Free GNOMONIC Demo Available by May 2026!
After 6 years, our new RPG's demo is finally close to done. If it's still only a demo, why did it take so long?
Yo from NOKOGODO! This is Kody, and I direct/write/program stuff for our games. Welcome to our newsletters!
Our next game is GNOMONIC! It’s our first RPG, and most of its graphics are made up of traditional, real watercolor sprites and backgrounds!
We announced that this game’s demo would be ready by the end of 2025, but since we’re just a team of three and only one of us can work on this full-time, we were a little short of finishing by then. So here’s the new plan:
Our free GNOMONIC Demo will be available on Steam (and maybe consoles?) by May 2026 along with its Kickstarter campaign!
And as you’ll see in our Kickstarter, we plan for the full game to launch by the end of 2028.
You can also support us by getting our first game: Sunshower!
We used to have a newsletter like this a few years ago, but after we restarted GNOMONIC between 2023-2024, we decided to let it go until we were ready to release a demo. Now that we’re almost done… How did we get here? Why did it take so long? And what have we learned so it won’t take this long to finish the rest of the game?
2020-2024: Journey to Finishing a Game
At the beginning of 2020, we started working on GNOMONIC, but we didn’t really know how to make a game. I started watching Sara Spalding’s tutorials on using Gamemaker, but I didn’t really understand what I was doing yet. JSpinz made art of the first few areas and cutscenes, but I failed as a Director by not totally understanding at that point how to best use the art that was made. We attempted a Kickstarter, but it didn’t really work since we didn’t know the best way to do that either.
After we both got out of college in the following year, JSpinz and I started working part-time jobs and making GNOMONIC at the same time. JSpinz also redesigned a lot of the initial ideas we had during this time. We didn’t get to work on the game as much as we wanted to since post-college life got in the way so much, and it fell by the wayside until next year.
A GameMaker game jam happened in March 2022, so we attempted to make a game for it that was much smaller as a way to test our skills to actually release something playable. We made a prototype of Sunshower, then released a more finished version in Early Access after the jam! After that, we thought for sure we’d be able to finish our demo in 2023. While JSpinz was working on art, I finished an update for Sunshower that released about a year after the Early Access launch!
Shortly after that, my longtime friend Paxton, who actually went to school for programming, had more free time in 2023 and started helping us out. He helped design a real battle system with me, taught me GitHub, and checked over what I coded so far… which wasn’t very good! We worked together to make a small test of the battle system for our friends to try. At that point, we basically restarted development on the game. I would say this was the first time GNOMONIC as it exists now really began! We took the feedback from this test and worked on battles along with all the other systems we would need to make this game a reality. I was pretty sure the demo would happen this year!
…But no! Life unfortunately stopped JSpinz and I from working on the game again when summer came around. I somehow worked through it to finish the 2023 Mother Direct video (and it was then that I decided the 2024 one would be my last), but making more of the game was basically impossible until fall of that year.
By the time things were more stable at the end of the year, we decided on how the battles would be and finished a lot of foundational battle programming for it, so next was building on that. JSpinz and I realized that the best way forward for the environments was to remake all the areas as watercolor paper sprite sheets that could each be scanned and digitally removed from the paper. 2023 really ended up as a total restart for the game!
In 2024, many of our plans went into action. Paxton and I polished things up and added game to the game, like systems for inventory, saving, and items, while JSpinz restarted the art process. I also began reworking all of the story, like slimming it down to the most essential parts. For example: there used to be two characters mentioned in our old 2022 newsletter who are much different in name and appearance now, some lyrics that appeared in our 2020 trailer have been changed, and much more. Basically, anything related to characters and story may not be the same anymore, so expect anything in the game now to be different from then!
Around the middle of 2024, Paxton and I decided to take some time to finish Sunshower since we still owed it to all those who bought into it during Early Access. We did it in a couple months, and JSpinz finished up the small amount of art left for it between making stuff like GNOMONIC’s cover image! Shane Mesa and SupaBubba worked together to create the awesome new Sunshower Soundtrack too! You’ll hear more great stuff from them again and a couple more special guests in GNOMONIC!
We released v0.9 of Sunshower in time for my final Mother Direct video, where I announced I would stop working on those videos and my website Mother Forever. It worked out well, especially because new discoveries in the EarthBound community had just about dried up by then (which makes sense after 20+ years of research on only three games) and I wanted to give our games my full attention in the future. I kept the website up because it does have some very valuable resources that people still tell me they use, and I rebranded its social channels into NOKOGODO so that we could use these to keep advocating for indies, like we do through our podcasts and RPG Direct events (more on those later), instead of leaving those channels dormant like the website.
We released v1.0 of Sunshower on November 1, 2024! It was great to have finally finished a game! We didn’t really push it super hard considering it’s such a small game and GNOMONIC has always been our main focus. But, in December, I started working with our friend Jimmy Spencer from Studio Kumiho on an exciting milestone for us as a studio: Nintendo Switch development! (Thanks Jimmy! Support Studio Kumiho by getting their games!) Studio Kumiho is our publisher on Switch, although it’s really just in name only since I handled the process myself. And not long after, we got access to develop and self-publish on PlayStation and Xbox!
2025 and 2026: GNOMONIC Demo and RPG Direct
And now we’re at 2025! Over the year, JSpinz finished and assembled the rest of the first area’s graphics, Paxton and I worked on getting everything outside of battles to work as planned, and I ported Sunshower to each platform.
We also had our first RPG Direct event this year! JSpinz made some awesome art of characters from OFF emerging from the screen of a girl who likes RPGs named Juno. You’ll meet her in GNOMONIC, and you’ll see her in all our RPG Directs! The OFF team was totally open to the idea we had for the art, so I’m glad that turned out like it did, and I’m happy they were interested in sponsoring the event!
I’m happy to announce that RPG Direct 2026 will return early next December! In addition to the showcase, it’ll also feature something else fun: the Indie RPG Awards!
Learn about its featured award categories and more on our RPG Direct webpage!
Submissions for RPG Direct 2026’s upcoming games showcase and nominations for its Indie RPG Awards will be open between August and October 2026, then a public vote will follow in November for nominated games. I hope these awards can help to spotlight those people who worked on the best parts of indie RPGs each year! Anything even vaguely qualified as an indie RPG is eligible to be nominated, including RPG fan games (so long as the category a fan game is nominated for is original in that category, like a fan game with new graphics or music). Hope you’ll tune in to support all the games in the showcase and see who wins these new awards!
And what about GNOMONIC? Like I wrote earlier, we tried our best to finish it by the end of 2025, but we didn’t end up finishing it in time. We’re so close though! JSpinz is working on the last few watercolor graphics we need along with digital graphics for one last important gameplay segment, and Paxton and I have been polishing, making sure things aren’t broken, and adding things like items and cutscenes here and there to the game. After all that, the only thing left is to test it with some people to make sure it’s not terrible! We’ve come a long way for a three-person team, and now that we have a decent process down for this first area of the game, making the rest of the game should be smooth (in theory).
Again, here’s the plan…
Our free GNOMONIC Demo will be available on Steam (and maybe consoles?) by May 2026 along with its Kickstarter campaign.
And as you’ll see in our Kickstarter, we plan for the full game to launch by the end of 2028.
In our next newsletter, I’ll let you know the demo’s exact launch date and more!
So that’s how we got here and what’s next!
Thanks for reading and here’s to a great 2026!!
𝙵𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢. 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚋𝚒𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚘𝚏 𝚕𝚒𝚐𝚑𝚝 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚍𝚎 - 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎 - 𝚒𝚜 𝚊𝚝 𝚑𝚊𝚗𝚍.
𝙰𝚗𝚍 𝚏𝚛𝚘𝚖 𝚌𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚜𝚑𝚊𝚕𝚕 𝚠𝚎 𝚋𝚎𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚞𝚗𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍.
𝙵𝚒𝚗𝚊𝚕𝚕𝚢 𝚠𝚎 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚖𝚎𝚎𝚝 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝙶𝙽𝙾𝙼𝙾𝙽.