- 1.12 Patch - 6 April 2026
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 - 31 March 2026
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 Summon Skill is even clearer --used to be called Come Out and Play-ay. But I just renamed it to Summon for clarity.Fixed a couple of derpy things that I stumbled onto.Added Draughts of Life to the regular item shop and removed it from the Arena Stor…
- Small Patch - 18 January 2026
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 - 15 January 2026
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 - 14 January 2026
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! :) - 13 January 2026
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! - 7 January 2026
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 - 18 November 2025
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) - 4 November 2025
Thanks to Beef Gravy Studios for checking out Arena of Suffering and for the review. Fun folks! :)
- What I'm Working On - 29 October 2025
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 - 27 October 2025
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 been at the forefront for graphics (fun gameplay though). But Resleriana looks great. Gorgeous menus. I want to make awesome menus.
- New Developments - 22 October 2025
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 it looked like a lot more work than simply grabbing RPGM MZ. And it is. It's also so much more flexible. Way more top end. More control. I think this is the right call. I'm three days into making a new engine and it's going very well. I didn't want…
- Header Capsule - 17 October 2025
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 overwhelming. So far . . . well, still not anything worth showing off. Hopefully we'll get there and I'll have something cool to show everyone. :)
- Monster Showcase: Beneath Dunrath - 15 October 2025
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 you think you're overleveled/geared and don't need to sweat the details. The non-headless Dulahan is more of a tank and punish fight. He's tough but fair? But something in his room looks a tad off. I'll leave you to check that out on your own (be ve…
- Almost Doubled Our Wishlists!!! - 14 October 2025
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 the new vertical capsule we swapped in last night, featuring Soval. I wanted to make things feel a bit more active. What do you think?
- Today is the Day! - 13 October 2025
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! - 10 October 2025
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 :) - 8 October 2025
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 loves puns and can't be all bad.
- One More Week! - 6 October 2025
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 - 1 October 2025
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 spores, dust, sandstorms, and fog too. Fun stuff!
