Immortal Zenith: Idle to Ascension

Dev Blog #4 — Preparing for Early AccessIt has been a busy last week, adding some additional systems into the latter part of the game, fixing bugs and reviewing balance across systems. There are still many more changes I plan on making to little things as i prepare for an early access release (and a few big additions I want to get in before early access), but feeling much more confident about the gameplay experience than even a month ago. All that being said, I'm tentatively planning for an early access release across Steam, iOS and Android on Friday, October 2nd at 5:00 PM EST! This is subject to change based on final approvals across all the platforms as I want a unified release, but it is looking good so far. I'm so excited to share the game with a larger audience, even in it's "imperfect" state as I know player feedback is going to help drive even more fun and rewarding game play. My closed testers have been an immense help already in pointing me towards places where my design might not match what most users would want and I'm sure a larger audience will reinforce that. Working on this has been a bit of an obsession, especially over the last few months and I can feel how close we are to the departure point for what is sure to be a fun adventure. I hope some of the folks who have wish-listed the game are as excited as I am to see this come to light and get a chance to interact with the world and the other players. Can't wait to share it with you! Updates to follow as we get closer to the date. If you want to see what's going on with testing, catch some screenshots from the game and chat with me or the testers, join us on discord! https://discord.gg/k8kJ6Xmtv TL;DR: Tentative release date for Friday, 10/2/2026 @ 5:00 PM

Dev Blog #3 — Bug-fixing & Content CoherenceIt has been a busy two weeks since my last update. Thanks to a lot of help from my alpha testers and some random bursts of inspiration, there has been quite a bit of progress made in relatively short amount of time. To touch on a few of the big things: 1. Complete re-did the exploration system and how zones are unlocked Before, every zone in a region became unlocked when you reached an appropriate realm for it, giving you the option to explore for whatever materials you were looking for. While this was "open" it also made the system feel like of flat and it didn't really interact with the rest of the game outside of material output. Fast-forward to a week or so ago, I re-wrote the exploration to instead use a path based un-lock system that requires characters to progress through certain zones with combat of increasing difficult to unlock the next zone. This also allowed me to tie tyrants into the main exploration progress as an unlock mechanism for the next region (and ultimately a requirement for reaching the celestial realm). All in all, it feels better, it offers another progress path and provides a challenge for players to aim for. 2. Added the foundation of Towns Before, a lot of the content in explore just kind of dangled there because it had no where more thematically appropriate to go. This inspired the creation of a world map featuring all the regions and various towns with different NPC shops and NPC profession masters. This also gave a more fitting place to migrate the random events and sects to. 3. Rework of all the equipment Started as a collection of fixes to the types of weapons (some categorized wrong) but ended with a full re-hash through all the tiers to make equipment thematically appropriate and distinct so there was real choices involved in why you might use one piece over another. 4. Addition of Creature types and various things that effect damage based on them Creatures now carry one or more types th...

Dev Blog #2 — Mobile UI DebuggingI've spent most of this stretch deeply embroiled in the mobile UI, and I want to be honest that a lot of it was unglamorous. Phones are an important home for the games, and a screen that looks fine at 1280px can be quietly unusable at 320px in a way you only find by sitting there with a small device and being annoyed by it. A few of the things that got fixed, because they're representative: The top bar was spending three rows and 158 pixels on four small readouts — Dao Power had somehow ended up stranded on a line entirely of its own. It's down to 112 pixels now, and it holds a single row all the way down to 280px wide. The bottom nav's expand caret went out, came back, and went back to the shape it had before, because the original was simply nicer to hit with a thumb. The combat log's label was eating most of the header on the beast-selection screen, so it's an icon there now. The battlefield picker is gone entirely — a dropdown you had to set before every fight, where the honest answer was always "whichever one suits my build". Fights roll their own terrain now, half of them on neutral ground. There's also a new opt-in compact fight selection for anyone who wants to pick a beast from its artwork instead of scrolling past a card apiece. Alongside the bugfixing I've kept adding content, and I've been trying hard to chase completeness and coverage rather than just piling on more. That's a different kind of work and it's the part I find most satisfying. The alchemy catalogue got rebuilt from the ground up onto a real matrix — there were pills at four different tiers doing the same thing, whole combinations of effects that nothing covered, and Qi restoration that didn't scale with your realm at all. Every element now has a pill raising its attack or resistance at least every other tier. Every origin now grants starting equipment. Every array plate and every talisman pattern can now be commissioned through sect crafting orders, where bef...