Last Days Before Imago Season

7 junio 2026

Hi! It's been a long time since I updated this blog. The main reason for my disappearance is that I have been extremely busy finishing Imago Season, my narrative RPG that is launching on June 11. That is next Thursday!! Or it might even be out for you, if you are reading this in the future (In which case, what are you doing here? Go play the game!)

So, what am I doing in this last week before the game is released? Mostly fixing bugs, which isn't the most exciting thing in the world. I'm confident that I've already squashed most of the programming-related ones (working on UI is its own kind of hell, but thankfully I'm a masochist). What I'm focused on now are the scripting-related ones. Why the distinction? Well, you see, Imago Season is at its core a kind of choose-your-own-adventure book, with a whole lot of variables that keep track of everything you have said and done, what places you have visited, who have you met and even what clothes you are wearing. These variables are scattered all over the game and are set mostly in the dialogue (plain text) files, so there are bound to be some misspellings, logical inconsistencies and what not.

Before the programmers in the crowd jump at me, I swear it is not as bad as it sounds! Godot has great support for making your own in-editor tools. I have scripts checking that all dice rolls are sensible, variable IDs are correct and, in general, nothing is out of place in the build process.

However, there are some bugs that cannot be caught just by looking at the script files. I call those "narrative bugs", which are mostly nonsensical states that could be reached. What if you obtain an item before the relevant NPC tells you to go collect it? Are we sure that if a character dies in a scene, the game doesn't instantiate them in a later one? Imago Season has a lot of narrative reactivity, with special scenes playing in many of these out-of-the-expected-path scenarios. You can also do most of the quests in the order you prefer, so the complexity compounds. Turns out that debugging a novel-length nonlinear script is hard!

What this means is that I'm running through the game again and again trying to find the weirdest set of conditions that a player can encounter. I have reached some hilarious endings this way (yeah, the game has CRPG-style ending slides for both the characters and the world state!) I also have an in-game debugger that lets me see and edit every dialogue variable. It comes in handy to quickly check different situations (and to give myself infinite money, of course)

Besides that, I'm working hard on getting controller support to a place where I'm happy with. I would love to get that Deck Verified badge whenever Steam decides to validate my game, so I have been working hard on making every menu as smooth as possible. Yesterday I got the basics of input remapping working, but that will probably come in an update a few days after launch.

Finally, and I know I'm not supposed to be doing this, I've been adding a few new encounters around the map and short dialogue paths for some of those weird conditions I mentioned earlier. I am not touching the critical path with a ten-foot pole, though. If a single thing of what I've added this week shows signs of working incorrectly, I'm stripping them out of the game and leaving them for a post-launch update. It's all flavor, anyway. But flavor is what we are here for...

With that said and done, all that remains is to ask you again to please wishlist the game and check out the demo! Your progress will be transferred to the full game when it launches on June 11, so you can get started exploring the Walled City of Tempura right now!

Reaching an audience as a small indie game is extremely hard even with the invaluable help of the content creators that have reached out, so please help spread the word. Tell your friends about Imago Season if you enjoy narrative videogames / sci fi / bugs / giving money to people on the internet!

Until next time. I'll see you in the City!