Dreadwinter - October 2025 Development Update

It's the spooky season!

Welcome

Hey! Welcome to another Dreadwinter blog, this time around it's the spooky edition (not that anything changes). There's a few things that happened that I want to talk about, and I'll also elaborate more on what the next steps are in the game's development, so stick around!

Steam Next Fest

Dreadwinter was part of this years October Steam Next Fest! It's a week long event made to showcase upcoming games and demos, and is very useful for getting eyes on your game.

Overall it was quite successful, and I hit the goals that I was realistically expecting to hit. You only get to enter once, so it's usually best to enter as close to release as you can. For Dreadwinter that could be this one, or the next one in February, or even June! (I hope to release before then, though)

Here's a rough summary of the numbers:

• Wishlists: ~400 -> 1000+

• Demo Players: ~80 -> ~350

• Median Demo Play Time: 17 minutes -> 13 minutes

• Average Demo Play Time: 50 minutes -> 30 minutes

• Small features from 3 youtubers (as far as I'm aware)

Maybe it could have done even better if I waited until next February, but Dreadwinter has quite a small audience right now, and I don't think it would grow too much between then. Regardless, it's done and I can only do what I can from now. I do have a better idea of what I need to do on the marketing front, and I did get some useful feedback!

The demo will stay up, and will get updates, so don't worry about rushing to play it.

Bugs and Improvements

I think one thing that needs to be improved is guiding the player at the start of the game. There were a few comments that players weren't sure what to do or where to go, which may be a reason why the median play time dropped. I wanted to give players a lot of freedom in how they played from the start, but I think it's a good idea to guide players along until the core gameplay is introduced.

For example, when you start the game, you wake up, and from there you can go wherever you want. I expected most people would leave their apartment, see the cafe, and head there first, but it seems some players chose to wander around.

Some players seemed to ignore the cafe and head into town first

An easy solution would be to prevent the player from exploring until they've entered the cafe, and maybe add some hints to go into Dreadwinter as well. I don't want to handhold too much, but you'd be surprised at what people will do without guidance!

A lot of my game design decisions are influenced by my experience playing cozy games, such as Stardew Valley, Rune Factory and so on, but obviously how I experience games and figure things out won't be the same for everyone else. Cozy games especially, have a larger proportion of casual gamers, who might need a bit more guidance to start off.

With that in mind, I'll work on making the game friendlier towards new players!

A Frustrating Bug

There is currently a bug that may occur when moving between levels, such as entering/leaving Dreadwinter, your room, or the furniture store (these seem to be common locations). When you move to another location, there is a chance that your character will warp, but the game does not realise that you have moved to another level, and so the camera will not follow, as well as certain background things not happening.

This makes it seem like you are stuck in a level, and is essentially a soft lock. I have an idea of what's happening, but I don't know what's causing it, and I currently am unable to reproduce the bug myself. It doesn't seem to be a consistent bug, which makes it quite hard to figure out.

Adding a "stuck" button to take the player to safety

For now, as a short term fix, I plan to add a "stuck" button for when this occurs. It seems that you can still access the menus, and the game continues as normal, which makes me believe that you still have control, but the camera is no longer tracking your character. The "stuck" button will warp you to a safe location, which should hopefully reset things.

I plan to add manual saves to the game as well, and have the game autosave after a cafe shift, so you don't lose too much progress if you have to restart. There's a lot of extra data that has to be saved, so I'm not sure how long this will take to add.

What's Next

I outlined my plans in the last blog post, but here it is again:

• Remaining townspeople in Lunara (Around 10 or so)

• Interiors for buildings/homes in Lunara

• Manual saves

• Functioning Dreadwinter expansions (Being able to unlock the expansions + gameplay features)

• Automation in Dreadwinter (Via machines)

• Takeaway mode - Serve orders to go! Seating not required!

• Adding in the story/stories

I'm currently designing the remaining NPCs in the game, and their homes, as well as any other interiors that aren't finished. Here's a preview of what I did in the last few days:

Two new characters I've designed

It's been a while since I designed new characters, so I'm glad to be getting back into it. Afterwards, I'll try to get manual saves into the game, hopefully I don't break it!

That's it for this blog post, thanks for reading, it was a bit of a long one!

-Alex