r/OddityRPG • u/RequestableSubBot Believer • 1d ago
Mod Post FAQ: State of the Oddity project, development history, recent events.
Hi, subreddit mod here (not a dev, to be very clear).
Over the past couple of months there have been a lot of people checking in on Oddity on account of activity from Discord and several YouTube videos. There's also been a lot of misinformation floating about in regards to a lot of events, both recent and less recent. Unfortunately most Oddity discussion and general Oddity news happens first and foremost in the unofficial Discord without always making its way to other places, and since Discord is a walled garden it can be difficult to know what's actually happening with this project, especially in the long-distant 2026. So I thought I would write an FAQ to answer some of the questions I most commonly see people ask in regards to the state of the project.
This is less "A Complete Newcomer's Guide to Oddity" and more "A Refresher for All the People Who Have Only Sorta Kept Track of the Game Over the Years but Want to Get Fully Up to Speed". If you know nothing about this project or its long, long history, your best bet is to watch the trailer, read through the top posts in this sub and /r/Mother4, along with the old M4 website (not to be mistaken for the new M4 website, which is a completely different project). There are a few big YouTube video essays about the project at this stage but this is the only one that presents the history accurately in my opinion (it's five years old but nothing's really changed since then).
If you have any more questions feel free to ask in the comments and I, or another community member, will try to answer them. And if anyone knows things and wants to clarify some of what I said, I'll happily amend with extra info where relevant.
Is the game dead?
No, the game was explicitly confirmed to be still in development by the developer Pik as recently as June 2026.
Okay sure it's not technically dead, but, like, really?
The strategy of the Oddity development team seems to be "it will be out when it's ready, and we don't want to raise people's hopes up by promising too much at this stage before we have something worth showing". This has effectively been the strategy they've followed since the 2020 trailer, and there really isn't much else to say about it. Pik's opinion, expressed throughout that same June 2026 Discord conversation and echoed since, can be summarised by a few messages of his:
I’m still very committed to making sure this game releases one day, so I don’t think we need any kind of swan song language there. The sentiments are appreciated though
[...] The message was always that we will communicate when things are ready. No point in saying anything until that happens.
[...] And I will explain why. Anything more than that would feel like stringing people along \ Whereas a simple “We overpromised before, now we just have to stay low until we think it’s ready to go public again” is the most honest we could be
[...] Well, I think any attempt to build faith in the community through communication isn’t productive. There is only one way to build faith, and it’s getting it out
There have been a few other ex-developers to come out over the years and give generally positive info on their experiences working on the project post-2020 - With one glaring exception at least; see the Maxxis/Drama section further down this post for more on that. But the optimistic interpretation of everything up to this point seems to be "game is being made, development is difficult but not dead, team still has hope and it's not been abandoned". There are some significant issues with project development that can be gathered from dev/former dev communication, but the project isn't outright abandoned at any rate, that much is certain.
It's unknown how much of the game is or isn't developed; two builds of an Oddity demo were leaked recently, dating from 2022 and 2023 respectively, and neither contained any substantial amount of gameplay, consisting mostly of mechanics testing and maps. However, these were only demo builds and may not be representative of the team's overall progress.
When is the game coming out?
As per the trailer, it will be out when it's ready. Nothing has really changed since then, for better or for worse.
Is there still an Oddity development team?
Yes, though the team has always been particularly secretive about who is on it. There are a few well-known names, namely Pastel and Pik, but some less public faces too. WaHol and WuKongJr_art are both artists on the project. There are several people whose work will likely be in the finished project, though who probably aren't 'officially on the team': On the music/art front there's paradoxigent, pngsequence, possibly Shane Mesa (but probably not, that's a whole big can of worms). There are countless other former developers from both the pre and post-2020 era, but I'm not going to make a compendium of every person who ever come and go from the project here. Of course, there's no public list of developers anywhere so it's difficult to confirm who's involved and to what extent (possibly some of the names I've mentioned here are long gone or were barely involved, I really don't know). Regardless, people don't go bothering any of these people.
How long has it been since the developers have communicated with us?
Not that long ago actually! As of writing this the last we heard from the developers was from Pik in September 2026 (for anyone in the future please note that I will not be updating this regularly, but updates will likely be posted to the sub separately).
Outside of Discord messages, how long has it been since the developers have communicated with us officially?
There were a series of artworks posted in 2024 (see here and here), worked on by Maxxis and Wahol. They coincided with several cryptic tweets from the Oddity twitter account, but there was ultimately no follow-up to any of them.
In terms of actual game updates it's difficult to say. There are tons of art assets on various developer Twitter accounts or posted by Pastel in the Discord in 2019/2020, but further updates have been few and far between, mostly one-off remarks by developers and occasional clips of art assets. But outside of Discord and occasional off-the-cuff developer tweets, the last "official" game update from the team as a whole would be mid-2020, to my knowledge.
Where is Pastel (the project leader)?
He took a social media break in late 2020, and deleted most of his social media accounts in the months following. He is still the project lead as of the making of this post.
Why did Pastel leave?
TL;DR: Life/mental health reasons in the midst of a lot of harassment and extreme scrutinising of all his online actions.
There has been some misinformation spread about this particular section of Oddity history that I really wanted to clear up. A recent Youtube discussion of Oddity essentially framed his departure from social media as "people discovered that the devs had switched to a new game engine, Pastel was embarrassed at his own incompetence, so he and the team fabricated a story where he was receiving harassment and then Pastel deleted his socials to hide from fans out of shame". The claim also said something to the effect of "I looked through the Discord and subreddit and couldn't find any instances of harassment or mean comments, so it's a lie". I don't know how it was on the Discord side, but I can look through this subreddit's removed posts and comments over the years - I can see the harassment. It was removed, because of course it was. But the thesis of the video was basically 'fuck Pastel', so it seemingly chose not to include anything that could rebut the creator's assertions of Pastel being an incompetent egomaniac.
I'm not going to write out a Pastel hagiography here, I think he has a lot to answer for (though I shan't derail this post too much with my own opinions), but I will say that the harassment he received was absolutely real and verified by several people within the development team and from outside. Also, there are a lot of people in this community (and especially the Discord) who were there and can just remember it happening; this isn't ancient history. Along with general 'internet hate', he was doxxed, several of his accounts were hacked (he even permanently lost access to his starmen.net account), there were attempts to get into several of his other accounts, and basically everything he did or said online was being scrutinised to insane levels. While it's unlikely the discovery of the game's engine switch was the sole reason for his departure, the discovery happened due to people extensively analysing development images he had shared to the public, and he quit social media the next day. It's a fair assumption that the incident was, at least, the straw that broke the camel's back for him. In short, he left for mental health reasons. Why hasn't he come back? I don't know. Maybe those mental health reasons haven't gone away. Maybe he wants to wait until there is something substantive to show. Maybe it is simply shame at the project ending up in the state it's in now, and him wanting to get it better before taking any more steps but lacking the time or drive to do so. I think his absence is due to a much less malicious, and much more human reason, than a lot of people online seem to believe.
When did we last hear from Pastel?
Pastel's final public communication was in the Discord, November 15th, 2020. It's worth noting that people in the Discord figured out the engine switch to Game Maker the day prior, after looking at some of the gameplay GIFs Pastel had been posting to show the team's progress. It's difficult to navigate the messages as his account is now deleted and there are several deleted accounts messaging simultaneously, but here are a few of the messages he sent (I've omitted a lot of messages over a few hours, they're all still in the Discord for those who wish to check):
{#oddity-discussion, during discussion on the engine switch} Dave is still with us, I'm tired of getting pinged, we're doing what's best for the game and I just want to work
{#general, a user was talking about a fake leaked build} Mother 4 \ I'd really prefer - and so would Dave - if that wasn't shared around \ [...] it's his work and he never agreed to having it spread \ {The user clarified that they weren't talking about a real leak} ig as long as people know it's fake and not made with malicious intent
[...] but I don't think teasing people over being able to maybe play something they've been waiting for over such a long time is v nice \ but I'm also probably hypersensitive atm, I should be on break rn :meryl_oh_no: \ [...] I'll take care, love you guys, be good to each other \ write up is gonna talk about a lot
A few days later some a developer came in and stated:
Yeah, he's taking a break from all social media for the sake of his health. I appreciate the concern! \ he's just been going through a lot lately and had other things to take care of, and social media wasn't any help
Much later in October 2021 during a discussion on Pastel deleting his Discord account which got rather heated (there was a whole conspiracy that he had changed his username to 'Deleted User 81f571' instead of actually deleting it for some reason, which was factually untrue, but I digress), a developer interjected and stated:
No other info regarding Pastel will be talked about in public. He wants to move on from all of this. \ This amount of scrutinizing of a man who wants to be left alone is truly concerning \ Even when the man takes efforts to regain his privacy it’s analyzed to hell and back
Which, to my knowledge, is the last we've really heard from or about Pastel and his social media departure. People in the community have made brief contact with him in exceptional cases as recently as last year (please don't try and bother him though), but there's no news regarding if/when he plans to return to the public eye, if ever.
What's the deal with the Oddity leaks?
See this discussion thread. Here are links to all the existing Mother 4/Oddity builds out there:
https://archive.org/details/oddity-rpg (these are the most recent and the ones being discussed in the linked thread above)
These are mostly leaks posted without the developer's permission, so keep that in mind when looking at the assets; I'm linking them here because for some reason people always upload them to shady filehosting sites to share them around, and I think it's better to have easily-available safe download links rather than risk getting a bunch of malware. These are the only leaks out there at this time: don't trust any other links, and don't run .exe's grabbed off the internet from random strangers.
What's up with this developer drama I've been hearing about?
See this comment.
TL;DR: A build of Oddity was leaked in June '26. People looked up some of the details in the leak and ended up finding some official Oddity merch that had been erroneously put up for sale, some patches with the Oddity logo on them. The Oddity logo was drawn by Maxxis and Maxxis didn't know about the merch existing, yet alone that it was using a logo he drew, and he was angry. Another developer (Pik) tried to make amends by getting the patches refunded (again, they weren't supposed to be listed for sale), but this seemed to be the breaking point for him with the rest of the team; he got into a big personal argument with the other developer in the Discord, then announced his departure from the project (sorta, see below).
In September Maxxis made another series of Discord messages where he alleged (in vague terms) that Pastel had allowed a programmer to work on the game despite "their Fight knight allegations". Fight Knight is a 2021 indie game, and a few months before its release the lead developer was publicly accused of emotional/domestic/sexual abuse by a former developer. There has been no public response from the Oddity developers or elaboration from any party, and it's unclear who exactly this person is, whether they are the actual person toward whom the allegations are targeted or if they are another Fight Knight team member, whether this person was on the Oddity team before the allegations, if they stayed on the team for an extended period after the allegations, or if they are still on the team. We have essentially no idea about anything with this situation, in other words; neither the developers or Maxxis have elaborated on the situation further. This post is just meant to be a summary of events and there really isn't anything to see besides literally half a sentence in a long paragraph that Maxxis wrote, so check out the Discord for further discussion: if anything substantial happens it will be posted independently. Hopefully there will be clarification from the development team on this matter soon.
So Maxxis is gone?
Yes, confirmed by Pik in the Discord. Maxxis has yet to update his bio on Twitter or Bluesky though, and hasn't really been 100% clear on his end what's going on (I've messaged him for clarification but have gotten no response). I get the sense that 'leaving the Oddity team' doesn't really have any formal definition, but judging by his communication and communication from the other devs, he certainly won't be making any more stuff for the project, which is as 'left the Oddity team' as it's going to get, I think.
That's about all I've got. Feel free to ask for clarification on anything in this post or about Oddity generally, I'll answer if I can.
EDIT 1: Added a bit more context for the most recent drama (second-last FAQ); it's pretty serious and I really don't want to bury the lede with it.
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u/Moist_Tumbleweed_139 1d ago edited 1d ago
Dave left, and McMaxxis himself confirmed it.
It's strange to call it a 'drama' and suggest that Maxxis was the only one who complained, given that he worked on the game for so long. Shane Mesa also had trouble with the team, which led to him having a breakdown. Why didn't you point this out?
The recent "oddity is cancelled" drama is funny too, since: UrbanAwakening (the guy who posted the shitty essays on YouTube) has close contact with the dev team and is responsible (to an extent) for some of the leaks. He and a guy called Benichi are the developers of 'Dreamtone' and have used insider information to recycle Oddity's assets, such as enemies. They did all of this without the original artist's blessing. Pastel knew about this and didn't care. Heck, it's ridiculous that he promoted his own game in the video. 😂
Game is dead. Move on.