Hey Kinoko fans!

It’s the end of November, which means it’s time for another monthly update on all things Kinoko and the Cult of Galaxy! Unfortunately, I actually forgot to write an update last month (imagine my horror – I’m normally so consistent!), so for this month I’ve had a good long look back over the change logs for the game and website to refresh my memory of all the things we’ve done since the last update at the end of September and put together a brief recap.

If you follow our blog here on our website, then you might remember from July’s update that we recently redesigned our game’s combat system. We intend combat to be a major part of our game, with our metroidvania-style levels being full of enemies, puzzles, and exploration in equal balance. With this in mind, Chel’s been busy designing a variety of new enemies for the Fungaia planet upon which Kinoko will be able to try out his combat skills. We’re still focused on getting ready for our first playable demo, so we’re limiting ourselves to enemies likely to appear in the woods around Kinoko’s village on Fungaia for now, but I do really like the variety on offer so far with the few enemies we have.

The first of these new enemies is a friendly kind of snail called a shroomollusc. These docile creatures tend to mind their own business, slithering aimlessly around their woodland homes, and retreating into their shells whenever they sense danger. Their shells happen to be very bouncy, though, and that’s where these creatures come in useful. Once a shroomollusc’s been startled and retreated into its shell, Kinoko can pick it up and put it down again freely. He can also kick it – sending its shell crashing into breakable objects, or even other enemies. The ability to pick objects up and put them down is a brand new piece of development which we’ll be looking to reuse in many other areas of the game.

The second of these creatures is the sleeping cap. This small creature, which looks very much like a mushroom, is also pretty docile. All it really wants to do is sleep. That’s why, when Kinoko goes blundering past, it awakens with a fright and unleashes a burst of its spores. If Kinoko gets caught in the spores, he gets instantly put to sleep, and the player can only awaken him by mashing the keys on their keyboard or shaking the left analogue stick. Kinoko’s sleeping state is another new piece of development, as is having to use rapid inputs to wake him up, so these too are pieces of functionality we’ll be looking to use elsewhere.

I believe it goes without saying, but as usual, Chel has done a fantastic job of producing the art and animations for both of these creatures, and she’s continuing to work on other enemies for the first part of planet Fungaia too!

Arguably the biggest change we’ve made to the game these past couple of months, though, is in the starsprites mechanic. I’ve talked in this blog before about how important it is that Kinoko feels like a friend to the starsprites. He’s not in charge of them, nor do they answer to him. Their bond is one built on friendship, and they work together for mutual benefit. They don’t obey him – they help him! That’s why we’ve begun implementing a friendship mechanic. You’ll gain friendship primarily by working together with the starsprites to defeat enemies and solve puzzles, but you might also gain some by participating in Starlight City activities too. Gaining friendship leads ultimately to unlocking friendship points, and it’s these points which can be spent to acquire new starsprite perks.

All of this is done and working, even if it’s a little basic. We’ve come up with a few ideas as to the kinds of perks we can offer, but right now I’m testing it out by having it so the player unlocks the raygun and flight via starsprite perks. All in all I’m really happy with how it’s coming along in terms of gaining friendship and buying perks! The next thing to do, though, is to focus in on the ways in which Kinoko can gain friendship, which means implementing starsprite abilities properly. You can’t do much with them at the moment besides summoning them, but now our attention turns towards using them in battle. Watch this space!

As for what else we’ve been up to, Chel and I both recently had a go at streaming for the first time. She did some animation on Discord, and I streamed a bit of my work on both the new enemies over on YouTube. Neither of us have any prior experience with streaming, so we’ve got a lot to learn if we’re going to make our streams interesting, but we’re glad we had a go at it and we’ll definitely be doing more in the future. Make sure you join our Discord server to be notified when we’re doing them, and subscribe to us on YouTube whilst you’re at it too! We’d like to take this opportunity to say a huge thanks again to everyone who joined us for these streams – we really appreciated the company.

In addition, our Cult of Galaxy website has seen some significant changes recently, which you might’ve already noticed if you’ve been browsing recently. I totally redesigned the ‘explore our galaxy’ pages to be a little more in line with the aesthetic Chel’s been going for across the board with character profiles and stuff, and I’ve added some handy search filters around the site too, to help you quickly find what you’re looking for. I’ve added a new ‘artefacts’ section, so as to include some new pages on important magical objects and holy relics from around the galaxy, and I’ve added new pages for several more characters and organisations.

Lastly, and you’ve probably already noticed this already if you follow us actively, but we – like many other creators – have made the decision to drop X from our social media pantheon. Although it was our largest social media platform by far, we hadn’t been growing for a while (plenty of bots, but no human beings!) and, with the types of things the algorithm over there favours nowadays, we’d come to find our timeline pretty polarising too. We’re posting primarily on Bluesky now, where we have both a main Cult of Galaxy account, as well as individual accounts for both Chel and myself.

Anyway, that about covers it. Now that we have systems in place for starsprite friendship and buyable perks, we should be in for an interesting December. Assuming nothing awful happens like it did this time last year, you can expect an end of year recap in a few weeks’ time. Hopefully, we’ll have something more to say about starsprites there, and – all being well – an update on the progress we’ve made towards our first playable demo too!

Until next time!