Picture is from this amazing mix by Melway https://mod.io/g/mixuniverse/m/5444852
First off, I'd like to announce that we now have 250 mixes in the Universe!! It's absolutely incredible and I love seeing it all! Some of them are truly wild while others are really creative. Definitely check them out in the Universe Tab or at https://mod.io/g/mixuniverse/
This year overall has been amazing for the game. Roughly 7000 new players, a whole new universe to play in, and a lot of stability and performance updates. On top of that, I have started to slowly shift into a mostly full-time solo-dev role here for the game instead of balancing a full time job on top of making updates to the game. I am still working for Terrible Posture Games, but not full time. (I was literally working 70-80 hours a week.. not sustainable) We released Battle Train and Good Boy this year so it was BUSY! A lot of the newer players came from this video alone.
https://www.tiktok.com/@chriszuko/video/7493542831634615598
I continue to repost during sales just because for whatever reason, people really resonate with this video so apologies if the algorithm has served it to you many times, it's currently the best marketing strategy I've got atm.
Here's something that is also super wild to me, 1200 players are over the 3 hour mark.
You CAN see that there is a learning curve that is strong with the game, most players around the first 30 min, but if you are 1 of the 1200 and have something to say, your voice matters! Every review helps steam visibility (Getting to 100 is the next milestone) and every purchase atm goes into making the game better! I hear and read ALL of the feedback! You can also leave feedback on the discussions or discord!
https://discord.com/invite/zZRXtk8T34
Image of what the modulation and parameter graph looks like for sounds being generated (Just fun to show :P)
So it's been a few months now since the last update and the build is coming along really nicely. The main thing is that everything I have been doing is in prep for the modulation and sample library updates. I thought the sample library update would be first, but now I realize it's best to do it AFTER the modulation update. I apologize but also am excited!
Here are some key things coming!
Build size is drastically reduced. (Roughly 1.5gb smaller) Samples now are close to 10-20b instead of 200mb per set of 88 samples which paves the way for adding say.. 1000 more to the game! This was a rather large blocker for the sample library update.
Audio parameters and FX are completely rewritten with the goal that ANY slider will have the ability to add modulation curves to it (This is what I'll be working on start of 2026)
Automator Nodes. Teaser showed here
Mover Nodes (More on these later)
Batched Visuals for Nodes have also been completely rewritten to remove a 1-5ms overhead (Depending on how many nodes) and instead directly communicate to Niagara systems (Sorry.. unreal jargon) .. the key take-away is its MUCH faster now to render nodes.
Link collision and node gathering performance is faster (In prep for mover nodes) more on those later.
ADSR (Attack Decay Sustain and Release) Controls
There will be more, but these are the big ones!
Most things are back to working exactly how they did before. However some of the trickier things that take time to find and fix are.
Sometimes visuals don't spawn for nodes (Cool right?)
Layer Switching causes audio blend issues with modulation rings (This is due to the improvements made to fix being able to update FX while the sound is playing.)
Async crashes (Due to some performance improvements not being thread-safe)
So not too bad atm, but still a bit unreliable for releasing a beta version of the build. (Mostly because of Universe Mixes)
On discord, the community has a really cool Christmas / Holiday themed Mix that anyone can participate in! All you have to do is join the discord, say hi and that you would like to give it a go in this thread
https://discord.com/channels/878654596770328576/1444455841263517887
I hope to one-day make Challenges and Collabs a feature of the game, but for now the discord is the best place for it!
Thank you all so much! I am appreciative of the patience and also am excited to reveal everything in the first quarter hopefully of 2026. You all rock and keep mixing! I'll be taking a short break here and Have a great Christmas / Holiday!