DI MONTHLY #9: A Look Back Before Looking Forward

2026: The year the ultimate awesome badass force known as Distant Illusions rolled into town and started to wreck your scene up for real this time I swear

Welcome readers, welcome into the world of tomorrow! It's the future! It's a new year! So naturally let's ignore all the possibilities that the future brings us and look into the past like a regretful history teacher.

New webzone for the script kiddies and 1337 hax0rz of the information superhighway

The first notable event of the year was in the middle of March, when we launched our new website. This was a long time coming, I'm a firm believer in a more splintered and personal web, so it was only a matter of time before DI pivoted into that direction as well.

The website project started in 2024 when I decided to experiment with a forum system written in ASP.Net Core. For… reasons. Initially I meant to use it as an imageless imageboard on my own site, as a guestbook or something (as normal people do), but after showing it off we decided to turn it into a DI forum instead. From there we also wrote a blog system, and planned like a half a dozen other ideas that weren't quite finished.

I'm honestly very excited for the future of this place, even though realistically speaking it won't ever get a lot of popularity. I love niche and potentially violently extremist online communities, and I hope we can use it for several other funny purposes in the future.

Operius DX Launch

The second event of the year happened in early May of the year. Operius DX launched. At least 3 people had been waiting for it since we originally announced it in - fuck - 2022. Well, you know what they say, Rome wasn't built in a day. Or a year. Or two.

Initially started as a mobile port of the game jam winning ad game for Opera, that also started Distant Illusions as a team, funny enough. The mobile version proved to be a real pain to get done, as the idea and the pace of the game just doesn't gel with modern mobile gaming conventions.

So the game sat on a shelf until 2024, when we were approved as developers for the Nintendo Switch, at which point development restarted in earnest. As soon as we got access to the devkit (itself a tumultuous process… pain, agony even), the whole game came together fairly quickly and the entire development of the PC and console versions of DX took about a year in total. Well, probably closer to 9 months, and then the last 3 were spent on the release part of the game, which to all of you hobbyist developers and armchair designers out there, is a far, far more painful process than you'd imagine.

Nevertheless, the game released on 30th of May 2025 to… basically no fanfare and rather lacking sales. We'll do better next time.

Browser Bootcamp

Like here! In August, we were at Gamescom!!! …As a logo. And in spirits, I guess. Not the fun kind though.

Behind the scenes, the production was a bit of a mess. You can read the whole experience from Mors' point of view from our August newsletter, if you so dare. It might make you sad if you do. Consider yourself warned.

The development itself was fairly breezy, despite the issues that we faced. The game came together in 2 weeks and features some of our best artwork and gags, and the entire game came together in a way that I don't think our previous Opera projects did. So I'm very happy with the end results, and the audiences who played the game at the stage seem to agree with me.

At the end of the project, I had to run to make time to write my thesis, which left the audio side slightly unfinished. That still bugs me, the final track segment is in a different key due to me not paying attention and also not having the time to correct it. But what do you know, chances are you never played it yourself. Ha ha.

There's also quite a lot of ideas that had to be cut for time and to make the game more consistent for the competition held at the event. Browser Bootcamp: Director's Cut anyone? Probably not.

Cascadence

On the twenty-first night of September we launched Cascadence as a game jam title (do you remember?).

In June we were getting ready to roll with Browser Bootcamp, since it was a fairly high-profile project that demanded our attention fully so that we could look our very best at Gamescom. So, naturally, Mors decided to fuck around with something entirely unrelated for about a week, making the development stretch on for longer than it should've. The result of that was Cascadence's first prototype. And me writing Markuplayer since I had nothing else to do.

The scope waved around a lot, initially. It was proposed as an exclusive game for our newsletter subscribers (something you should still definitely do btw), then it was considered as a standalone release on Steam and Switch, which became unfeasible due to a very rapidly ballooning scope and a lack of time. Then finally, we were urged to join the Falling Blocks game jam by our friend DeBisco, so the game ended up being turned into a smaller scope jam title in the two weeks we had for the jam.

We still think there's more left in the tank for this project, so look forward to Cascadence DX (working title) sometime next year. This time if it gets delayed, it's probably my fault, so remember to send me a lot of emails about finishing the soundtrack.

New Game

October marked the start of the production of our next big game. It's been a long time coming. We drafted the initial ideas for it in 2022, under very different circumstances. Such as the idea being terrible at the time.

Radium has been in the works for about 2 years, which is a very long time. We could've made do with cutting the development short and went into production in 2024, but it would've made the game significantly worse due to a much worse codebase at the time. So in the end I am not salty and annoyed at all about my inability to push the game out sooner. Grumble grumble.

Through years of thinking about the game but not working on it, it's been slowly perfected, like a diamond being slowly formed in the tremendous pressures within the sofa cushions under your mom's ass. I'm very excited to show it off, now that we have some gameplay. The finer details need to be tweaked (shitty prototypes still need to look their very best, you know) but the d-day is fast approaching.

Anyway, that's all I have to say about The Next Game™ for now. You will hear more about it very soon ;) (winkyface)

Awards Season

December rolled around, with the usual festivities and award season rigmarole in its wake. Geoff “Sure I know what indie games are, they're made by venture capital funding and massive publishers right” Keighley gave a bunch of awards to some French people, a second Santa hit the World Trade Center and Mors won a GameMaker award. Hooray!

In addition to the debut of the phrase “Award-Winning” before our studio name, we also debuted a small tool named Procrustes. It's for creating all those pesky promotional art assets for game stores and whatnot. It's not the most exciting end to a year, but we're saving a whole lot of pain in the ass by not doing those manually, so screw you, it's a victory in my book.

Conclusion

And that brings us to now. I'm actually writing this post on the 27th of December, so the year isn't technically over and stuff might still happen, but I doubt it will since I have spent the holidays either sleeping or being far too drunk to get anything done.

Therefore we're off to a new year. The year that's now exactly 20 years behind us is 2006, the year of the Nintendo Wii and that one PS3 conference that people still make jokes about. By the time you're reading this, we're (probably) already hard at work, bringing new things to a close and making 2026 the best year ever for Distant Illusions.

To conclude this year in review, I will give it 20/25.
+Stuff happened
+Did not have a massive mental breakdown
-Too much water

As always, stay tuned, and see you… before the end of the month. Hopefully. ;) (winkyface again)

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