Three whole years have passed without a new Sixtus Flaming devlog entry. That’s a damn long time, and I fully realize this might be cause for concern even for the die-hard fans of Sixtus Flaming worldwide. As you know no doubt, they (you!) have been desperately waiting to hear something – anything – new about the upcoming masterpiece. I mean how is anyone supposed to run fan websites and social media if there’s no new material whatsoever coming out from the devs?

During this radio silence, however, we’ve been working hard all along. In fact, 2026 has been easily the most hectic year of development we’ve had so far. There have been more commits to the project this spring alone than during all the previous years. The driving force behind this was a goal we set for ourselves during the new year’s: that we’d finish the testers’ version of the demo by the end of April. On January 1, our TODO list for the demo’s limited release had 124 tasks. After completing these, we created Release Candidate #1, which still produced 36 issues in our rigorous self-testing. RC#2 produced 8 issues, RC#3 just four. RC#4 was the one we released for the testers. Well, we ultimately had to postpone the deadline to the end of May, but then we finally had a version that pleased us sufficiently.

As the devlog has laid dormant, the one thing that has been updated on this website is the note on the landing view that the demo would be out in 2026. Now, releasing the demo without any outside testing would be simply idiotic and lead to loads of bugs and patching, so this was an important phase we wanted to approach as thoroughly as any other aspect of the game. The testing that followed has now pretty much concluded and what I have is some good news and some bad news. Let’s begin with the good news.

The testing server’s welcome message on Discord

I gathered together a fine group of a dozen trustworthy people from my friends and their friends, people of different backgrounds (for example different ages, different sexes, experienced adventure gamers and newcomers to the genre). No professional testers participated in the process at this stage.

The idea behind the testing was obviously to find new bugs, possible soft locks and actions and thought patterns we had not considered (all of which happened) but even more importantly, to see how people actually react to the game. How does the protagonist seem, what kinds of feelings does the game invoke (if any), what do players think of the world building, the story line and the puzzles?

Now, we could have approached this in a traditional way of letting them play the demo and then fill a questionnaire to see what works and what doesn’t. Luckily I did NOT choose that route. Instead, I told everyone to get OBS Studio (or a screen recording application of their choosing) to record their actual gameplay with reactions. As all laptops have microphones and there are cloud services that work well for sending big files, this was not a big ask. If they didn’t want to, they didn’t need to give me any written or oral feedback beyond the gameplay video, so this was, in fact, very easy on their part.

A screenshot from a playthrough recording of one of my friends

Well, isn’t it tiresome for the devs to have to go through hours and hours of gameplay footage instead of some nifty questionnaires? Quite on the contrary! Watching each playthrough has been enormously rewarding! I’m a filmmaker and what I’m used to is when people watch your film, all the feedback you’re going to get is pretty much restricted to whatever they decide to say afterwards, and it’s usually mixed with politeness which sometimes hinders the message. But Sixtus Flaming is not a film. It’s a game; an interactive experience. And that means when people play it, you get to see real-time how they react to things! You’re right there with them and get to experience first-hand the unbearable frustration of not realizing a way forward and then the absolute joy of coming up with a solution. Getting to experience this, and when they laugh at your jokes – I rank them among the best feelings in the world! The thought process, decision-making and logical thinking of the player becomes evident. Don’t get me wrong, it does mean significantly more work for the developer, but at least to me it was such a thrill I would heartily recommend this approach to testing to anyone!

So, now that the testing for the demo has pretty much concluded, when can we expect the public release? Well, that’s the bad news, I guess. My goal to myself was that the demo would release before I turn 43 years old (that is, today) as I wanted something very meaningful to happen when I’m 42 (as it is, after all, the meaning of life). The demo’s public release would’ve been a good fit for this, considering I’ve been working on it for 6+ years now. But the game’s coder mentioned that the testing process satisfied his need to show off the work (although releasing a teaser video of some kind would be nice). Soon thereafter I had to concur: it had done the same to me. Also, during testing, the average playtime was around 2 hours while most experts seem to suggest an effective demo should have a playtime of 15–30 minutes…

The most important reason behind the decision I have now made – to NOT release a public demo at this point – is, however, the fact that the release of the full game remains years away. While the demo has only 6 rooms (and lasts roughly/almost the same as playing through first chapter of Monkey 2 (the introductory Scabb Island bit)), the full game will have around 50 locations (and the scope will be around that of Monkey 1). So there’s a huge amount of work left and realistically, we’re looking at not much sooner than the early 2030s when it comes to the release of the full game. Releasing a demo now would be nice in a way, but it would lead to people forgetting about the game during the coming years. There’s no way to keep everyone interested for such a long time. This means it makes much more sense to release the demo closer to the release of the full game. And when that happens, the demo probably won’t be the demo the testers played now.

In any case, I’m extremely grateful for what the testers have done, it has made such a difference and the game is going to be much better in so many ways because of it. We’re now pressing forward at full force. I’m confident this is going to be a wonderful game. We just have to make it first.

P.S. While there’s quite a bit of waiting ahead, you will NOT have to wait three years for the next devlog entry. 🙂

-luuk