itch.io

Yes, especially in regards to the development changes you mentioned.

One of the reasons the development time has been so long (though meaningful) is due to certain things that have been worked on during the BFNS Ultimate Beta 1 development period being either totally redone or changed multiple times during the development of the update to make them even better.

One example is a scrapped around 4 chapter long Adventure Mode concept before the current 10 floor Adventure Mode campaign plan was finalized, another is the lighting system, which has gone through multiple changes as well before reaching it's current development iteration, and the last (and probably one of the biggest ones) is the Floor Maker.

Originally, it was going to include all of these advanced features like custom texture, music, item, and character support, but during it's development in 2024-25, although those features got pretty far into work in the what was then being called the Floor Builder, it ended up being way too complicated/convoluted (especially for a mostly solo dev like myself who also has a 38 hour/week working job, has to help around the house sometimes, and usually only works on BFNSU when he feels motivated as it's a passion project, and not something I force myself to develop, so that limits most of the development time mainly to the weekends currently) in the editor, so that Floor Maker iteration was scrapped entirely and rebuilt from the ground up into the streamlined first person Floor Maker that has been shown in the more recent progress updates, which is planned to focus on customization in custom floors via selectable floor themes rather than external mod support, which should work better overall than the old concept.

Also, Beta 1 is still currently planned to be released sometime in 2026, with a Beta 1 Preview version for BFNS Development Testers planned to be released a month before that and include most of the content planned to be included in the final, public version of the Beta 1 update.

The upcoming map layout polls will be a big step towards that, cause once those are decided on, the layouts can finally be built and implemented in game as work on Beta 1 continues!