Hei all,

it's been a while! I just noticed I had started writing a devlog entry titled "February status update" and never finished it. Apparently it's not February any more. Let's wrap up quickly what has happened since...

I applied for a grant, you won't believe what happened next

Last February I applied for a six-month grant from the Finnish Cultural Foundation. Long story short, I didn't get it. It would be a dream job to be able to work on EMUUROM full time, so it was a bummer. Anyway, I will apply again next October! Hopefully I can just reuse the previous application, it was a lot of work.... well, at least I learned how to use Affinity Publisher.

Made a new trailer

Oh wow, EMUUROM finally has an updated trailer:

I made it completely inside the TIC-80 game engine. It was both easier and harder than using a dedicated video editor (main reason was that my laptop didn't run DaVinci Resolve well enough though).

If you watched the trailer, congrats - you now know that EMUUROM also has a Steam page! Go wishlist the game, it helps immensely even if you're only gonna buy the full game on itch.io. Because of Steam presence, I felt I needed to create a sleek new cover picture for EMUUROM. It's here:

Oh and that new demo

EMUUROM is featured in the upcoming Steam Next Fest next October. I will stream EMUUROM for the event some time in October, and more importantly this means that the EMUUROM demo will be available on Steam as well. Actually, the current itch.io demo is so outdated that I decided to make a new one! It will include at least:

• new intro cutscene! It gives some important context for the game.
• new EMUUROM
• finetuned level design
• better performance overall, especially when scanning

And worry not, I will release the demo here on itch.io as well. Look forward to it!

Hey, what about the game itself?

Making new areas to the game has progressed quite slowly, to be frank - but it HAS progressed! All these trailers and cutscenes and demos have taken a lot more time than I estimated... Anyway, I've started working on the second world, Neva. I have some neat ideas for the area puzzles already. I've also made some important decisions on the overall structure of the final areas so I don't (hopefully) run into dead ends when I actually start making them. Oh, and the "actually making" part might happen sooner than you think: on November, I have a two-month vacation from my day job, dedicated to making EMUUROM! Maybe 2021 release is still possible...?

PS. When Neva is ready for beta testing (join disborb for betas!), I will post a new devlog entry. Here's to hoping that happens quicker than in, uhh, 8 months.

Until next time!