• 22 Sep, 2025*

Well hello there!

Did you know that today is the last day of summer? It’s almost autumn! But that means it isn’t autumn yet.

[The sound of shouting lawyers can be heard in the distance...]

So this update has to be a pre-autumn update. Which is ok because I’m mostly going to talk about the upcoming event:

VANCOUVER GAME GARDEN

If you hadn’t heard already: ANOTHEREAL is going to be at (the event listed above)

Here’s the promotional image I made:

That’s right! If you live somewhere near Vancouver, BC, you can come to the event and play a bit of the game!

There’s more information about the event at vangamegarden.com

...But I need to take a moment to talk about location-specific exclusivity when it comes to events.

If we’re being completely honest, limiting the amount of people that can play the demo to only those able to come to an event isn’t great. In fact, I always want as many people to be able to see what I’m working on as possible.

Things like the Steam Next Fest were created during the pandemic when people couldn’t travel out to in-person events like PAX, or Vancouver Game Garden, and I think there’s a lot of value in having access to early looks at games.

However, because ANOTHEREAL is in such an early state compared to the final shipping game, that means it’s really difficult to maintain a build that I feel comfortable releasing into the world.

When you put something on Steam, even temporarily, the build’s files are accessible and in the case of Game Maker projects, tend to be very easily decompilable. This means people can, for well meaning purposes or malicious ones, look at code and assets that aren’t meant to be in the demo and spoil the experience for themselves or others...

There’s ways to get around this, but it takes time and effort to safeguard the project files in the right way. Personally, I want to focus my time on continuing to make the game.

So when it comes to showing off a demo for ANOTHEREAL, an in-person event like Game Garden allows me some degree of privacy over my build while still letting people check it out and let me know what they think.

I hope you understand the reasons I’m not making the demo publicly available online just yet.

At a later point in time, I want to make sure that everyone who is interested in this funny little game of mine can play a demo of it for free. The demo might even be quite large... But that will require effort, and good timing to make sure the time period between releasing a demo like that & releasing the rest of the game isn’t too long.

So, with that said, if you’re coming to the Game Garden event, I’m open to you taking pictures & video of what I’m showing and share it! I might even share a little afterwards, myself. Does that seem fair? Let me know on Bluesky if you have any thoughts on this.

So what’s in the demo?

Because ANOTHEREAL is a wordy RPG with a linear progression, it’s not the best-suited game to demo at an event... So I’ve decided to preface it with a little introduction from Umbra herself.

Depending on how you answer her questions, you’ll get to play three possible demo experiences:

• See the story from the beginning. This is the first ~10 minutes of gameplay, from the moment you’d start a new game fresh.

• Experience the thrill of combat!! This will take you straight to the point in the story where combat is introduced for a bit of a tutorial & several introductory fights. Again, around 10 minutes of gameplay.

• Get challenged with a miniboss. The 3rd option is for experienced players only, and will load you up right before the first miniboss encounter in Chapter 1. While it’s not the most difficult thing, it will give a better idea of where things are headed for combat challenges in the game!!

I have no idea how busy the event will be, so I might have to rotate through players to get everyone playing that wants to... but if there’s enough time, I strongly suggest checking out multiple parts of the demo.

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The Rest Of The Game

I’ll have a lot more to say in the actual proper Autumn Update in a month or so, but I do want to briefly mention that development on the rest of ANOTHEREAL is going well.

A couple notes on things that I’ve achieved:

• Every player shot in the game has been designed & implemented
• Every player super in the game has been designed & will be implemented soon
• Half of the enemies in Chapter 2 have been designed & have a first pass implementation
• Many of the enemies in Chapter 3 (!) have been designed & await implementation
• The scenario progression for Chapter 2 is almost finalized & Chapter 3’s scenario has been finalized for quite a while. More details soon! For now, please look forward to news from the Vancouver Game Garden!

#ANOTHEREAL [#game dev](https://blog.radicaldream.land/blog/?q=game dev) #news