapid prototyping. The first versions of the Root Whipper were quite bare-bones, with just enough functionality for us to do early playtests with. As we got a feel for how the enemy wor…
- Low-hanging Loot - 7 April 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. Today we are talking about improvements we’ve made to the looting and scavenging experience in Dandelion Void!The Balancing ActWhen a game is early in development like ours, we have to be careful how much time we devote to game balance. We could spend hours perfectly tuning a set of 10 weapons, but a lot of that work would be rendered invalid when we add 10 new ones. In general, it’s natural for early builds to have some balance issues.With all this said, when we notice balance issues significantly affecting our internal playtests, it does become worthwhile to do a quick smoothing-over pass. In particular, we recently identified some issues with our current build’s looting experience:Gameplay slowdowns: Any time players got to a storage area, they’d spend an inordinate amount of time going through every container with a fine-too…
- Bookworms and Barflies - 24 March 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. In a previous post we discussed the different categories of environment art aboard the Pergola as distinct "palettes". Today we’re showing off two new areas within the "civilian and domestic" palette!But before we get started, we’d like to highlight a new video from Splattercatgaming, where he played our closed pre-alpha demo. Thanks for checking it out, Splattercat! Spoiler label: This post shows environment art for two new areasDomestic ProductionAs we mentioned last week, our current focus for new environment art is to showcase the lifestyle of the Pergola’s original inhabitants. When people think of science fiction spaceship environments, their mind tends to go to the styles pioneered in the Nostromo from the first Alien movie. Metal, concrete, and plastic materials, industrial greebling on every surface, and an almost entir…
- Hotels, Houseplants, and Hovels: - 3 March 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog. This is part one of a two-part post. Today we're showcasing the different categories of environments that can be found in Dandelion Void, along with some new items. Next time we will be showcasing some new environmental areas within these categories!As a quick housekeeping note, we’d like to thank everyone for your patience with the irregular devlog schedule last month; we have been all-hands-on-deck on (yet another) exciting announcement that we aren't able to talk about quite just yet. Watch this space!How to Paint a Spaceship There's a lot going on in our game’s setting; the Pergola is a retrofuturistic generation ship that launched in the 1970’s. It is now derelict, overgrown with plants, and inhabited by survivors living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Our three "environmental palettes" from left to right: original generation…
- In space no one can hear you laugh - 6 February 2026
Hi everyone! Welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog.Today we’re talking about a hotly debated new asset we’ve (temporarily?) added to the build, along with some general reflections on horror, tone, and when humor enhances or inhibits player terror.But first, we'd like to direct your attention to the MrAtomicDuck’s second stream of Dandelion Void -- featuring a ton of never before seen content! If you missed it live, the VOD is now available:Molecular Moods Our story begins with one of the most satisfying tasks in game development: programmer art replacement! A few months ago we added new status effects, including indigestion and (un)happiness. As is common in development, we programmed a first version of these before we had time to make new icons, so Robin (yours truly) stubbed in some temp art.These served their purpose for playtesting, but are obviously a bit of an eyesore. Finally,…
- From Project Zomboid modders - the survival-horror Dandelion Void will have multiplayer - 19 January 2026
Now I'm even more interested in Dandelion Void! It looks like Project Zomboid in space with plant-based horrors and now it will get multiplayer. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/01/from-project-zomboid-modders-the-survival-horror-dandelion-void-will-have-multiplayer/
- Announcing Multiplayer in Dandelion Void! - 18 January 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog! We are posting this a bit earlier than our normal schedule to coincide with a special announcement: Dandelion Void will be supporting multiplayer!The venerated YouTuber and friend-of-the-team MrAtomicDuck has dropped a new video today with a great overview of Dandelion Void. It also includes footage of never-before-seen features, enemies, and hazards! If you haven't watched it already, please find it below:If you're reading this and not subscribed to MrAtomicDuck, make sure to do so! He's even got a Dandelion Void stream planned for this Thursday, at 11am EST / 4pm GMT.You & Me Against the VoidWe listed Dandelion Void as a single player experience when we launched our preview page last May. Multiplayer had always been something we hoped for for the game – it’s survival-crafting, after all! – but as seasoned game industry veteran…
- New Lightyear’s Resolutions - 6 January 2026
Hi everyone, and welcome to another Dandelion Void devlog! Today’s post is a little different. Now that we’re in the glorious new year, we wanted to reflect on everything that’s happened up to now, and share some of our “new year’s resolutions” for the game. This is a bit of a longer post, so please feel free to skip around as you like! The sections are as follows:Ancient History - An archeological dig into early prototype footage!2025 Highlights - The story of the year Dandelion Void took off to the stars!2026 Resolutions - Our goals for Dandelion Void Development in the new year!Note that while we are discussing high-level goals for 2026, this post will not touch on our release timeline. But keep your eyes peeled later this year for more information on Dandelion Void’s schedule!Ancient HistoryBefore we get into 2025, let’s turn back the clock and look at some of our game’s “childhood…
