Sol and the Endless Orbit is a platformer/RPG with an ambitious story that spans multiple chapters and planets.

I started making this game in Scratch 5 years ago. I've since restarted it in a different game engine, and it's now on its way to becoming an actual video game! There's even a 15-minute demo you can play right now!

I plan to post development updates in various places across the internet, some of which I can't promote on Scratch… So, since this started as a Scratch project, why don't I share updates here as well? I'll be dropping in periodically to talk about how development is coming along, and explain new stuff I'm adding to the game, so you can follow this thread if that sounds interesting to you.

Time for a small progress update! Here's what I accomplished in April:

• Save points and a menu where you can load, copy, and erase save files
  
• Settings menu and keybinding
  
• Shiny new pause menu
  
• New animation when enemies are defeated
  
• Sliceable grass and breakable rocks (the most important feature of any game)
  
• A bunch of boring internal stuff (file system, debug tools) to make development faster and more organized
  

Basically a lot of behind-the-scenes, UI stuff. Not as much as I would've hoped, but I'm feeling optimistic about May. My goal is to make an expanded intro area that introduces the game's story, which will be included in an update to the demo (either in May or June) along with the other stuff I just mentioned. And then I'll post a more in-depth devlog. See you then!

In May, I finally updated and organized all the notes I've written for this game over the years. Having all the information in one place makes it a lot easier to gather pointless statistics, like these:

• Chapter 1 is the most thoroughly-planned chapter right now. (Its outline consists of 42 main bullet points, while the others range from 8 to 27.)
  
• Current progress on areas (21%), battles (26%), music (44%), and other elements like major cutscenes and mechanics (12%) adds up this chapter being about 26% complete.
  
• The soundtrack for Chapter 1 alone will have more songs than Draw: The Sequel.
  
• There are over 50 Skills planned for the full game.
  

More importantly, this also makes it easier to actually develop the game…!



…Or so I thought. I spent most of June on the intro area I mentioned in the last post, but needless to say, I didn't end up finishing the update in May or June like I said I would. I wanted to at least share a progress update last month, but I didn't feel like I had enough good news to share. It was kind of discouraging. Fortunately, though, I've learned two important lessons from this:

• 1) Don't mention deadlines for completed content. Not only was my estimated deadline completely wrong, but it also stressed me out a bit, to the point of ironically making everything take longer. It's hard to be creative under pressure (even if that pressure is just from myself).
  
• 2) Write a draft of the full script. (For such a dialogue-heavy game, this is something I really should've done earlier, but better late than never I suppose.) Part of the delay was just trying to figure out how to set up the story in a way I was satisfied with; for example, implementing a whole cutscene with original animations and whatnot, only to end up scrapping it and starting a new version a few days later. Finalizing the story (beyond the general outline I have now) should make development should be a much more straightforward process!
  

Anyway, that intro area is basically done now. The plan is still to release it as part of an update to the demo, but there are a few more things I need to finish first.



(I gotta get better at taking screenshots, it's funny how he's in the exact same pose in every image I've posted here.)

I played the prototype and I loved it so much! Keep going, you've got this!

I love RPG's hope you can finish this game

There's nothing spookier on Halloween than a surprise demo update! Am I right?

I shared the prototype back in February, and my goal was mainly to collect feedback on the gameplay, so a lot of planned story sequences were left out. In the devlog, I mentioned that my next priority would be finishing up this content.

Well… I did that! And you can play it now! Not only that, but I also added:

• New items, Skills, and secrets
  
• Saving/loading and a title screen
  
• Settings and keybinding
  
• Controller support
  
• Shiny new pause menu
  
• Reworked tutorials and battle mechanics
  
• More visual/audio improvements and bugfixes than I can possibly list
  

And it's on Steam too! As I understand it, it's really important to get a lot of wishlists early on — it tells the algorithm to recommend the game to more people, thereby assisting me in my devious plan to one day become a full-time indie game developer. So if you're on Steam, I would really appreciate it if you added the game to your wishlist! It really helps!!

I figure this isn't the last major update I'm going to want to inform people of, so I overhauled the Scratch project with an info and updates section. I'll be posting updates in this thread more frequently though.

If you're wondering why this update took so long… I already went over some reasons earlier in this thread, but overall, the update was just a bit overwhelming — I was adding new stuff at the beginning, middle, and end of the demo, and polishing up all the old stuff in between. It felt like I was doing a lot at once, and it was hard to know when to stop. Now I only have to focus on the new stuff, which I think will make the rest of development a lot more straightforward. I'm feeling especially optimistic now that I'm done dealing with save files and keybinding; progress is always smoothest when I'm just making content, which is basically all that's left to do! It also helps that we're now out of the stage of tutorials and plot setup, and moving onto the parts where actual cool things can happen…



Next time, I hope to share a glimpse of the Sunrise Isles! Happy Halloween!

Yipee

Keep up the good work!

Small progress update: between the stream I did for my 10th Scratchiversary (for which I made an entire video essay in preparation, plus multiple new Scratch projects) and personal Christmas projects, the end of 2025 was quite busy for me, leaving me without a lot of time to work on the game. That said, I got a lot of stuff out of the way last year, and I'm nearing the end of the current run of my webcomic, so I feel optimistic about making more time for this game in 2026!

Back in July, I mentioned my plan to write a more complete script of the game's story. What I didn't mention was that I also wanted to present this story to people I know for feedback, which is why I'm now writing it in the form of a playable plot synopsis (basically a condensed version of the entire game). That's been my main priority thus far in 2026, but I've also gotten back to work on content for the actual game:



The plan is still to release the full first chapter this year (roughly 2 hours of content with multiple areas, a complete story arc and final boss, the works). It's basically all planned out, and I created a project timeline I think is reasonable. I'll keep you posted on how it's progressing!

Sounds great!!!!!

yea great!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Things are going well! I've drawn pretty much all the art and implemented the main mechanics for the next area, and completed an introductory minigame-like sequence and the first room.



I tend to make progress kind of linearly (design one area, make it, then design the next), but I've been trying to get ahead of things by designing future areas as I work on this one. I've finalized the gameplay/narrative design for about half of Chapter 1 (sketching room layouts, coming up with challenges, writing dialogue, composing song drafts)… It's starting to take shape much more clearly in my mind!



That said, I spent a while stumped on one particular sequence… I had a theme in mind, but I wasn't sure what the gameplay would be. It took me a while to figure out a good mechanic, then think of fun challenges that could also give insight into the characters. Yesterday I wrote all almost 100 lines of dialogue for it, and even ran a calculation in Scratch to make sure all 243 combinations of choices were balanced properly. I think it turned out fun!



I even worked out some final details of a semi-important optional storyline that spans most of the game, so I'm excited for people to discover that.

Assuming things continue progressing at this rate, the chapter will definitely be out by the end of the year!

Deltarune tomorrow Sol and the endless orbit tomorrow!