For the past 1.5 years, we’ve been working tirelessly on ONEiRA; a narrative-driven puzzle-platformer where your choices matter. It’s a very special project to us, so we wanted to take a moment to introduce ourselves and share with you why!

For starters, we’re Dream Matter Labs, a brand-new indie studio founded by a team of juniors!

Our entire team has firsthand experienced how impossible it is to break into the game industry nowadays. What was once a welcoming place filled with experimentation and unconventionality, has now shut its doors and become a place deprived of these very same qualities.

In 2024 alone, 14.600 people lost their jobs in the game industry as companies prioritized their short-term metrics and downsized their teams. As a result, the job market is now bursting at the seams with more and more people desperate for an opportunity.

Especially for juniors, breaking into the game industry has become an impossible feat as entry-level jobs have seemingly become a figment of the past. Because of that, we have concluded that the beaten path for us was one with a dead end, and that we needed to forge our own...

As a result, our dear Dream Matter Labs was born! Here, while we show the industry exactly what we can do, we're hard at work to make our dreams become our reality—and what better way to do that than by making an entire game about dreams!

Granted, ONEiRA wasn't created out of very deliberate, introspective decisions, but rather by chance during the LSDJam 2023. This event was like a love letter to LSD Dream Emulator and the very place where our team crossed paths and conceptualized ONEiRA.

As time went on, one thing led to another, and both the team and ONEiRA grew substantially. Following this, we now had the opportunity to really give this game the time and energy it deserved, and have it be our entry ticket into the game industry. Naturally... we took it!

Because of all this, we're writing this today. In a way, ONEiRA has since become an extension of ourselves and we try to put as much of ourselves into it as we can. Now, the most exciting part is that we are able to share it with you and have the chance to shape it alongside you.

After all, we want to make games for our players and place high importance on your perspectives and experiences. SO, If you;d like to follow and influence development up-close, join us on Discord! We'd love to chat with you and have you playtest ONEiRA as soon as possible.

Regardless, thank you all so much for your support! More soon...

Add to wishlist:

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Learn more:

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• Discord

Watch the developers play in a live stream of the Codename CURE II demo!

Hey everyone!

Say hi to the newest (and fluffiest) face of Hotdog Hustler — your loyal emotional support dog!
Whether you're grilling late into the night or just trying to survive another weird shift, your dog will always be there... curled up by the TV or chasing shadows outside the van.

I've been calling him Buddy. — but hey, he’s your dog.
Pick a name that means something to you. He’s not just a pet — he’s your last little piece of warmth in a world that sometimes forgets to care back.

More updates soon! Until then,

💛
— Hotdog Hustler Dev

Hey,

I'll be streaming the game today starting at 7PM UTC / 2200 Kiyv time. For an hour or more :)

Come join me on the game's Steam page.

1. Fixed an issue where the tutorial could not be completed properly

2. Fixed an issue where marker could appear in unreachable locations

3. Fixed various other known issues

small update to increase the player jump power very slightly. Should make some of the very difficult jumps slightly better to attempt.

Did some visual change to how the animation of the "Secondary Target" is displayed in the User Interface

Hello everyone,

today is, once again, Saturday.

As always I'd like to remind you that this ".5" blogs are focusing just on the lore of the game.
If you are not interested, come next week to discover a new enemy type!

With that out of the way, let's start!

Here in Italy, summer has slammed the closing doors of spring, and as such... it's damn hot outside!

That's the reason for the choice of this devblog, in which I'll tell you something about people that hate hot temperatures... Dwarves!





The roots of the dwarven people are cloaked in mystery.
The only surviving account of their ancient history comes from the Manual of Western Races, written by an anonymous monk of the Eastern Thunder Order:

• “Long ago, Dwarves were grotesque beings born deep beneath the earth, shaped from blood and mud by the will of a forgotten god. All they knew was battle.
  When that god vanished, leaving behind only strange remnants scattered across the world, the Elves had already become a powerful and advanced race. Yet even they were caught off guard by the relentless advance of a mysterious bearded folk, who began landing on their shores shortly after the god's disappearance.”

Sadly, elven records were lost to time, and this passage is all that the greatest scholars of the East have managed to recover from the few surviving documents spared by the Living Hell.


Before the rise of Skal the Immortal, the dwarves lived in isolated mountain clans.
Each clan ruled its own mountain, and serious conflict only broke out in the gravest of disputes.

Everything changed when a young dwarf, whose name would one day become legend, discovered an ancient arcane tome at the base of Mount Sumnia.

Some believe this book predates even the formation of dwarven civilization, written when they were still muddy, shapeless creatures, but no one knows for sure.
Skal has never allowed a single soul, not even his own offspring, to lay eyes on it.

What is known is this: Skal grew older, fathered countless children with countless dwarf-women... and outlived them all.
Indeed, Skal has buried every one of his children, 24 generations of dwarves have come and gone.
That’s several millennia, by dwarven standards.

In time, Skal became something greater than a ruler.
He is now revered more than the ancient gods, those remembered and those long lost.
To all dwarves, he is the one true sovereign. Hence, the monarch of the Dwarven Skaldom.

He led his people beyond the mountains, founding thriving cities throughout the Coldlands and the Wallwoods.

It might sound like the tale of a wise and ageless king.
And it is.
But that’s only part of the truth...


Skal exercises direct mental control over every dwarf in his realm.
Only a rare few manage to resist his influence, and those who do are hunted down like beasts.

Refugees speak of an overwhelming compulsion to return to their homeland, haunted by a single, obsessive thought before breaking free:
Serve Skal.


According to scholars who study mind control, Skal may be using an ancient elven spell, once described in texts now lost to the Living Hell.
Escaped dwarves, however, insist in saying the true source of his power is the book, Skal’s book.

According to them, it also... "suggests" to him ancient sacrificing rituals to extend his life.
(Some say that Skal kills his own offspring to live eternally, but it has never been witnessed.)

Interestingly, the mind control isn’t constant.
There are moments when his grip weakens, especially in two notable situations:


Skal is a passionate fan of high jump competitions.
For a dwarf, he is said to be exceptionally tall, and this might explain his unusual fascination with the sport.

Despite his incredible age, Skal always ranks first.
His score is in the thousands.

For perspective: each tournament grants the winner just one point.
And they’re held once per year.
Considering the average dwarf lives around 350 years... it’s practically impossible to reach such numbers, unless, of course, you’re Skal.

When a tournament is held, however, Skal control isn't as strong as the rest of the year, maybe because he is too busy focusing on the sport.


There exists a special group of dwarves who are almost entirely free from Skal’s mental hold:
the Beardserkers, elite dwarven warriors trained in the arcane art of teleportation (the only form of magic allowed in the Skaldom).

Every newborn is personally examined by Skal for signs of magical potential.
If any is detected, the child is taken from their family and sent to train in the Beardserkers’ Pines.

There, from the age of one, they undergo brutal daily training: plunging into icy waters, lifting impossible weights, and harmonizing with nature, all to master the teleportation art for warfare.

Dwarves are typically slow and sturdy.
Beardserkers are the exception.
They’re as fast as lightning (by dwarven standards), teleporting behind enemy lines to strike with lethal precision.

They also serve as Skal’s preferred invasion force, and also as collectors of debts.
(As Gnomia learned firsthand during the reign of King Shorty.)


For generations, the Dwarven Skaldom ruled the western lands under Skal’s iron mind.
That era ended with the sudden invasion of the Fishmen from the North.

The attack came without warning, not even Skal’s prophetic abilities foresaw it.
Caught unprepared, he was forced to redirect the full might of his armies northward, ultimately abandoning many vassal kingdoms.

The Miningdom of Coboldia and The Molearchy were lost.

Skal attempted to hold onto Gnomia, considered a strategically vital location, but, well... we all know how that ended.
(And if you don’t, go and read Devblog #2.5)

To this day, the Fishmen remain a real threat.
Though the borders are now stable, their strength lies in their diversity: each fishman is unique, with its own abilities and traits.
This makes it extremely difficult for Skal to devise a single, effective offensive strategy.


Still, war is no excuse to neglect the economy. Skal knows this well.

Dwarves are master artisans of Runesmithing and Stonecrafting.
Any respectable ruler hires dwarves when there’s stonework to be done.

Shorty, or rather, his aunt, might have a thing or two to say about that...
But I’ll let you uncover that story on your own directly in game!

That’s all for now
Have a nice day and may your jumps reach ever higher!

-Giuseppe

Dear Community,

After a few weeks of development on the new room concept, we'd like to share our current progress with you.

The overhaul of the Dungeon Editor, which was intended to significantly simplify dungeon design, is unfortunately not working as well as we had hoped. The usability doesn't feel good, and switching between the different modes (rooms and units) is very confusing. Therefore, we've stopped this development and tried to revisit the original problem:

Rooms are difficult to balance against each other in the current version, as the monsters and traps in one room can have too much of an impact on the others – this is mainly due to the dimensions and connection points of the rooms.

Without having to intervene too much in the existing system, we've decided to adapt a few rooms. This is primarily done by replacing railings with walls, which prevents traps and ranged enemies from working on parallel paths.

This allows us to balance the old rooms in the old room concept with flexible room sizes.

These points have been raised several times, and we want to change this situation with the next update. Every room placed in the dungeon must be equipped with a minimum number of defense points.

This means that the more rooms you want to use, the more spread out the maximum available defense points will have to be.

We received many ideas and comments on this point. We have decided that the defense points for the entire dungeon will be fixed by the player's level and will not change depending on the number of rooms used.

There will also be a change to rooms. In the future, rooms will already have the maximum possible defense points at level 1 – but each room will receive a maximum number of defense points that matches the available space. Room level upgrades will be slightly cheaper, and level upgrades unlock new default designs that can be customized for each room.

There have also been some discussions and comments on this topic in Discord. It feels wrong that players in a game like Tormentis have to stand in a corner for 20 seconds to fully heal. This isn't exciting to watch in replays, either. Therefore, we've decided to disable healing over time in the next update. At the same time, we'll significantly reduce potion cooldowns so they can be used more flexibly and limit the potions to a fixed amount that can be used in a dungeon.

We've developed 15 new rooms for the new room concept. Even if the new room concept isn't implemented as planned, we'd like to incorporate a few new rooms.

Even though we lost a bit of time with the new room concept and the editor overhaul, we've gotten some ideas for how we can incorporate an optional construction mode in the future, which should make placing rooms much easier.

As you read in our last Steam News, we want to expand Tormentis' functionality—not just revise and improve existing systems in the game.

We plan to release the new update in mid-July.

In game music added. Thanks to https://casperwhitehead.wixsite.com/pixeljuice-music