I've been hard at work polishing the current content so that it's ready for the big itch.io release! There's a few important features that must be in the game before that is ready: Dating, Voice Acting, Balance, and Polish.
Dating
The Dating feature is going to be very rough at first but we'll flesh it out over time. Each character that you unlock will have 3 daily tasks in order to earn Tokens faster. Speaking to them, Feeding them, and Playing with them. Speaking will be simple; I just need to create a few more dialogue scenes for each character. Feeding is already implemented in my version since we added Food/Cooking last update. Playing will be a bit harder since it will require a new feature in order to work. Right now, the Playing feature will just consume some cards. In a future update, Playing will select 5 of your cards at random (you might have noticed some in your Premium Inventory after last update). You'll play a card game against the character, then after you win or lose you'll get the Token. There will be achievements and rewards for getting wins, so winning is still valuable!
Voice Acting
I've been searching for voice actresses, and a few will be returning from STRIP Cards. This will be important to the quality of the game! And the characters will feel much more alive~! While they're recording their lines, I'll be finishing the next few stages of the game in preparation for the itch.io release (which will be content-gated by several floors and characters each update compared to the Patreon version).
Balance
The game has been steadily becoming more and more playable (sorry about the first few versions being so broken, I'll make sure to label unstable versions in the future). The current state of the Character Upgrades is a bit disappointing, so I'll need to completely redo them in the next version. The gameplay loop is to collect Tokens and upgrade your Characters after Resurfacing, then return to Floor 1 with 0 inventory and 0 upgrades. The upgrades don't feel impactful enough to require a full game soft reset, so I'll be adjusting the game and systems so each time you Resurface it feels like a significant boost to your grinding!
Polish
Every button in the game will need to be redrawn at some point, and most of the inventory systems are a bit simple too. This will be a lot of extra work, but it will be worth it! I've been doing what I can to make the menus easy to navigate and fun to use (little animations and sparkly effects help the most). I've also made a new Title Screen for the next version~
We've been testing new features and content in my Discord server, so if you'd like to see what we've been cooking, come join and be part of the discussion! Here's a preview of the next Character, Holly!
What's Next?
The current plan is to get the itch.io version ready for players, then simultaneously releasing [v2.3] for Patreon! itch.io version will be content locked up to Floor 19, while Patreon will always be at least +10 Floors from that version. There will also be Patreon-only cosmetics in the future, so keep an eye out for those!
Future versions of Mineheart Abyss will be Patreon-first, and I have content planned for the rest of the year and into 2027. Potentially much more if the game is a big hit! This game is designed to have more content easily added to it over time, so I hope to keep working on this game for many years!
I've started drafting my next Project once Mineheart Abyss is finally in a polished and balanced state. It will be a Farming Simulation game similar to Harvest Moon where the marriage candidates will each have an animal cosplay outfit. The characters will be in place of actual animals, for example the girl in the cow costume will produce milk for you 🐮🥛 The rest of the game will focus on character interactions, story, and crop farming. I'm expecting early builds for this game to be ready for playtesting sometime after Summer '26 after the Steam version is launched.