Happy Holidays! – 2025 In Review

Happy Holidays from the Thunder Lotus family!

Hey everyone!

2025 was a really quick rollercoaster and I hope you enjoyed the ride!
Thank you so much for being part of our lovely family and for supporting us, whether it’s by reading our shenanigans, playing our games, making art, or interacting with us and the rest of our community, your involvement fuels our passion to keep creating better experiences!

As per tradition, join us in reminiscing all that happened during the year!

A lot has happened, so grab yourself a hot beverage, wrap yourself in some blankets and let’s dig in!

Start of 2025 – Winter

The year started off fast with us announcing 33 Immortals’ last Beta before its eventual release!

33 Immortals’ last Beta

While it was fairly short, behind the scenes, it gave us the confidence we needed to greenlight the project’s upcoming release date, find most of the last hiccups we had missed and tweak the game’s experience one last time before release.

Our community’s support really helped us nail that final stretch, and we’re super grateful for the help!

33 Immortals’ Inferno Notes of Inquiry – Art Booklet

In preparation for the game’s launch, we created an art booklet of the game for our newsletter subscribers, where you can read about the realm of Inferno and its infernal minions! There’s also a bunch of tips & tricks from our favorite poet Dante. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can do so by subscribing to our newsletter 😉

33 Immortals’ Launch Date

With the wonderful help of our partners at Microsoft and ID@XBOX, during their IGN February Showcase, we announced our game’s release date : March 18th 2025.

We really couldn’t believe that the day was approaching, only a couple of weeks left, and the game would be finally out!

More frequent livestreams

As an initiative to be more transparent and present with the community that helped make this game a reality, we started streaming more and more. We started streaming mostly for special occasions (i.e. betas, announcements), but started to build up steam by streaming once every two weeks on a consistent schedule.

We’ve been streaming Wednesdays at 11AM (Eastern Standard Time) on our Twitch account. We kept this schedule for most of the year, with the occasional delay, be it to handle vacations, sickness, or to line up with an announcement. While our setup still isn’t perfect (I’m fully blaming OBS on this one), I’m pretty happy with all the amazing time we’ve spent playing with you all, talking about our game and finally meeting our community where they are: inside our game!

Having released a slew of singleplayer titles before, it was really amazing to finally get the chance to play with a community directly, in real time! So thanks for showing up and hanging out with our shenanigans 💖

Beta Recap

It wouldn’t be a Beta without a recap!

During the Early Access, whenever we hosted a Beta, we figured we would do an internal recap of all the fun findings and player data we’ve collected over the course of the playtest. We were pretty happy with these specific data points, so we figured we would share them with you directly, since they are, well, your collective accomplishments!

Alpha & Beta Rewards

In lieu of the slew of Alphas and Betas we hosted throughout the Early Access, we decided to reward those that participated in those playtests with their own in-game reward.

If you see someone with either of these halos, it means they’re some dope people who helped us out while we were still creating the game, so please thank them for their service! 🫡

Immortals Day (March 3rd [3/3/2025])

With the release now at our doorstep, a community member, corgiduo, took it upon themselves to celebrate 33 Immortals in style with Immortals Day (March 3rd… 3/3/2025).

They created an art piece, a collage if you will, of 33 individual art pieces from 33 individual members of our Discord community. Thanks again to everyone who participated!

I’m honestly uncertain how we can top it next year, but your efforts have been appreciated and framed in our office!

First roadmap

Right before the release, we revealed what our early access schedule was going look like… while not knowing what an early access would feel like.

We aimed for a lot of content in each quarter of the year, back to back to back which, as we will see, did not pan out 😅

Spring

(Well, technically, Two days before Spring, but whatever)

33 Immortals Launch

Our game finally released! Woohoo! 🥳🎉🎊

This release came in a myriad of events, starting with a release livestream, playing with you all and celebrating with the dev team! Hearing our dev team shout at the top of their lungs and raiding our streaming setup with champagne was not on my bucketlist, but it was an experience I’ll remember for years to come!

Launch contest – Race to Immortality

With the release came a creator event: Race to Immortality

In this event, we asked creators, their audience and our audience to play 33 Immortals with special capes to earn points for their favorite team, and the first team that reaches 1 million points won the chance to be immortalised inside our game as well as unlockable rewards throughout the challenge, which were obtained by watching the creators.

We had three teams competing, each with their own unique cape: Team Lazurite, Team Amethyst and Team Sardonyx.

Little did we know, Team Lazurite would blow everyone out of the water by reaching the maximum amount of points in less than 4 days in a 7-day event 😅

Twitch Drops

Alongside the Race to Immortality, Twitch streamers were also able to give non-Race to Immortality Twitch Drops to their audience.

This Twitch Drop event only lasted a month, but we were especially proud of the reception (and of the very funny Dante Pog emote) !

Team Lazurite win

After not even half the event was over, Team Lazurite grouped together and blitz through the cap of 1,000,000 Stardust in record time!

Shoutout to Matara Kan, Michimochievee, Limealicious, Bricky, and their community, crushing the competition and becoming our Race to Immortality winners!

However, their rewards (legendary weapon skin and altar) would come at a later date.

April Fool’s – Community Contest – Race to Immeowtality

Who doesn’t like a good April’s Fools joke!

To celebrate the festivities, we teamed up with the dev team to create the Race to Immeowtality, a cats-versus-dogs event, where players would need to equip either a cat or a dog and play through 33 Immortals to collect Stardust for their favorite pet, with a Legendary Pet skin on the line – the most points at the end of the event wins!

Unsurprising, cats won by a landslide, but we’re really happy with the reception to our totally-not-an-aprils-fool-joke event!

Early Access 1-month recap

Once the 30 days had passed, we decided to look back and recap the events of the start of 33 Immortals‘ Early Access launch, as per tradition.

A lot has happened in a very short while, so we took some time to breathe before heading into our next release cycle.

Summer

Unfortunately, time wasn’t on our side and this marathon had us a bit more exhausted than we had expected, thus taking a bit longer than we would’ve hoped to release our game’s first update.

33 Immortals – Update 1: Xbox One

Porting a game is never easy, and takes a lot of time to do right. To ensure the game is as stable as possible on every platform, there’s a LOT to be done and this meant we weren’t able to advance as fast as we had initially expected. Due to the uncertainty of publishing on a different platform, we hosted a playtest at the end of May and publishing the build a week later once everything was confirmed to be working.

Now, with the Xbox One build being released, we could rejoice that our game was fully online, on each of our release platforms! 🥳 All that was left to do is finish the rest of the game 🏃🏻‍♂️💨

But first…

At Fate’s End reveal

Summer Games Fest came around the corner with a fun surprising announcement: we’re also working on another game!

At Fate’s End, an action-adventure game where you fight the ones you love and your skill tree is your family tree, was announced at the start of June by our wonderful partners at ID@XBOX 💖

This game was developed by the same team that made our previous game Spiritfarer (and not the 33 Immortals team, no worries, we’re still finishing up 33 Immortals!). That said, we can’t wait to show more about the game, once we’re ready to share more 😎

At Fate’s End is coming to Steam, Epic, Xbox and PlayStation in 2026, so please wishlist us if you haven’t already!

33 Immortals Update #2 – New Combat Controls & Quality of Life

July rolled around and so did our first real update to 33 Immortals: a bunch of Quality of Life updates!

Not the most sexy lineup of content, I must admit, but a lot of these changes were necessary and a lot of them came directly from the feedback we received from our community, denoting our commitment to making our game with our community, not just for them. 💖

First step in the right direction, and more to come!

New initiative by Alison: Dev Diaries

My wonderful colleague Alison started her own initiative: Dev Diaries. Blogs where we go behind-the-scenes and discuss what’s happening with production, some reasoning behind where we’re going and tease what’s to come.

Community Contest – Lucido Hunting Party

It had been a bit since our last event, so, with the addition of a brand new Elite Lucido enemy, we unveiled the Lucido Hunting Party, an event where we invite members of our community to pull together and slay all these little critters from the Beyond.

At Fate’s End – The Hemlock Family Tree – Art Booklet

With the success of our previous booklet, we decided to also create a little something for our At Fate’s End newsletter subscribers: The Hemlock Family Tree, an art booklet of all the characters from the notorious Hemlock family and also the main cast of our game.

Curious to know more about the Hemlock family? You’ll have to subscribe to our newsletter! 😎

Gamescom – Two games!

We were invited by ID@XBOX to participate at Gamescom with both of our games!

We started with At Fate’s End, with some gameplay footage of the game, showcased by the game’s creative director: Nicolas Guérin.

Then, we released a trailer for 33 Immortals’ next update: Update 3

It wasn’t my first time doing voice work, but it still feels weird to hear my voice in an official trailer 🤣

Dev Diary #2

Alongside the update, Alison also released her second Dev Diary, talking about Update 3.

33 Immortals – Update #3 – Rewards!

Update 3 brought a couple of long-overdue rewards, starting with the Altar of Immortality.

This Altar of Immortality commemorates Team Lazurite‘s victory in the Race to Immortality, and can be found in-game in the southeast section of Dark Woods.

Alongside this reward, we released the Legendary Immeowtality Pet skin…

…and the Lucido Hunting Party reward skin!

You can grab redeem either of them using these codes:

Legendary Cat: 8216-3397

Lucido: 8210-9972

Gwen plushie

We also unveiled our next Spiritfarer plushie: Gwen!

She was only available to order for a limited time (sold out, sorry!), but she should be arriving at the start of 2026, so if you ordered one, you should be receiving updates soon~ish from wonderful partners at Youtooz!

Fall

Dev Diary #3 – Server Update

At the start of Fall, Alison released her 3rd Dev Diary, as we worked on our next update.

It contained some unfortunate news regarding 33 Immortals‘ EU server. It gave a lot more context than I could ever do in one of these, so I’ll let you read it for yourself, but, with now a handful of months of hindsight, we do believe it was the right decision to take to maximize the gameplay experience of everyone, at the unfortunate cost of ping.

10 years of Jotun

The end of September marked the 10th anniversary of our first game: Jotun.

We decided we had to celebrate this momentous occasion by walking down memory lane. Alison and I were joined by a slew of my colleagues who worked on one, a few or all the games we’ve published, starting with our Jotun’s creative director (and CEO), Will Dubé. It ended up lasting way longer than we anticipated as my colleagues and I had… lots of stories from the old days of Sundered and Spiritfarer, as one would expect having worked at one place for so long 😅

We had a bunch of gifts that we gave away to those who participated in chat, which should be arriving soon… 🤔 Blame the Canada Post strike 😅

Business podcast

Speaking of our CEO, he participated in a podcast about startups and making games. If you are an aspiring game developer, I highly recommend you to check it out!

GameConf

On a more personal note, I received the wonderful opportunity to discuss my work on newsletters to my game developer peers in Angoulême, France. It was my first time giving a talk, so I had no idea what to expect, but had a blast and my talk’s reception was very positive, which I couldn’t be happier about! 🥳

33 Immortals – Update #4 – Pride & Temperance

Our first major update to 33 Immortals came out with two brand new weapons!

While they were not on our initial roadmap, after receiving lots and lots of feedback from everyone, we realised that we needed to pivot our game’s development to better represent the reality of making a game like 33 Immortals, more on that later.

Dev Diary #4 + Devlog #1

Alison’s back with another dev diary, and her first devlog? 😮

Can watch it here:

We’ll definitely do more of these in the future, if time permits it 😅

New Roadmap

With the Pride & Temperance Update, it became clearer and clearer that our roadmap was becoming out of date. With the reality of what Early Access actually entails dawning on us, we made the hard, but logical decision to move back the release of Paradiso to 2026 as part of our 1.0 campaign, to leave space for fun content you’ve been asking for, such as New Weapons, as well as giving the polish Purgatorio needs before release.

You can check out the new roadmap in much better quality here.

Community Event – Prideful Plays

Big update means big event, say hello to Prideful Plays

We hosted a community submission contest, where we asked our players to show off their best moves, make us laugh or cry by submitting their pride and joy, in whatever format they wished.

The contest lasted a couple of weeks and culminated in a livestream where we went over all the player submissions we enjoyed the most, but more on that later.

Race to Immortality Rewards – Team Lazurite Weapons

As promised at the start of the Early Access, Team Lazurite‘s Legendary Weapon Skins were released!

You can unlock each of these wonderful skins by using the codes below:

Bricky‘s Sword of Justice skin “Appraisal”: 9170-4686
Limealicious‘ Daggers of Greed skin “Blades of Laimu”: 0555-7032
Matara Kan‘s Bow of Hope skin “Matara Bow”: 0799-4941
Michi Mochievee‘s Staff of Sloth skin “Rod of Scambers”: 7048-1174

Or unlock all of them with this one: 8581-1848

Halloween – Pumpkin pet for you!

We celebrated Halloween in Dark Woods with a new familiar!

You can unlock our wonderful friend Zucca by using the in-game code: 3666-8058

MIGS

For the first time ever, we sponsored a corporate event!

For those who don’t know, MIGS (Montreal International Game Summit) is a two-day conference in Montréal, Canada (where we live / work 👀) where developers from around the world come to learn about game development & publishing, discuss expertise and develop connections.

We hosted our own booth to discuss with developers about our experience, how we came to be and where we’re going.

As a sponsor, we helped four upcoming titles by giving them a booth space to showcase their demo to the public and other developers. These games had great demos, so I highly recommend you go check them out & wishlist their game:

• Almanach: Of Empires and Sorcery from Foretold Entertainment
• CitaDrill from Studio Moka
• Croak from WoodRunner Games
• Isles of Krom from Floppy Goat Inc.

We also gave a couple of conferences: our CEO, Will Dubé, was part of a panel on company growth, and our wonderful programmer, Yona Montineri, gave a talk on rollback netcode.

We decided to make our team shine by providing all of us with very pink hoodies, which made us stand out quite a bit during the event.

Not everyone was available for the picture, so some of our colleagues decided to draw themselves in! We honestly all had a blast meeting fans of our game and our peers in this wonderful industry!

End of 2025

We are ending the year in style with some celebrations to our dev team, our community (that’s you!) and to the things that helped us persevere throughout this very dense and compact years: a slew of amazing games.

Prideful Plays: The TLG Awards

To celebrate the ending of our event, Prideful Plays, we decided to showcase our most standout submissions from our community in a for-fun awards show, showcasing the best drawing, 3d models, music videos, memes and more!

But that’s not all, we also announced the 1st and 2nd place winners of the Prideful Plays!

As voted by a large portion of our community, Snowifer and their 33 Immortals-inspired Glitter Shakers were crowned the winner of the Prideful Plays Community Vote!

As for the most Prideful Play, the crown went to NOOB OF DA YEAR.

In a mutual decision by both our Creative Director and our Art Director, their astounding coordination to defeat the secret penitence chamber in Purgatorio in less than 30 seconds, while the Holy Fire of the Ascension Battle was active. This feat of coordination, ingenuity and pride made them the clear winner of the competition.

Congratulations to both of them, we couldn’t be happier of the reception of the event and everyone’s participation. Thanks for all your submissions and thank you for enjoying our game! It really means a lot to us 🫂💖

Christmas Gift

We’re not all Christians, but that doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy a good cheer!

Enjoy this gift from the Dev team to you!

You can redeem these cute holiday rewards by using the code 8701-3125

As with all the other cosmetics we unveiled, you can unlock it in 33 Immortals‘ Main Menu > Options > Gift icon (Redeem options). Just paste (or write) the code and click apply! The cosmetics will be added to your Wardrobe with Charon!

Games We Loved 2025

As per tradition, we created a list of all the games we loved to play this year.

If you’re looking for things to play during your holidays, I highly recommend you to go check it out! There’s plenty of games that would’ve never been on my radar if not for my colleague’s wonderful recommendations!

Plans for 2026?

As we say goodbye to 2025 and hello to 2026, we ask ourselves: what’s on our agenda?

Lots. Just a LOT of things are happening next year. You thought 2025 was charged? 2026 will be one hell of a ride! At least, for us, most definitely! With all the updates planned for 33 Immortals, as well as its release to 1.0, there’s a lot of work ahead, and we can’t wait to showcase the culmination of many years of hard work by our very dedicated colleagues!

Oh and let’s not forget At Fate’s End! Aimed for 2026, we’ll be discussing more and more about this mysterious title. Being a narrative driven game about a mystery, I’ll be sure not to spoil too much about the story, but I can guarantee that you’ll be on another wonderful adventure by the team that brought you Spiritfarer 👀

If you’d like to stay up to date with our news as it unfolds, rather than in one go like this, consider subscribing to our mailing list!

That’s all for 2025!

We’re honestly eagerly awaiting all that’s happening next year, but… for now, we need rest! Thanks again for all the support, it really means a lot to us, and I do mean it!

Stay happy, stay healthy and please don’t forget to take care of yourself! Have a happy holiday season & a happy New Year!

See you in 2026!

Many hugs,
-Med and the Thunder Lotus team