Arena of Suffering — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| 1.12 Patch | 2026-04-06 | This morning's patch fixes a minor bug with selling that displayed the auto-equip option even though it wouldn't do anything for sold items. It also fixes a more dangerous bug in retraining that could allow you to hit escape and have a null character retrain--this would lock you in the training room. Not good. Now it should exit retraining and not charge you any tokens. Just a proper back out. |
| Arena of Suffering 1.1 is Live | 2026-03-31 | I compiled a number of additional bug fixes and QoL changes and took care of them after getting back from vacation. It's all live now, so please be vigilant for anything that didn't take correctly. We have another case where an important event in Tutoria Cave could be avoided with fast diagonal movement. Because it was an important event, I reset the flag on it just to be 100% certain people trigger it and get their Tutoria birds. For people who already have run the dungeon, this should cause a 1-time partial replay of the event if they return.The Arena Shop is now more specific about the items and skill you're buying. :)I made sure that our |
| Small Patch | 2026-01-18 | One of the later achievements was missable in a way that I found a bit unfair. So, if you beat the last normal boss, a new encounter becomes available that gives you a chance to take on a nastier version of the boss fight and get one of the trickier achievements without having to know ahead of time what to set up. I feel like this is fair to all players and doesn't reduce the difficulty of the encounter in the least. Good luck everyone! :) |
| 2nd Attempt at Achievement Fix | 2026-01-15 | Today's patch is trying to lock down achievements even more for times when connections are lost, Steam misses something, etc. The system stores all achievements locally, and when you load a game it tries to update Steam in case it missed anything previously. This should be way more effective at eliminating edge cases, people coming from offline play, etc. Please let me know how it works.Because it makes me laugh at myself, I'll add: "It worked perfectly for me." /fingers crossedGo kill some dragons. Much love.LordKemp |
| Micropatch | 2026-01-14 | A player had some issues with erratic Achivement unlocks. I've patched to try and help with that, but please let me know if anyone else is missing either the beep from the Steam notification or the recording of your achievement. Once we've squashed it, I'll see about making a boot up check so that people can retroactively get anything that they missed. But the bug must die first!No other changes made. |
| Arena of Suffering is live now! :) | 2026-01-13 | I originally set the time for noon today EST, in case there were any final snags. But I can't find any (yet), so I'm setting the game to live now. I'll have Discord open all day if anyone hits a bug: https://discord.gg/x9rBMRw3 Feel 100% free to DM me with issues. I'd love to have our release week be as smooth as possible, so I anticipate patching whatever may or may not come up. We only hit one error in the Demo, so let's see if we can keep a good track record like that!Have fun everyone. :) |
| 1.0 is under a week away! | 2026-01-07 | January 13th is almost here! :) The full release for Arena of Suffering should be on noon EST, though this is my first release ever and we'll see if there are any hidden hoops that'll trip things up. Either way, I'll make sure to stay online that day to take care of any hiccups. Looking forward to it! |
| Untitled | 2025-11-18 | Working on new battle systems. I'd like to have a initiative system that isn't ALL heroes and then the monsters. We'll shift to individual inits for future games, and thus we have the tracker up top. It works too! New battlelog is minimal, but that's also functional. The party sidebar on the right is . . . not. Really not. I'm laughing but still really confused. What's even better is that the bug before this had them at about 5x5 pixels each. Neither attempt fix messed with the scale. Oh Godot, you're so cray cray. |
| We got another Youtube Review! (Thanks to Beef Gravy Studios) | 2025-11-04 | Thanks to Beef Gravy Studios for checking out Arena of Suffering and for the review. Fun folks! :) |
| What I'm Working On | 2025-10-29 | I'm working on long-term material: better movement (so that we can add creatures into our maps instead of the stand-ins that we have now). Instead of going w/ full sprites in our movement, I'm using a single sprite and moving them with script. It's looking nice so far, and it's a heck of a lot easier than expand my art pipeline to include tons of pictures to move every single monster that we make. |
| Working on the Details | 2025-10-27 | One of the things that I've found the hardest to change about RPG Maker's systems is the "simple" stuff: menus, raw layout, etc. It fights back when you try to reset some of the engine's defaults. I'd really like to improve our UI/UX. Because the default system is well known, I don't think that many users are going to have any problems figuring out how to play, but I'd like to make those important details more fun and functional over time (for future games and for Arena too, if at all possible).Which JRPG has the best UI in recent years from your experiences? In terms of looks, the most recent Atelier really impressed me. They've not usually |
| New Developments | 2025-10-22 | To "relax" after Next Fest, I got back into work for future games and updates to Arena of Suffering. But I'd gotten some good advice from other devs and feel like we're already bumping hard into the ceiling of RPG Maker MZ. I mean, we made 70 plugins for our first game just to try and make the system do what we wanted. More are coming too--our update Lighting system is working, as are first implementations of Weather and Particle systems. Super cool stuff, and a lot of fun to make and to see in practice.But for the long-term...I think we're going to make our next game in Godot instead. I was intimidated by it as a first time developer because |
| Header Capsule | 2025-10-17 | I've been thinking of ideas to improve our Header Capsule (the wide art you see on the Steam Store Page). I went for that fun 90s vibe, to fit the style of game that we're honoring. But, there is a careful line between fun nostalia and just looking dated. I'm not sure that I rode the line correctly, and a few people have mentioned that this doesn't land for them. I'm going to try and make a better one if I can.If people have ideas or just want to mentioned their favorite headers, go ahead and show them off. My main idea is to try and have Saval raising a shield, warding off dragonfire. Nice and epic without adding so many elements that it's o |
| Monster Showcase: Beneath Dunrath | 2025-10-15 | Next Fest has been a whirlwind, so I’m taking a breather from marketing to share five fresh critters from our dungeon beneath the northern mountains. Cold air, blue-white palette, and lots of teeth.The dungeon has caved in on itself in a few spots, so I added wilderness creatures of that area. The Frost Imps are an interesting case. I didn't use any other swarm art (everything else is just a single creature per image). But I wanted to try a trio here.And these two are midbosses for that dungeon. I had a LOT of fun making the chimera fight. You can trash the heads to limit the enemy's attacks, or rush the main body and just secure the kill if |
| Almost Doubled Our Wishlists!!! | 2025-10-14 | Thanks to everyone who checked out our page and demo — whether you wishlisted or not, I really appreciate your time! The day completely snowballed, and it’s taken a huge weight off my shoulders. As a first-time developer, it’s terrifying to put your game out there and not know if anyone will even see it. (I’m sure second-time devs will tell me the fear never really goes away, lol.)Anyway — this is so cool. I’d love to hear your thoughts or ideas for the future if you have a moment to hop on the discussion board. No word on any bugs yet (yay!), but I’ve cleared my schedule this week just in case we need a new build for anything spooky.Here’s t |
| Today is the Day! | 2025-10-13 | It's the 13th, which means that Next Fest begins today. I hope people find a ton of new games to check out and look forward to. I'll be around if people need anything for my game, and I'll certainly be looking for wishlists of my own (even if I don't have enough time to play the stuff I already have, lol). :) |
| More cool monsters! | 2025-10-10 | I put a few more of our monsters on the main store page for a bit of fun. I had so much fun making all of them during development that I'm seriously hankering to get back into that. I think that was my favorite part in Arena.In between the various Steam setups and emails these days, I've been thinking about what elements should be improved in the future. I'm almost done with a dedicated character generation system. We went with an in-game one for Arena, and it works. It's solid. But, I got a couple of comments that a dedicated system would be better/more fun/etc. So, that's a thing that I decided to do. |
| Shop Work :) | 2025-10-08 | I've been trying to update the shop system (on a totally safe build that never goes live). And you know what--it's incredibly hard. Harder than our graphic overhaul, harder than making a basic particle system, tougher than weather. I just don't know why shops are so hard to do well. It's been kicking my butt royally. Message me if anyone has ideas on how to make this easier. Either way, there's no way it'll make Next Fest and it's probably next GAME material anyway, lol.In more fun news, I wanted to show off one of the bosses from our Demo. This is the first handsome fellow that you'll go up against in a serious fight. He's a brute, but he lo |
| One More Week! | 2025-10-06 | Only 7 more days until Next Fest! I updated our screenshots and Title page with more recent artwork, and I'm really happy with it. The old intro screen had always seemed thematically fine with me but a bit bland. This one pops more. |
| Next Fest Coming Up | 2025-10-01 | Only 12 more days until Next Fest. Our testers didn't have any trouble with the demo (please drop me a line if anyone else does!). I'm hoping that we'll be able to spend some time developing new plugins while we wait for our publishing date. Does anyone have requests for things that they'd want to see in either an expansion post-release or in the next game that I make? My biggest personal push has been to make a new weather system, and progress on that is going very well. I don't think it's something that'll make it into Arena, but anything we do after this should have more than the basic rain/snow that's built into RPGM MZ. Right now we have |
| Demo Should Be Live | 2025-09-22 | The Demo is through with approvals, and it should be live and running now. Please let me know if anyone has hiccups with it. :) |
| Demo Going Online | 2025-09-17 | Arena's demo is going live today. It needs to be ready for Nextfest, but I thought it would be awesome to have it ready for anyone who still wants to try things out now. Except a number of quick patches throughout the day as I test and get any final bugs out of the way (there have been a few). I'm still working on a scrolling text issue. By tomorrow, it should calm down a lot. Take care! :)EDIT: 9-18When I said going live today, what I should have said was going live (for me), getting some awesome bug fixing done, and not realizing that Steam has an approval phase for Demos even if the main game and store are already greenlit, lol. So, the pu |
| Open Playtest Closing Today | 2025-09-05 | In the next hour or so we'll bring down the Playtest. Thanks for your help everyone. People who are still working on their game: you can copy your save files just to be safe. They should transfer over to the main game later on, but it's always nice to be extra careful. I have associated the saves w/ the main game's App ID, so hopefully the Cloud Saves will be okay. Question Mark? :) |
| Playtest Ends Next Friday (September 5th) | 2025-08-29 | We're going to bring down the Playtest at the end of next week. Thanks to everyone who got to play the game. For anyone who is dying to still have access, contact us and we'll see if we can keep you on in the Closed Beta. The game had zero reported crashes during the test (heck yeah). We added a few features that were requested, and we're 100% still on target for releasing in January. I'd bring it forward, but competing during the holiday season is not for a first-time dev, especially a small indie one. Wish us luck, and I'll be excited to see everyone at release. :) |
| Achievements!!! | 2025-08-28 | It took so much more work than I thought to get the game talking with Steam. But, it does now. There are 25 achievements so far, and they seem to be working. We can't test those directly during the Playtest (Steam rules, oddly). But, I have a private branch and things seem to be working really well there. Nice.Soon, I'm going to start on a public demo. Playtesters have more access, but the demo will have achievements, and the whole thing will still be available to everyone even after the Playtest is done. |
| Patch in the Works | 2025-08-23 | I'm trying to get a patch out the door today to address the comments from this week that I've gotten from the internal testers. Typos (no biggie). A random jerk ogre who was out of position should disappear from the forest. Small stuff there.Added Feature: There will now be a NPC Speech toggle in the options menu. Turn it off and you won't hear the "Memememee" type of sound effects while talking to NPCs. Some testers enjoyed this, but a couple found it distracting. So now they won't have to turn their sound off to avoid it! :)A couple reports of Cloud saves not working on secondary systems. That's ominous, so that's the feature I'm trying to |
| Trailer is Up and Running! | 2025-08-21 | The full trailer is online now and is displaying on my Steam page, so I think it's up for everyone. Yay! I had no idea how long trailers take to make (first one). I've made videos of gameplay before, so this was tricky. Anyway, I hope people enjoy it. Please leave a review and let me know how the playtest is going! And have a great day everyone. :) |
| Coming Soon! | 2025-08-20 | Our store page goes live today! I'll spend the next day getting the Playtest up and running through Steam so that people can start using this is our base of operations. The biggest concern will be to make sure that our Steam Cloud saves are working before people put any serious same into the build here. Hopefully, we'll be running at full speed by next week.Oh, and the trailer isn't up yet, so don't worry if you can't see anything. I'm still working on editing the darn thing. :) |