September 2025 Blog
Hey everyone, welcome to the very first monthly update for Subliminal!
If you’ve been following along on our Patreon, you know that development updates are nothing new for us. We’ve been sharing progress weekly with our supporters for nearly a year now! But this is our first chance to bring everyone else along on the journey, and we’re so excited to have you.
Each month, we’ll recap the biggest progress we’ve made, share a behind-the-scenes moment or two, and showcase something fresh with a rotating spotlight section that’s new every month. This month, we thought it would be more fitting to start by introducing the team properly. But first, let's catch up on where things stand with development!
Development Progress
September has been a big month for polish and refinement! After months of building, testing, and rebuilding, things are finally locking into place. Here are some of the highlights from the month:
Bug Fixes by the Dozen:
We fixed over 100 bugs in the past few weeks. Everything from tiny collision errors where the player would bump into an invisible wall, to physics issues that literally broke the game. There’s nothing too flashy about bug fixing, but they make the game feel infinitely smoother to play!
UI Polish & Controls:
Subliminal’s menus feel more responsive, and key binding options are now supported. We’ve also begun working on controller support, which is a big step in accessibility and preparing for future console releases!
Chase Sequences:
We locked in the final animations and soundtracks for some climactic chase sections. These are some of the most intense moments in Subliminal, and the music production has been particularly phenomenal and eerie. Big shout out to the animation and music teams for this work!
Puzzles, Paths, and Endings:
Many in-game puzzles have been rebalanced for better pacing; they should be challenging but a bit more intuitive. We also added a few more paths to explore, some hidden detours where collectibles may await you! Gather them all, and you may uncover secrets.
Optimization Push:
One of our biggest focuses this month has been on making the game run smoothly on a wide range of hardware. We’ve made huge progress for players on NVIDIA 10-series cards (and similar), averaging around 50 FPS with all of Subliminal’s beautiful visuals still intact. Add in some global optimizations, and we saw a 10-15 FPS boost across the board. We’re still hard at work here, and we’ll have more accurate data to share after we get to a wider range of playtesting devices.
Waterworks Revisions:
The Waterworks area, already one of our largest environments, has been expanded with new interactions, improved visual water effects, and story details.
Bit by bit, Subliminal is transforming into a polished and cohesive experience!
Behind the Scenes: Wrestling with Lighting
This month, one of the trickiest problems we encountered had to do with lighting. If you’ve ever played a horror game, you know how important light and shadows are to the atmosphere. In Unreal Engine 5, we use Lumen, a powerful system that simulates global illumination in real-time. Most of the time, it’s incredible, but it has one quirk that nearly broke some of our darker sequences and environments.
Whenever a light is switched off, instead of snapping instantly to black, Lumen fades the scene out over a second or two. Technically, this makes sense (it’s how the engine saves performance), but when you have a lot of scenes in-game where lighting is supposed to snap off immediately, it can break the immersion. Imagine flicking off a light in your basement, and instead of instant darkness, everything slowly dimmed like someone was lowering a dimmer switch. It just didn’t feel quite right.
After lots of experimenting, and a lot of frustration, we found a solution. Right before a light is turned off, by temporarily tweaking how many frames Lumen references to calculate lighting, adjusting sample counts, and rebalancing the anti-aliasing, we force a much snappier transition without tanking performance. It’s not quite perfect yet, but it’s close, and it makes certain moments in-game hit the way they’re supposed to.
It’s the kind of fix that most players wouldn’t notice, but that’s the point! Horror lives in the details.
Spotlight: Meet the Team
Since this is our first monthly update, it felt right to use this spotlight section to introduce ourselves.
Accidental Studios is a team of about 25 people spread across nearly every continent, working together fully remotely. That means our Discord is alive at all hours with late-night calls, frantic messages, and “good morning” messages that double as “good night” depending on where you are in the world. Most of us aren’t working full time on Subliminal (yet). We’re students, professionals, and everything in between, with jobs, responsibilities, and a life while finding hours to pour into development.
What ties us together? We’re all, without exception, night owls with terrible sleep schedules. Our three core developers in particular are basically vampires at this point. If something gets fixed at 4 AM, there’s a good chance it was one of them. Though they all hate coffee, it sometimes becomes a necessity given the nature of their work habits!
But for all of the chaos, we share one thing in common: we love Subliminal. Every meeting, every test build, every frantic last-minute fix before someone has to go to their day job is fueled by a genuine passion for making games that inspire people. We want to create hyper-realistic experiences that don’t just look good, but make you think and feel in ways that games rarely get the chance to do.
Of course, it’s not all glamorous by any means. Sometimes it’s… well, pure chaos.
For the entirety of development until just recently, one of our in-game characters, Walter the Balloon, had its physics settings set incorrectly. Instead of being light and airy, the poor thing weighed a whopping 50 metric tons. We’re not exaggerating either. The balloon obliterated any physics object it touched, and we didn’t know why! (Don’t worry, physics objects in the game are much safer now. Mostly.)
It’s things like those unexpected bugs, the “did you mean to do this?” screenshots, and the endless debate over whether to tweak one tiny detail, that remind us all why we love working together. And we’re incredibly grateful that you’ve all given us the opportunity to do so.
Additionally, this month, we wanted to hand the mic to one of our environment artists, who helps bring the eerie, surreal scenes of Subliminal to life. Here’s Lucas:
”Hey, my name’s Lucas Miner and I’m the Lead Environment Artist at Subliminal. I’m 26 and from Argentina. When I was around 19–20, I started working as a graphic designer for a local business, and after about 4–5 years that path eventually led me into 3D. I began teaching myself through YouTube videos and forums, mainly about Blender and Substance Painter, and eventually decided to give freelancing on Fiverr a shot. After a while, by chance, Sven reached out to me through Fiverr — I made a couple of models for Subliminal, and since he liked my work, he decided to bring me on full-time. To sum it up, after about 3 years and a lot of hard work, here we are, still going strong and bringing to life an amazing project filled with talented and ambitious people. I can’t wait for you all to see the final result. Shoutout to all the Subliminal followers!”
Lucas’s story is just one example of how Subliminal has come together: a mixture of chance encounters, late-night passion projects, and people who never really planned to be here, but can’t imagine being anywhere else now.
Looking Ahead
Finally, the finish line for Episode 1 is in sight. In the weeks ahead, we’ll be:
Finalizing optimizations for lower-end hardware.
Wrapping up the last of our 2D art and ending animations.
Opening playtesting applications for Patreon supporters (around 20 slots across different PC specs).
These last few months of 2025 will be both incredibly exciting and unimaginably terrifying… but mostly exciting, we hope!
Closing Note
That’s all for September’s update! Thank you for joining us on this new monthly format. We want these posts to feel less like patch notes and more like a conversation, a chance to take you into the world of development and share the highs and lows of making Subliminal.
If you’d like even more frequent progress updates, our Patreon supporters get weekly dev logs, usually with footage and breakdowns that we rarely post elsewhere. Otherwise, we’ll be back next month with another deep dive, and maybe even some looks at playtesting.
Until then, thank you for reading, thank you for following, and most of all, thank you for being patient with us as we continue to make Subliminal the best it can be.
– The Accidental Studios Team
