Final weeks of development and an updated launch date

[p]Happy New Year![/p][p]Welcome to our first Hermit and Pig devlog of 2026, and one of our last before launch. It has been a minute since you've heard from us, but we're finally emerging from the deep dark development journey known as the final stretch, and things are looking very good if we do say so ourselves.[/p][p]Over the last month we've had an elite group of volunteers from our community doing alpha testing, and they're real crackerjack testers who have helped us a ton! While they're testing we've focused on fixing bugs, finalizing sound and music, and adding in a bunch of small details to really make Hermit and Pig feel complete. For a while we were feeling stuck on how exactly we wanted to bring the Hermit and Pig story to a close, but after many edits and iterations we sorted out the final ending and we are excited for you to see how the whole story goes. Over the next few weeks it's all about continued testing, polishing, and putting the final touches on this dang game. It has taken years plural, but we can finally say the finish line is in sight! [/p][p]And speaking of finish lines, we're making a slight edit and moving ours to February 5th. We hope you don't shed too many tears over this one, but the extra two weeks is all we need to make sure we can release this mushroom-covered beast exactly how we want to (and really figure out how to launch a game, that's a whole workload in itself).Okie dokie, well thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with us through this gamedev journey. We hope you're as excited as we are about Hermit and Pig![/p][p]May your new year be strong on animal friendships and tough on fascism.[/p][p]Mason and Nathan[/p]