August 2026
Demo Update: Controls, Signal Lock, and Office Fixes
This update tightens up controls, improves Signal Lock fairness, and fixes a handful of rough edges around the office, menus, and logs.
- Controls: Rebinding a key now updates the on-screen prompts.
- Controls: Remapped controls now survive restarting the game. They were saving correctly but failing to load, so every launch quietly reverted to defaults.
- Controls: Prompts that name an action, such as "press Submit to continue," now follow your bindings too, including the cancel prompt on the rebinding screen itself.
- Signal Lock: Your press registers the instant you press, not when you let go.
- Signal Lock: A frame stutter can no longer skip the indicator across the target. On a slow frame, it could jump farther than the entire target zone without ever appearing inside it.
- Signal Lock: The bonus band now sits inside the target zone. It used to roll anywhere on the bar, which meant the best strategy was to ignore the big target the game shows you and aim somewhere else entirely.
- The office: The Harmon padlock is a real lock now. The dials are lit and selectable in the world.
- The office: The lock no longer springs open the moment the last correct digit passes under the pointer.
- Accessibility: Reduced Motion now reaches office puzzles. It was being ignored there.
- Menus: The "new" dots on Logs, Records, and Achievements clear when you open the screen. You do not have to read or click anything inside, and they stay cleared after a restart.
- Logs: Fixed a case where a log could open showing placeholder text instead of its contents, and added a check that stops a build from shipping if any text is missing.
August 2026
The LEXICON Demo Is Live!
This is it! The LEXICON demo is live!
This is the culmination of a year's worth of solo work building my word puzzle roguelite. It feels a little surreal to finally have something playable on Steam after working on it day and night for so long.
LEXICON combines the big number combos of Balatro, the procedural dungeon runs of Slay the Spire, and a splash of the spooky meta puzzles of Inscryption. You build words, create ridiculous combos, and dig deeper into a strange abandoned computer system as the story starts to unfold.
I'm incredibly proud to finally put the demo in front of everyone. I would love it if you gave it a try, shared your feedback, left a review, and wishlisted the full game. Hearing what works, what does not, and what you want to see next will be a huge help as I keep building toward the full release.
Thank you to everyone who has supported me while I worked toward this day. A special shout out to my primary playtesters, my wife Meghan and my 7 year old son Ben. I'm pretty sure his vocabulary has grown from playing the game so much.
You can grab the demo here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4940970/LEXICON_Demo/
Join my Discord here: https://discord.gg/hUszXZEmZx
July 2026
A 3D Scene for the Opening (Because This Wasn't Complicated Enough)
I've been heads down on something new: a 3D scene for the very start of the game. LEXICON has always opened cold, straight into the terminal, and that's worked fine mechanically, but it never did much to sell what this game actually is before the wordplay starts.
The problem is first impressions. On a store page or in someone's first thirty seconds, LEXICON can read as just another cozy word game if all you see is a puzzle grid. It isn't. There's a whole abandoned computer system and a strange, unraveling story underneath the word building, and I want players to feel that the moment they hit play, not five runs in.
So now there's a scene before the terminal boots: a dim, cluttered room, an evidence board covered in notes, old file cabinets, a CRT glowing green in the dark. It's meant to plant the question of what happened here before you ever type a word. Screenshot above is very much a work in progress, lighting and set dressing are still getting tuned, but the mood is already doing what I wanted it to do.
Building this out has honestly been a blast. It's a different muscle than puzzle systems and UI, and it's a nice reminder of why I wanted to make this game in the first place.
July 2026
Controller Support, a First Deck Test, and a Chattier ECHO 7
A big chunk of my time the last week and a half went into controller support, the unglamorous but important kind. Pausing used to be fake. If you tabbed out to the Steam Overlay or your controller died mid battle, the game just kept running behind the menu, animations, timers, sound, all of it. That's fixed now. Losing focus, a controller disconnecting, or opening the pause menu all properly freeze the game and hand things back cleanly when you return, instead of quietly punishing you for tabbing away.
I also closed the last real gap for controller only play. The daily seed field was the one text box in the whole game you couldn't reach with a gamepad. Barely anyone will ever touch it, but Valve's full controller support certification doesn't care how minor the field is, if it's reachable with a mouse it needs to be reachable with a controller too. It now pulls up a proper on screen keyboard when you're on a pad, no keyboard required.
This week I also got LEXICON running on an actual Steam Deck for the first time, instead of just testing Steam Input from the desk. First impressions were good. Controller glyphs read correctly, the new pause behavior held up going in and out of the Deck's own overlay, and the game ran smooth. Still have PlayStation glyphs and Valve's own certification pass to work through, but this was a solid first checkpoint toward Deck Verified.
On the writing side, ECHO 7 got a lot chattier. Ambient banter went from 9 lines to 33, and I changed how they're picked. Instead of pure random, you'll now hear the whole pool before anything repeats, so it feels a lot less like the same few lines on loop over a long run. Also added new boss dialogue and a short epilogue for players who go deep enough to trigger the full ECHO 7 arc, closing out a story thread that's been building all game.
Next up is finishing the Deck certification pass and getting more hands on controllers to stress test the flow end to end.
July 2026
Adding Minigames to Events
I've been working on mini games lately. In Slay the Spire, events help shake things up, add some flavor, and bring a bit of risk vs reward into the mix. It's one of my favorite parts of that game.
The thing is, those events can feel a little one dimensional. I have similar events in LEXICON, but I wanted to take it up a notch, so I added a couple of extra event types built around simple minigames, things like pipes or an active reload style timing bar. It breaks things up a bit so the player isn't only building words the whole time. None of them are difficult, but you can win some good stuff, end up with a curse, or land a really great reward if you hit the tiniest spots.
It feels like a good fit for LEXICON specifically because the game is so heads down and cerebral. These moments work as a breather from all the word building, and they double as a small skill check, which is something regular play doesn't really offer. As I keep playtesting, I'm watching two things closely: whether the timing and aiming feels fair to players who are stronger at wordplay than reflexes, and whether failing an event and landing a curse feels like a meaningful risk instead of just a punishment. That's usually the line between a risk and reward moment feeling fun and players just avoiding the event altogether.
July 2026
Testing webhooks!
I'm testing out some webhooks so I can post once to discord and the website for bigger devblog posts. Here's hoping this works.
July 2026
Welcome to the Devlog
This is where development updates for LEXICON will
land going forward: design decisions, art and audio progress, playtest
takeaways, and news about the demo and Q4 2026 Steam release.
LEXICON is being built solo by T² Games: a word puzzle roguelike wrapped
inside a strange abandoned computer system, where building words unlocks
protocols that reshape each run and slowly reveal a hidden story.
The fastest way to follow along day to day is still the
T² Games Discord.
Longer-form recaps of that progress will be posted here as entries like
this one. Wishlist LEXICON on Steam to get notified the moment the demo
and full release go live.
