Indie developer The Behemoth outlined its plans for the future in a recent livestream, and it includes major updates to games like Castle Crashers and BattleBlock Theater, as well as work on a new game that will soon be in the prototype phase.
Castle Crashers, the side-scrolling beat-em’-up originally released in 2008, will receive a major update on Steam called Painter Boss Paradise, which is the first new content added to the game since the introduction of new playable characters back in 2012. The update will add Steam Workshop support, allowing for players to create their own characters and share them with others. The Behemoth states in its roadmap trailer that creating characters will be as simple as swapping out a single image and then letting the game handle all the hard stuff like animations.
For those who don’t want to craft a character of their own, there will also be an official new playable character, Paint Junior, who uses their imagination to create art and defeat enemies. Painter Boss Paradise will additionally introduce redrawn models for all of the game’s playable characters and weapons, but don’t worry: The new models can be toggled on or off in the options menu.
For the studio’s platformer BattleBlock Theater, an update for the Steam version will allow for higher frame rates, support for more controller types, better rendering, and higher audio bitrates for improved sound. The game will be coming to modern consoles as well, something also in the works for Alien Hominid HD and Alien Hominid Invasion, which are currently available on Xbox and PC but will soon be coming to PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 too.
Not to be left out, The Behemoth’s quirky strategy title, Pit People, will also be receiving some quality-of-life improvements, though specific details were not shared.
No release dates were given for any of these updates, and no additional information was shared in regards to when The Behemoth’s next new game would arrive. In a press release, the developer states that all of the aforementioned updates “will be rolling out while the team looks ahead to prototyping and developing new titles.”
The roadmap served as a way to “address several popular far requests from the past 21 years while establishing a new level of transparency with players,” according to the press release. The studio’s most-recent projects were Alien Hominid HD and Alien Hominid Invasion, both released in 2023.