Hey everyone! It’s been a few weeks since we shadow-dropped Young Suns into Game Pass as a Game Preview title and we’ve honestly been so floored with the reception. We knew it was the earliest of early access games but we didn’t expect how excited, graceful, and supportive the community would be around it. In fact we have a shocking statistic:

We have now hit 100k Unique Players in less than a month of availability. We’re so grateful to everyone checking out the game and leaving feedback on our discord or by email. This is just the start and the future of Young Suns looks bright ✨

If you missed our announcement and reveal presentation, watch it here:

Game Dev Corner - Young Suns Edition

As we close out the year we wanted to take a look back at Young Suns’ development in 2025, and talk about all the things we wanted to share earlier but had to keep to ourselves until the announcement.

• This year saw us working nose to the grindstone getting Young Suns ready for it’s first release. Along the way we had a few post-mortems where we analyzed and discussed our processes and approach to making the game. We like to do these (and course-correct where necessary)after every major milestone. This is really important, and is especially interesting in a co-op structure, where we can easily hold discussions around accountability and leadership.

• We implemented strike teams - small interdisciplinary teams that own a feature, meet daily, and are able to quickly get their work into the game at a shippable quality.

• We built a tutorial for a game that’s a moving target (there’s a reason why many early access games ship without a tutorial). How do you teach something when you haven’t locked down so many systems? How do you make that infrastructure scalable and not something you throw away when the game evolves? We implemented a system of tutorial rubrics that are adaptable to new contexts. We can mark any type of feature as needing a rubric, and set the conditions for a tutorial specific to that feature. By abstracting the tutorial system a layer above the actual game content we can keep it flexible for future needs!

• We’ve built a major part of an over-the-air update system by moving lots of our quest and economy data into a data format that can be updated without the need for a full patch. This isn’t quite ready but will pay off in the long term when we’re looking to keep the game maintained as an indie team. (Don’t worry though, this won’t require you to have to play or be online all the time.)

• We’ve developed an asset pipeline and tooling to support the creation of tons and tons of objects, items, and clothing.

• So… much… more…

If you’re curious about anything mentioned above please let us know by replying to this email and we’ll expand on it in a future newsletter :)

Youngsona Fit-check

One of the most exciting things about putting Young Suns out into the world is seeing people use our character creator to make themselves or any character they want to explore. Here are some of our favourite Youngsonas so far:

If you’d like to share your Youngsona with us join our discord!

A few months ago we ran an Ask Me Anything on the KO_OP discord about Goodbye Volcano High. It was a huge success (technical issues aside) and we received over a hundred questions! We unfortunately didn’t have time to cover them all, and honestly with Young Suns we haven’t had time to schedule a new one so we’re going to pull a question from the user submitted ones each month as part of our newsletter going forward! This month’s question is courtesy of @HeliHarbour:

Was Stella ever supposed to have an LnL character? Some have speculated Celeste (played by Reed) used to be.

Some of you may know that we had a character named Leo in early development that was cut. Leo and Stella used to date and had a falling out where they couldn’t be in the same room together without it being weird. Originally Leo, as Reed's best friend, was invited to LnL so Stella wouldn't want to be part of it. Even though we cut Leo, we kept the fact that Stella was off doing her own plant based tarot witchery because she has a full life and no time for silly games :p

Okay this turned out to be a beefy one but we’ve had a lot to say!! Again thank you all for the love and grace, we are entering our 14th year of existence and truly couldn’t do any of this without you. See you in 2026!