An indie game based on Winsor McCay's groundbreaking comic strip.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
NEW Backer demo incoming soon! Plus, Post-GDEX report, and Cleveland Classics dates!
9 months ago
– Wed, Sep 10, 2025 at 02:28:38 PM
Hey Dreamers, Adrian here.
Recently, we released a new build to our high level backers. Since then, we've been testing the game both internally and externally, fixing the most egregious bugs and smoothing over a lot of the experience. There's still a couple of issues we want to iron out, but soon, all backers will receive an email with a link to a new backer-exclusive demo!
We're really excited for more of our supporters to get access to the game, as this build far better represents our vision of the complete experience more so than our previously released demos. Testing this will be an important step in pushing towards a new Steam demo and our long-awaited Early Access launch, so we can't wait to get it into your hands.
What to Expect
New Level - The City Rooftops
Nemo runs toward a red Momerath in our new City Rooftop level.
Our introductory stage, the City Rooftops, will be available to all of our backers for the first time! The beginning of his adventure has Nemo leaping from building to building, chasing down his bed in order to catch a ride to Slumberland.
Story Sequences
Nemo and Peony find his bed atop the city.
For the past couple of months, we've been perfecting NemoScript, a custom scripting language that among other things, allows anyone on the team to create cutscenes with little coding experience. NemoScript is even written to include some of Winsor McCay's comic idioms in the scripting language itself. Because of this, we've been able to include most of the cutscenes players will experience throughout the game's first three major sequences. This includes the first motion comic at the start of the game! While none of these sequences are finalized, backers will be able to experience the first parts of Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends' story for the first time!
Explore Nemo's House
Nemo standing in his dining room, with some familiar photos hanging on the wall!
After finishing the Night Sky level, players will be able to now also explore Nemo's House! This interstitial stage serves as the game's hub, where players must solve puzzles to access new worlds, while also being able to access the places they've previously visited. While they won't be accessible in this build, players will be able to access other features such as the kitchen, music player and more in the future!
Befuddle Hall Challenge Courses
Nemo runs toward danger in Befuddle Hall!
By searching around different levels and talking to new NPCs, players will gain access to the Befuddle Hall challenge courses. These bonus areas will test the player in various platforming, puzzle and combat challenges throughout the game. Please note this feature is still very early, but it will be a fundamental part of the game!
Fast Travel with Bosco & Mysto
Mysto will build Bosco Stations for Nemo to fast travel within the level!
For the first time, backers will be able to access Bosco Stations and fast travel around the Night Sky and Forest maps! Just give Mysto a small bit of your candy stash, and unlock the ability to move between Bosco stations. These will also serve as checkpoints for players who have lost all of their lives, returning them to the last Bosco Station visited.
And more!
In addition to these major upgrades, there have been changes made to level design, item progression, game feel and more to all areas of the game, including those from previous demos. We'll also be sending out a feedback and bug report form along with the build, so please be sure to let us know your thoughts there once you've had a chance to play the game!
GDEX 2025 Report
Once again, the team visited GDEX in Columbus, Ohio to meet with other regional developers and test the game. Along the way, we met with some of you in the backer community and were able to talk about the game. This was also an important opportunity for the team to jam on some new fixes and features, including adding our version of a "Chozo Statue" for when Nemo and friends find new upgrades, as well as level design and game feel tweaks.
The Nemo cabinet made a return to GDEX, now running on a Steam Deck (which ran the game beautifully!)
Chris, in the team's hotel room, using his hand as a reference as he draws an item-giving statue
Max editing the game in real time on our booth's mini-bed as people play the demo
We even fixed a pretty mean game save bug so that the overall experience can be a lot smoother. Chris also finally bought a boxed copy of the Little Nemo the Dream Master game for NES, which was an important part of everyone on the team learning about Little Nemo and Winsor McCay's art in the first place!
Cleveland Gaming Classic
We'll also be bringing the new build of the game to Cleveland Gaming Classic next weekend! If you live or will be in the Cleveland, Ohio region from September 19th to the 21st, come say hi to us at the show and play the game with the developers! And if you haven't yet, visit http://www.gamecleveland.com for tickets!
Conclusion
That's all for this update! If you haven't already, please be sure to wishlist Little Nemo and the Nightmare Fiends on our Steam page, and keep an eye on your email box for when the demo goes live! Again, there will be a feedback and bug report form alongside the build as well. Your feedback is important to us, so please be sure to fill it out when you've checked out the game!
Until next time, Dreamers!
~ Adrian
Message from King Morpheus: Get your pajamas ready - the latest testing demo is here!
10 months ago
– Sat, Aug 16, 2025 at 10:27:19 AM
This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.
Late July/Early August update: New demo for testing-tier backers, new cutscenes, refinements, and features!
10 months ago
– Wed, Aug 06, 2025 at 06:01:24 AM
Hello dear Dreamers!
Thank you for your patience with this month's update. We are in the process of finalizing a new backer demo that we will be rolling out in stages to everyone. The first backers who will see it in the next few days are those in the higher tiers that include game testing, then in the next few weeks, to everyone. All of this is building up to a season of festival submissions, and more important for you all, finally entering Steam Early Access!
To give you a sense of everything we've been working on, here are just a few new things you'll see and that we have been working on this month:
Nemo's house
This is a big one for us: previous demos included some levels that you can choose between, notably the Night Sky and Mushroom Forest. Since those are the most "camera ready" levels, we will still have those primarily included as the explorable Slumberland areas of the demo, but now instead of selecting them from a menu accessed by hopping into bed, you must solve puzzles between levels and access the levels from portals around the house. After consulting with some narrative designer friends of ours, we thought this would both keep the house an interesting part of the overall gameplay and be more narratively interesting than using the bed for absolutely everything.
Featured in the demo is an early version of a puzzle where Nemo has to collect seeds from plants around the house and put them into the proper place in the garden. We'll likely continue refining it as we go along. Please note that art for some of the puzzle areas is still being added, so folks interested in what games look like during development can enjoy looking at the in-progress artwork in the meantime.
The magic of game development!
Bosco quick travel
This is still in an early state, but we currently have an early working version of Bosco the Dragon as a quick travel system. First, you find the Slumberland court magician and civil engineer, Mysto, and she asks for a candy donation to fund building a platform in a location. Afterward, this platform can be a place that you can quick travel to (and eventually start the level from.) Mysto is a character that we included in art from the Kickstarter campaign, and are excited to get working in the project.
Mysto
Intro and cutscenes
Another big push the past few weeks has been bringing together the game intro and cutscenes to tie the whole game together. With these, you'll really be able to get a sense of Nemo and friends' world.
We don't want to spoil everything, but the world is imbued with much more story than before, and a sense of danger as you see the damage that nightmares are starting to do.
We've also refined the intro level on the city rooftops, which will be playable in the demo. Notably, it includes our version of Winsor McCay's walking bed comic from 1908, having players (and Peony) chase the bed through Nemo's town.
Line art for the bed napping on rooftops and being startled by Nemo when he approaches in the city rooftop chase sequence
One more thing...
That's just a bit of what we've been doing, but we want to let folks see things in the demo as we roll it out to the different tiers. But before we go, we wanted to share this awesome animatic for our upcoming trailer/animated intro to the game, by the awesome Studio StarCharm:
We're really excited about this one, and having yet another avenue to share more of the game's world.
That's it for now. Stay tuned for the incoming demo updates - within the next day or so for testing-tier backers, and later this month for everyone else.
Cheers and many thanks,
Chris and Team Nemo
June update! Game intro preview and a peek into the tech of the game
11 months ago
– Tue, Jul 01, 2025 at 08:39:07 AM
Hello dear Dreamers!
It's been a busy few months. We've just about fully assembled the first draft and skeleton of the main gameplay and different levels, but a big effort beyond that has been bringing it all together via the game's story. For this update, we wanted to share the intro to the game, which we will release to backers soon (first the higher-tier playtest backers then more generally) so you can experience it for yourselves.
Our goal above all else is to make it feel like a playable Winsor McCay comic, so we tried to bring together familiar story bits (it's all about the walking bed!), along with the tone and characterization for our heroes. Here's the preview of everything up through the beginning of the Night Sky level:
While it's 6 or so minutes of gameplay, this is the result of months of work, so we wanted to give you a peek into the different tools and systems making this run.
We've talked a little about this before, but to help drive the cutscenes and interaction in the game we put together a mini scripting language. You can can see these exact lines in the video above and can see the actors we refer to in these sequences. The animated sequences have been a combination of setting an actor's state (walking, jumping, etc) and driven by timeline animation.
The process of stitching all of this together is incredibly time consuming. Max in particular has been combining these in some pretty awesome ways, and really hitting it out of the park with these cinema sequences.
We've been working on the game into pretty late in development for a couple of key reasons: as a teaching experience (this part of the game teaches you how to play the rest), we need to figure out what we should teach players by setting up and playing all of the later levels. It's also where the resources used to make the cool stuff in the rest of the game come together to create a great experience in the first few minutes.
All of this is to say that a lot of the systems we're using to string together the beginning are also being used to connect scenes throughout the game, such as this example of how players will come and go from the challenge levels in Befuddle Hall:
That's it for now! We'll be reaching out soon with more info on those demos.
Cheers,
Chris and Team Nemo
May Update - Setting up the Story
about 1 year ago
– Tue, May 27, 2025 at 01:00:25 PM
Hey Dreamers! Adrian here.
May was a busy month for us over at Team Nemo! We've been toiling away at story sequences in our pre-existing levels, building more Befuddle Hall challenge levels that we mentioned in our previous update, adding new play mechanics and decorations to our Slumberland level, beginning to polish up the game's user interface, and so much more!
But over the past couple of weeks, we've been putting together a very important part of our game; the opening cutscenes. This is part of our push to start polishing up the beginning of the game for our next backer release which we'll have more information on soon!
Starting the Game
Part of our goal with the introduction is to build a sense of mystery and intrigue for Nemo's latest adventure, and we start our story set up with a conversation with two celestial figures, our homage to the introduction to the classic film 'It's a Wonderful Life'.
Speaking of influences, if other elements of our interpretation of Little Nemo's outer space looks familiar, there's a good reason for that! We also took some visual inspiration from Georges Méliès' 1902 film 'A Trip to the Moon' and John Craig's illustrations for the Smashing Pumpkins 1995 album 'Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness'.
A Trip to the Moon, Georges Méliès, 1902
Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness deluxe album cover art, John Craig
After asserting the increased number of nightmares children are having as being a threat, we then cut to our hero Nemo, caught in his own nightmare. We wanted to make sure our intro got players into the game relatively quickly, so this sequence will be entirely playable.
We've shown pieces of this Nightmare sequence in previous updates, but with Chris' awesome background art and assistance from designer Max Kunze, the sequence is now in a playable state!
There's still some additional polish to add, as well as a bit of dialogue and context for the sequence, and other surprises as well. Before we move on to the next section, however, let's highlight some of the background elements that we're put together by Chris!
The creepy nightmare eyeballs that watch Nemo as he explores the Nightmare!
A mysterious figure appears in the distance! Who could it be?
A Quick Slumberland Update
While we're patching together the opening to the game, we still want to make sure we're working on new areas of the game as well. Which is why Max has been hard at work on new mechanics, hazards and biomes that you'll see in Slumberland toward the end of act 1 of our game as well!
At one point, Nemo and his party will have to explore the Barracks, a dangerous part of Slumberland where that is well defended by the (perhaps overzealous) Slumberland guard. This early look showcases a work in progress where Nemo must contend with said guards dropping heavy weights on all who try to slip past them!
Max has also spent some time reworking the overall map of Slumberland, adding new twists and variety to each biome. Here's a look at the new layout for Slumberland's Kitchen area, which will also feature its own unique mechanics and hazards!
The Slumberland Kitchens, divided by two central skyway bridges
Finally, we're working on locked doors that can only be unlocked by hitting switches and solving puzzles with one of the four playable characters in our game, starting with the Princess, who players will get access to for the first time in Slumberland. Here are some concepts drawn up by Chris of some of the switches you may come across:
Conclusion
This is only a small showcase of all of the progress we made this month! Our goal for June is to continue to polish up the game's introduction, adding new mechanics such as the game's shop for buying abilities, upgrades and collectables, polishing our cutscene UI and getting every story sequence from the beginning through to our game's second level. From there, we plan to have a fully featured release for backers very soon, and to have regular updates to those playable builds on a consistent basis from that point. So stay tuned to this space for all this and more in the coming weeks!
