Hey everyone, I just wanted to pop in with a little status report before Im off on a family vacation for a bit over a week. As Ive mentioned before, the first main update to Iron Village is to give it a soft ending, tying up the (light) story of why you are building this village and signaling to players that theres no more content beyond this point. For Iron Village, this takes the form of a City Establishment Ceremony. Monarch Faearn shows up in their Royal Train, conducts a ceremony, attends a feast, and then officially designates your town as a City. All of the preparation, as well as the train and the monarch themselves, have been implemented, the remaining work consists of having the ceremony actually occur, and figuring out what to do with the Monarch afterwards.
The Royal Ceremony isnt the only thing in the 1.1 update though, theres a few feature requests that made it in, as well as some features that didnt quite make it into 1.0:

• Buildings can now be freely moved: no more demolishing and rebuilding.
• Production can now be paused: open a buildings info panel, and click pause (or resume) production.
• Autopurchase: automatically buy resources from trains as they come by. This can be really helpful to combat food and water shortages.
• Screenshot Mode: Hide all of the UI (apart from the little screenshot mode button) in order to take screenshots with just the pixel art.
• Added rotated versions of farms & big houses. They are different buildings, you cant actually rotate one into another, but that should give you more flexibility in building your towns.
• When a building tries to store the resources at the end of a production cycle, it will wait until it can store something, but then discard the rest and move on. This should help with the Deep Mine, where before it would stop producing anything if even one storage was full usually this made it really difficult to actually get gems.

• Allow demolition even when there is insufficient storage for the resulting resources as long as the game warns you first.
• Make necessary changes to the UI to ensure the Android version works well before release (which may be pushed to May).
• Zoom In and Out: Actually zoom in or out in the game, without also changing the UI scale.
• Villager working animations: the way clothes are implemented might make this annoying to implement, but I have some animations for the villagers to actually mine, and I can probably pull something together for farming.

It turns out, $3681.54 USD. That is quite a bit of money! And it doesn't even include my own labor! Although, its also a very low budget, depending on how you look at things. Ill note that technically, none of these expenses are strictly mandatory. You can absolutely make a game for cheaper, if not free. This diary is not presented as advice, but rather a retelling of the development process from the point of view of dollars and cents. (and Euros!) This definitely feels like one of the more personal dev diary entries. Like, even though were talking about something relatively boring like a budget, it is also exposing my privilege: Ive been lucky enough to be able to scrape this money together over the course of a year and a half. Still though, as someone who believes in pay transparency, its time to put the money where my mouth is. My hope is that this will be helpful for anyone else who wants to attempt solo game development, and you can piece together what you really need. At the very least though, I hope some of you find it interesting. Ive broken this down by category, so it doesnt correspond with when the expenses occurred. For the most part, these occurred over about a year and a half from September 2023 through March 2025.

Publishing Fees: $224

• $100 Steam Direct Product Submission Fee: Technically, this will count as $0 once the first check comes out, since they return this if your game makes at least $1000 USD in revenue. (Iron Village has done so, Ill talk more about that in a future dev diary.) However, I havent seen it in the company account yet, so it counts as an expense.
• $25 Google Play Developer Fee: This is a one-time payment, so any future Lunar Chippy releases on Android would be covered as well.
• $99 Apple Developer Program: Theres a longer story to tell about this annual fee, but I signed up for two reasons: App Notarization for MacOS, and potential iOS development. App Notarization avoids the app getting blocked by the OS from running, which is user-overridable, but only if they make the effort to go into security settings and allow it. However, my account randomly got caught in some sort of automated spam or fraud detector algorithm after a few months, and Apple shut it down with no reason given. The support person was like, sorry, I cant tell you anything, maybe try making a new account? If the Android version does really well, maybe Ill try it again, but Im not really in the habit of throwing away $100 for nothing.

Legal Fees: $770

Assets: $483.57

Translations: $811.87

• $0 for Brazilian Portuguese: I was contacted by Thiago Mania pretty soon after the store page went up, who volunteered to do this translation.
• $0 for Spanish: This was a combo of 4 years of high school Spanish classes, looking things up with Google Translate, and cross checking with the Brazilian Portuguese translations. Each of those three things by themselves is not enough: my Spanish is hella rusty, relying on Google Translate is a great way to get yourself into una situacin embarasada**, and Portuguese is a totally different language, just with similar-sounding words.
• $761.87 for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese: I worked with WeMavin Languages for these, at the rates of $0.06 USD per English word in French, $0.10 for German, $0.14 for Japanese, $0.07 for Simplified Chinese, and $0.08 for Traditional Chinese.
• $50 for two international wire fees for those translations: turns out wiring money internationally can be expensive!

Capsule Art: 600 ($653.03 USD)

Physical Marketing: $739.07

• $38.95 for the shiny Lunar Chippy Games stickers
• $118.75 for a bunch of train sticker sheets I was going to hand out at BostonFIG, but didnt arrive in time.
• $368.06 for the BostonFIG Indie Sponsorship
• $157.36 for a a ton of business cards, the posterboard, and stand
• $55.95 for a Target run to get other supplies (mouse, headphones, tablecloth, etc.) for BostonFIG

Online Marketing

Total: $3681.54

So I was feeling proud, thanks to my efforts, all of your efforts as players of the demo, as well as Beas efforts in bug hunting, the 1.0.01 release went off without any major game-breaking errors. I managed to mess that up with 1.0.06 and those doors nobody asked for . Its possible that plenty of you never actually noticed the bug, but heres what happens: [olist]

However, the old building and door may have already gone through garbage collection. To oversimplify a technical concept, the garbage truck has already come by to take the trash out of the dumpster. So Iron Village crashes. [/olist] Since theres a possibility of crashes, and the error handling can have side effects in how the simulation runs, Im pushing out another build, 1.0.09. As an added bonus, you get a new piece of UI and a couple of tweaks I was working on for 1.1. (Some other incomplete features have been disabled.) Heres the full list:

• Fixed coal and iron hoppers to carry their loads 1 pixel higher.
• Added Meals to the Level 4 Permit Document

• Autosale Notifications! I meant to get these into 1.0.06, but didnt quite find the time. Anyway, now when an autosale gets made, youll see a summary of the gold you made, plus the goods that were sold.

[ 2025-03-31 18:13:39 CET ] [ Original post ]

First of all, thanks so much everyone for playing Iron Village! It's been great to see how well received the game has been, and I'm looking forward to building onto it some more! Some stats if you're curious:

• Over 500 sales
• Over 3600 outstanding wishlists (I see you all waiting for the summer sale )
• 391 unique users
• Median time played of 53 minutes
• 17 reviews, 88% positive

• In 1.0.00, there was an issue with loading saves with Royal Palace construction sites. Basically, it was expecting a progress bar to be present, but there wasn't one, so the game wouldn't finish loading. Both parts of that have been fixed now: the progress bar is there, and loading games won't freak out over a missing progress bar.
• The next bit was an upgrade to Godot 4.4, the main feature of which was typed dictionaries! This is a technical detail, but basically pre-4.4 the lists of resources for building costs were actually two separate lists: one with resource types (an enum), and one with resource counts. I've finally been able to refactor that into one list with both, and in the process I found a couple of typos in costs, so that should all be fixed.
• Fixed an issue in the late game where placing buildings, roads, and demolitions would cause a noticeable lag. This was because the game recalculates the navigation mesh whenever a new building changes how villagers move around, and the way I was calling it would force the game to wait for those calculations to finish. That doesn't happen anymore, so the game can continue running smoothly.

• Invented the modern technology of doors. Villagers will now open and shut doors when entering/leaving buildings, complete with sound.
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect minimum approval rating would show - basically, the game was showing the minimum approval for the level you're on, rather than the next level.
• Slightly decreased electrical demand of trains. Electricity can be difficult to produce quickly enough for the new locomotives, so hopefully this helps ease perpetual shortages.
• Made double-wide roads render better. Technically, making roads two tiles wide doesn't really widen them, they still act as two parallel roads, but I've rewritten the road tiling logic in a way that at least makes it look like one big road, rather than some sort of net.

Theres still 1 day until Iron Village is out, but the 1.0 version of the demo is available now! Here is the list of changes since 0.8.04 came out:

• Fixed an issue with the Log Cabin not having correct upgrades.
• Lowered population caps to 20, 40, 60, 80, and 120.
• A bunch of things for level 5. (No Spoilers!)

• Added an autosale feature, unlocked at level 3. This allows you to automatically sell resources, leaving a specified minimum stock if you choose.
• Added logic to handle game controllers becoming disconnected, pausing the game and displaying a popup.
• Pause the game when the Steam Overlay is up.
• Adjusted coal tenders to show as full with 4 coal. (Was previously 8, but trains never needed this much coal.)
• Enable demolition to be cancelled.

• Added a Logistics Office, built in level 3, which allows for autosale (described above) and job prioritization (described below).
• Finally fixed an issue that sometimes prevented quarries from being demolished.
• Added additional tutorials for features in levels 3-5.
• Adjusted the starting camera position, and now persist the camera position in save files.
• Building buttons widen themselves if the title or description is too long. (Surprisingly, Spanish was the biggest offender, not German.)

• Updated the farm fields in the main menu to be 21, the same as in game.
• Added villagers to the main menu.
• Fixed CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font to use another pixel font as backup, removing instances of mismatched ransom note font appearance in certain words.
• Adjusted window header size for CJK fonts.
• Included the actual approval rating in the next level requirements.
• Added an option in the settings to play zoomed out note that this is not a game feature (yet) per se, but an option to make things look better on large screens. It also will not allow a pixel ratio under 2, so it will not zoom out at the games default resolution.
• Added flower bushes to the windmill.
• Added a bit of dirt around the well.
• Steam Achievements!
• Added a Miscellaneous category of buildings.

• Added player-customizable job priorities: rather than rely on their algorithms, you can make certain resources +1 or -1 priority, which makes them consider resources producing those types earlier or later in their job hunt.
• Added building thumbnails to the Info Box, so when you select a building it shows a little icon of it.
• Added a little status icon for buildings with missing storage.
• Fixed an issue with customizing the railway logo mid-game (i.e. it didnt work).
• Added a progress bar to construction projects to get a glance of their progress outside of the info box.
• Educated villagers on the need to look both ways before crossing the tracks.
• Added a button in the custom railway logo window to clear all of the pixels.
• Edited the credits to better handle , ,
• Added Bea McCullagh as QA
• Fixed some issues with controllers and the UI.
• Fixed an issue where demolishing a storage building would reduce the remaining storage by double. (This would be fixed on reloading the game.)
• Animals now spawn at different points in their animation, so theyre not all mirroring each other.
• Adjusted the focus texture to be (barely) noticeable on selected buttons.
• Fixed the sounds to actually play based on position, shrunk the audible radii, and made the loudest sounds quieter. (The sounds were doing this theoretically, but all from the top left corner of the map, audible within 2000 in-game pixels. This is just about everywhere.)
• Fixed an issue with animal z layering, a.k.a. why are there cows on the roof?
• Added more grass, so that users with comically large screens are less likely to see the endless grey void.
• More game balance changes, Im sure things will need additional balance.

(As of March 20th, 2025 there are 4 days to go until Iron Village releases!) Iron Village releases on Steam in 3 days March 24th at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4)! Ill have some release notes for the final build later, but for now I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about whats going on now. I want to capture a snapshot before the actual release, and take a bit of a look back at how things got here. Itll be interesting to compare to how everything goes after the release, and how that potentially changes my views of things, but this will more accurately capture my thoughts before further hindsight comes in to mess things up. To start, why have March 24th as a release date? Well, back in September I signed up for Steams City Builder & Colony Sim Fest basically a special sale page on Steam that shows games that fit the genre, including demos. The festival starts on March 24th. Given that games on sale get the most prominent position on the page, the best way to take advantage of the opportunity would (IMO) be to launch with a release sale: a built-in Steam feature that allows you to set a sale of 10 or 15% off for 7 to 14 days upon initial release. Setting a hard deadline is fairly scary, but also it was far enough away that I figured it wouldnt be an issue at all but of course, I originally thought this was only going to take a couple of months. So eventually, the desire to make things as well as I could meant that I only actually finished the end game content a couple of weeks ago. This is very much not ideal, since it interferes with the time needed to thoroughly test and balance the game, as well as getting a complete product to YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The net result is that while I think Iron Village is still a good (and most importantly, fun) game, the balance may be a little off, and marketing efforts definitely suffered. The hard deadline also meant annoying the translators a little instead of being able to request translations in bulk, I ended up making some last minute requests along the lines of these are the last two strings, I swear, only to be wrong a couple days later.
(A screenshot of my current town, showing some of the late game content that only squeezed in last minute.) There is a little bit of polish (for instance, villager working animations) that is not getting done due to the hard time limit, and some last minute changes arent getting tutorial text on launch due to the need to get them translated. Im listing all these negative aspects of setting a hard date, so what are the positives? Well, part of the hard deadline is a motivational factor to actually get this game finished. I dont really get the option of indefinitely postponing the release, since I would lose out on the visibility the festival offers. While I cant tell the future, I can make some rough guesses based on Next Fest last month. Getting that spotlight in the Steam store was enough to take Iron Village from 1025 active* wishlists on February 23rd to 1897 on March 3rd. (As of March 20th, were at 2309 active wishlists.) *As in, wishlists that havent since been deleted or converted into sales. For transparency, there have been 205 wishlist removals as of March 20th, and 1 conversion: Thiago Mania, who has been translating Iron Village into Brazilian Portuguese. Will the visibility of the City Builder festival be worth all of those negatives? I think so, but only time will tell. I can say that Im not planning on doing that again, the stress of having a side project with a hard deadline and a full time job, plus actually making time for my family, is too much to do all over again. If I can turn game development into a full time job, then sure, there might be a situation when setting such a deadline so far out makes sense. But otherwise, this is a one time thing. To wrap up this dev diary, Ill talk a bit about what Im planning on doing post-launch. Some of this definitely depends on how the launch actually goes: if reviews turn out to be quite negative, or theres lots of issues that Ive managed to miss, then its all subject to change. However, the rough plan of releases is as follows:

• Initial Bugfixes. Depending on how many of those are needed, and how urgent they may be, this could be anything from a same day/next day emergency patch to an update a week or two later with quality-of-life tweaks.
• Android Release. In order to focus on the Steam launch, I pushed the Android release out to an ETA of April. Most of the work there comes down to two things: UI improvements (its a small touch screen, so while everything works, it can be better.) and Google Play Games integration (mainly for the achievements).
• The First Big Update (1.1). Ill talk more about this later, but the plan is to get:
• a. Some more quality-of-life changes that didnt end up in the first patch(es).
• b. Improvements that require translated text, such as improved tutorials.
• c. New Buildings: A few more variations of existing buildings, as well as a couple of projects that have been conceptualized but did not end up in the main release.
• d. A Soft Ending: Right now, there is no well defined end to the game you build everything, get a decently efficient economy running, and then just run out of things to do. It would be nice to tie things into the backstory and add some sort of final project/event, even though you will still be able to play beyond this ending.
• Two themed updates (1.2 and 1.3). I have some ideas for larger thematic updates, kind of like free DLC.
• Im not planning on working on Iron Village forever (Ive got too many other game ideas bouncing around in my head for that), but I figure theres still plenty of room for it to grow.

Big milestone here Iron Village has been updated just in time for Steam Next Fest! The biggest changes in this version are five (5) new languages: French, German, Japanese, and Chinese in both Simplified & Traditional forms.
(Hopefully you dont need Potato Storage translated, because I totally forgot to put that string in the translation table. Oops.) I didnt post Diary #39 0.7.39 Release Notes to all of the usual platforms, so some changes since the last release notes will be there, but otherwise heres whats changed/been fixed:

• Fixed more issues with certain sounds not being affected by the volume slider.
• Finished electrification (level 4+)
• Implemented the ability to cancel demolition/tree chopping. (Currently disabled due to lack of translated strings, will be enabled in the next version.)
• Buildings can now be upgraded from within the info panel.
• Added support for French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified & Traditional).
• Fixed an issue on Steam Deck where controller hints would flicker while pressing and dragging out a road.
• Made the on screen keyboard automatically come up when the text box is selected in the Steam Cloud save window.

So the huge downside to setting a release date is now I have to hurry up and finish the rest of the game content. Normally I wouldve waited longer, but with the Steam City Builder Fest coming up at the end of March, the dice have already been cast. Thankfully, level 4 is actually pretty close to being done (apart from kitchens and electrification), and level 5 is definitely underway. Will the game be released somewhat unfinished? It depends on what you mean therell definitely be room for balancing, but the core of the game has been pretty well refined by now. This at least means I wont chicken out. So, what even is in the end game? Im not going to post too much in the way of spoilers, but Ill give a bit of a preview: Level 4 is the Heavy Industrial Permit, and Level 5 is City Status.

Heavy Industrial Permit

City Status

Hey everyone, theres another release coming your way right now! Im going to be ramping up on marketing/PR ahead of Next Fest & the full release, so I wanted to get in another round of bug fixes and improvements before showing it off. Of course, Im sure therell be some other embarrassing bug thatll surface, but oh well. Anyway, heres the list of changes:

• Prevented players from demolishing trees in an area of the map that isnt unlocked yet.
• Lots more content for progression level 4.
• Adjusted the position of the building footprint icons.
• Fixed trains to use the correct sound channel, allowing them to finally be muted.
• Pause train sounds when the game is paused.
• Added a tooltip over the Continue button to show which save is being loaded.
• Fixed the number of decimal points for approval ratings in the Railway Status window, for real this time.
• Spacebar no longer counts as a button press the way Enter and left clicks do. (It will still pause the game.)
• Buildings can now have multiple locations for villagers to go to for instance, they can use multiple doors, or work in different parts of the quarry.
• Fix an issue where the game would try to find a cloud save locally.
• Adjusted the estimated arrival times of trains.
• Added wood costs to certain stone buildings not as much as the stone cost, but non-zero.
• Prevent demolition of a storage building if there wont be enough room to store its contents.
• Fixed an issue with the train floors not showing when doors open.

So uh, it's been awhile since I posted last - hope you all had a good holiday season! I've finally got an updated version of the demo launched (in fact, it went up on Steam on Tuesday, and Itch yesterday morning), so here's some release notes for what's new (and what's new, but hidden in the full game):

• Fixed an issue where the train smoke in the main menu failed to animate when returning from an active game.
• Shifted the first train the buys potatoes to purchase them earlier.
• Villagers now stay awake for longer.
• Z layering of UI has been completely overhauled to avoid future overlapping issues.
• Fixed a lot of visibility issues with the tutorial bubbles.
• The little upgrade icon no longer blocks you from clicking the Railway Status button.
• Villagers can now get water directly from wells, and food directly from certain source buildings. (e.g.
• Bakeries, but not farm fields.)
• Changed the Play x2 and x4 buttons to act like the Play x1 button: clicking on it while paused properly unpauses the game.
• Pressing Enter in the New Game Screen goes to the next UI element.
• After building a road, default to keeping the build mode on.
• Fixed a bug where laborers were being cloned in buildings (even though the villager was not).
• Villagers can now prioritize jobs based on needs for example, if theyre low on water, they will prioritize working at a well.
• A lot of level 4 work (no spoilers yet!)

• Added permit documents, describing the level that the player just unlocked.
• Made game loading slower. (Ran into a weird issue with multithreaded loading no longer working, so now its single-threaded until I can get around to investigating properly.)

• Added little footprint icons to show if a building 11, 12, 21, or 22. A better implementation is coming, but this covers the lack of information for touch screen players.
• Overrode base Godot logic to allow you to move the mouse a little while clicking a building button, and still count it as a click rather than a drag. This was an especially large problem on touch screens.
• Made some UI adjustments to hopefully keep text boxes above the on screen keyboard. This probably requires additional tweaks.
• Added Cloud Save support on Steam, toggleable via an in game setting.
• Loading & Saving Games on Cloud now uses a custom UI panel.

• Map Expansion: You can now expand to the other side of the tracks in level 3. Although this is not accessible in the demo, the margins between the playable space and the edge of the map have expanded.

• Known Bug: You can chop down trees in the south even if you have not unlocked it.
• Code has been added to paint in some grass if you are loading an old save, but otherwise these map changes only take place in new saves.
• Autosave is now implemented, when enabled in the settings the game will save every 5 minutes.

• Adjusted the positioning of the Buy & Sell buttons to hopefully make them more visible.
• Improved (but did not fully fix) an issue with progress bars appearing 100% full before the underlying task is actually done.
• Changed the build system to not include certain full game assets in the demo.
• On Android, shift certain UI elements over from the left to avoid getting blocked by camera notches. (This has been slightly overdone, and will be re-fixed soon.)
• The Carreteras section of the build menu (en Espaol) has been renamed Caminos to better reflect the usage.

Its been a week since BostonFIG, which was a crazy, fun, and great time, and I wanted to sit down and jot down some of my thoughts, since this was my first time doing one of these sorts of events. Hopefully thisll be interesting, and at least useful for other indie devs! I had first heard of BostonFIG through Most Dangerous Games, they had Capitalism Craft at the online showcase earlier in the year. (Its still under development, but its a really fun game. CW: Capitalism.) They had an in person event coming up (first time in 5 years!), so I figured Id apply and submit Iron Village. The way the event is set up, theres a showcase of games (both digital and physical) selected from the applicants, and afterwards awards are given out for the top games. There were 80 applicants, and unfortunately Iron Village did not end up making the cut. This was very disappointing, but there were two huge consolations: 1. Very detailed feedback from the curators. Getting good feedback on a game in development can be quite difficult, especially when starting out. The two critical parts that stood out the most to me were the relative lack of theming and the lack of recoverability at the start of you get yourself into a bad situation. This feedback is already making its way into the game through the new New Game screens and the Welcome Administrator letter at the start, and some of the progression restructuring has been done to flesh out the world a bit more. The new backstory also hints at why this land is empty, although that doesnt fully get explained. The lack of recoverability is being worked on some of it is already in place, just not well communicated to the player, but if your villagers all leave because theyre unhappy, it is pretty difficult to make a comeback. 2. Anyone who didnt get selected for the showcase was still invited to get a table as an indie sponsor for $400 USD, minus application fees already paid. Thankfully I wasnt the only one to take them up on the offer, so I wasnt the only non-showcase game there.
So fast forward a little, and early on a cold Sunday morning I pack up my Steam Deck, my MacBook, headphones, a mouse, a sign, and a tablecloth and drive into Boston. Im definitely nervous this is the first time Ive shown off Iron Village in front of a large number of people in person, so of course theres a nagging feeling of what if this game is actually kind of shit? Turns out I didnt need to worry, once the doors opened both the deck and the laptop were occupied most of the time. I only managed to sneak out for lunch at 2pm, and that still required me to leave while someone was still playing. The first important finding from the event: it turns out lots of people like Iron Village! The biggest benefit of presenting Iron Village at BostonFIG (and IMO, the main purpose of shelling out the money and presenting at conventions) is those findings. Theres just no better way to get feedback than to witness a bunch of people playing your game in front of you. I filled more than a page in my notebook with observations, player feedback, and a few bug reports. Heres a list of some of the main things that stood out:

• Despite testing beforehand, we found two glaring bugs within the first 5 minutes: (1) the tutorial bubbles for trading with a train pop up over the build menu if its open, but then go away if you close the build menu; (2) when you go back to the main menu after playing, the trains in the menu spawn smoke particles that dont actually animate. Thanks to that bug, I had to restart the game every time someone played.
• Different people will find different ways to play, especially in ways you didnt expect. Sometimes its a one off, sometimes theres a pattern. If its a pattern (for example, some players building one of each farm field and then running out of money), its worth at least paying attention to.
• This especially shows up on the Steam Deck. Since its designed to let people play PC games on a handheld device, theres a lot of different input methods, including a controller, touch pads, and a touch screen. All of these will get tested at some point, especially by players who havent used a steam deck before, so hopefully your game can handle it! (Iron Village mostly passed, although the left touch pad doesnt seem to do anything in game.)
• Upon seeing the art style, a lot of people will ask, is this like Stardew Valley? The episode of No Small Games on Fields of Mistria was talking about this phenomena when describing farm sim games, it turns out its not just farm sims!
• Letting your players figure things out for themselves at the start is really useful to test how well your tutorial works, but unless you did it perfectly, it does mean you have to watch them struggle a little.
• In addition to finding out about problems in the game, this sort of playtesting is really helpful for confirming what went well, as well as confirming future priorities. For instance, one problem that came up was that villagers wouldnt prioritize getting water when they were thirsty, theyd just pick a random job. I was already planning on adding job prioritization, but this confirmed that I should make it a high priority.
• Two players stuck around for long enough to get through level 3, so up to an hour of gameplay!
• In contrast to the constant busyness, the actual wishlist numbers were not substantial. I was probably spoiled by the effects of the Thanksgaming Kotaku article (+400 or so wishlists), but over the last week Ive received around +20 wishlists. The feedback is way more valuable than the wishlists, but I wanted to share that data as well.

Hey all, so as I mentioned last time, Im going to be at the Boston Festival of Indie Games tomorrow! Sunday, December 15th from 10am to 5pm at Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116. For those of you who cant make it though, youre not missing out on the new update! 0.7.15 of the demo has now gone live, which is the same version that is available to play in Boston. (The main difference is that level 3 is also playable in BostonFIG.) Heres the full release notes:

• Added dirt ground textures to animal pens.
• Implemented Needs for villagers now they require food and water, otherwise their satisfaction will fall, which may cause them to leave.

• Added a new menu when starting a new game, making it a more thematic experience.
• Made farms 21 with longer crop rows
• Updated train consists so that later stage goods are more spread out. This should help make it so that you dont have to wait for several trains before making one huge trade.
• Fixed coal tenders to show as full if the train is not requesting coal (i.e. level 1)
• Updated status icons to look more like a speech bubble, which should help legibility
• Updated progression to add potatoes and peppers to level 1. Potatoes act as a very good source of food, and peppers can be refined in level 2 to make magick powder.
• Adjusted passenger car graphics to make the floor higher.

• Added a Magick Refinery to turn the magick peppers into powder.
• Fixed Build Menu tutorials to adjust their y position if the menu moves, e.g. because the window is resized.
• Added trains that move in the main menu
• Updated progression levels to be permits with names, which should hopefully be a better thematic explanation for why certain buildings are unlocked at certain times.
• Added an in-universe tutorial note at the start of the game.
• Fixed an issue where the status of the tender was not persisted on load
• The bakery now produces 2 bread per 1 water & 1 flour instead of 1 bread. This was required to balance the game economy, now that bread is the best food available for filling up your villagers.
• Fixed an issue where pressing A on the controller would not actually let you build the selected building.
• Fixed a few different instances of menus where controller focus would be lost.
• Made orchards 12
• Made homelessness less dissatisfying in level 1. Your villagers will be about three times more patient about sleeping in the station at the start.
• Fixed the passenger number pop up to properly display the number of emigrants.
• Fixed an issue where reopening the build menu would focus the controller on a button in the first tab, not the one thats still open.
• I also uncovered an issue thats probably been around since the start: the Load Game and Save As menus do not work on the Steam Deck. This seems to be an issue with how Godot works with the OS the FileDialog seems to rely on org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser, something which is probably installed by default on normal Linux, but not the Steam Deck. Since Im planning on implementing cloud saves, Ill end up having to do my own implementation anyway, but I just wanted to call this out.

This past week Ive just about finished the overhaul of the initial gameplay, which will be the subject of this dev diary. But first, an announcement: Iron Village will be at the Boston Festival of Indie Games this weekend! The event is Sunday, December 15th from 10am to 5pm at Cyclorama, 539 Tremont St, Boston, MA 02116. Youll be able to get your hands on the full build i.e. including level 3, not just the demo! I hope to see some of you there! (Please note that face masks are *required*!) Anyway, Ive been away from home for the past two weeks basically a combination of Thanksgiving, a wedding, and not wanting to for back and forth with the kids in the week between the two. Thanks to my day jobs office attendance policy, I had to take this as a vacation though I really needed it, to be honest. This left me with a week where I could actually get some solid time to work on Iron Village. One of the things that has been neglected in Iron Village is the setting whats going on here? Why are we building a town here? Why is the land empty? Is there any detail to the setting besides generic medieval/fantasy? Some of this will be addressed as you play, but the beginning doesnt really have that much to it.
A Royal Proclamation you do get to name your own kingdom though.
Signed by the mysterious Monarch Faearn First off, the New Game screen has been updated. It takes the form of a Royal Proclamation literally telling you to go make a town to support the new railway, which is being built to facilitate trade with Nova Porthladd, a city which recently opened up for trade. This new screen does commit the sin of regurgitating exposition at you, but at least its doing so in character?
This is from level 2, but new changes are all present here. Level 1 of gameplay has been shaken up quite a bit. The aesthetic change is that farm fields are now 21 in size I felt like they didnt take up enough space in proportion to other buildings, so literally doubling their size should help. There are now *four* different crops to choose from: wheat and giant mushrooms are still in place, but now potatoes and peppers have been moved from level 3. Potatoes serve as an initial food source (more on food needs in a moment), and peppers have been rebranded as magick peppers. Theres some lore to be fleshed out about tropical dwarves and spiciness as a form of magic, but for now just keep in mind itll be an important resource. The biggest mechanical change is hunger & thirst. Is it crazy to be adding new mechanics this late in making the game? Probably. Thankfully though, the state machine for villagers was set up in a way that made things fairly straightforward. The easiest part to explain is thirst: villagers get thirsty over time, and get thirsty faster while working. When they get a chance, theyll pop over to the water tank, have a drink (taking it from your water supply), and then get back to work/sleeping/whatever they wanted to do next. If they get too thirsty, their satisfaction takes a negative hit, which eventually causes them to leave. Hunger works the same way, although different foods can be more or less filling. In level 1, potatoes are the best source of food, providing 60 fullness. (This is an internal value that is not exposed in the game, FYI, although depending on feedback I could see that changing.) Magick peppers and giant mushrooms also work as food (20 fullness each), but theyre lower priority since their main purpose is manufacturing other goods. Im going to leave it here, discussion of changes to levels 2 and 3 will wait for another diary. I want to close out with a huge thanks to John Walker, whose Thanksgiving tradition of highlighting unknown indie games on Kotaku led to Iron Village showing up in an article! Over the course of four days, that got us from just under 300 wishlists to over 700! Go check out the article, as well as part 2 to see some other titles deserving your attention!

Hey all, I decided to squeeze out another release before Im gone for two weeks for an extended Thanksgiving vacation. Heres whats changed:

• Fixed a bug where the custom name of your railway wasnt saved.

• Theres a new UI for resources, designed to better handle the larger variety of goods as you level up.

• Boxcars now show crates inside them to represent their load.
• Boxcars and Passenger cars have slightly more detailed interiors.
• The train station is now 41 instead of 42, which allows the game to start with a road drawn immediately behind the station. (This only applies to new saves.)
• Trees now take longer to chop down, based on how many trees are part of the building.
• Resource values and production times changed to be more balanced.

• Trees leave behind stumps when chopped down. (These are purely cosmetic.)
• New flower and forest floor graphics.
• Hide the progress bar in most cases when a building isnt currently doing any work.
• Fix the coal tender on trains to render the current load.
• Add population caps per level to avoid infinite population growth.
• Added some error fixing code to periodically check that states are consistent. (This was prompted by an issue where nobody was working at a quarry it turns out the quarry though two workers were on their way, but those workers were completely unaware. That state was then saved in the game save and persisted on reload.)
• Reduced the approval level display to one digit after the decimal point.
• Added a small threshold to allow for the mouse to move slightly and still count as a click, rather than a drag. (This does not apply to the Build Menu UI, as it uses a more complicated built-in UI system from Godot.)

Ive talked a little about progression level 3 in previous dev diaries, especially in previous release notes and in Diary #28 Train Cars, but I figure Ill go ahead and spill more info about whats included. First of all, for the release of the game Im planning on having 5 progression levels, stretching from a tiny settlement to a productive town. Im planning on rebranding the levels as permits basically, you get permission to build a certain new set of buildings. The first level is initial basic infrastructure: small houses, a well, basic farm fields, and dirt roads. The second level permits basic industry: turn the wheat into bread, turn the mushrooms into potions, and dig for stone and coal. The third level is an advanced agricultural permit. The timing might seem a little weird shouldnt most agriculture be in the beginning? Maybe, but this level adds a lot more variety, and sets up for more advanced industry later on. In this dev diary Ill go through the broad categories of whats included: food crops, farm animals, double tracking, and town expansion.
There are *six* food crops in level 3, four of which are grown on fields and two on orchards. Unlike the previous two agricultural buildings, which are primarily for making other goods (wheat for flour/bread and giant mushrooms for potions), all of these are usable as food. Ill note that the concept of hunger and thirst doesnt currently exist, but Ill probably be implementing it soon for the purposes of game balance. The new crops are carrots, corn, potatoes, peppers (which will have magical applications as well), apples, and manafruit (a magic-infused fruit with further applications).
No game that claims to be cozy can get away without having farm animals, so cows, sheep, and chickens make their debut in progression level 3 as well. Like everything in Iron Village, they come in via train, where you have the option of buying them. You do need to make sure you have enclosed space for them first, which acts as their storage building. The pens double as workplaces though a villager can come by and milk the cows/shear the sheep/collect eggs. Unlike other resource producing buildings, the input product (also known as an adorable farm animal) doesnt get consumed, so you get a nice renewable resource production system. Cow milk has the added bonus of being transformable into cheese, which allows you to make more delicious profit.
Another piece of infrastructure you may have noticed in other screenshots is double tracking. Once you reach level 3, another line of track is built, which allows trains to go both ways through town. The main benefit to you is increased train frequency, allowing for more frequent trade opportunities. Finally, theres town expansion. I havent actually implemented this yet, but more land will be opened up to the south of the tracks. With the amount of space on the current map, if you try and build some of everything youll run out of space. Unlocking the south should help alleviate that, although Ill probably end up expanding the map in the north as well. Anyway, that should summarize whats happening in level 3. Dont forget to wishlist Iron Village on Steam! After next week Im going to be down in Florida for 2 weeks (Thanksgiving with the in laws & a wedding), so Im planning on releasing another update to the demo this week. That 2 weeks may ironically mean more dev time, thanks to my day jobs return to office mandates I will run afoul of work from home quota if I try and get any of that work done.

So uh, this has been a week, right? I did actually manage to get some work done before the election shitshow, and a bit last night and this morning, so here's a surprise demo update! Also of note, the Android version should finally be properly available on Google Play - apparently there was one more button I needed to press to activate the open testing track. Final note before I list off the release notes - I'll soon be setting up a separate store page for the demo on Steam. This shouldn't affect anyone really, but now there'll be a way to leave reviews for the demo itself, so please do so if you'd like to leave feedback!

• Fixed an issue where buildings with no refund resources couldn't be demolished.
• Fix passenger trains to have at least capacity for 8 emigrants.
• Sorted out a garbage collection issue where the "chop trees for wood" bubble complained that its trees were gone.
• Dealt with an odd situation that came up in playtesting where a villager was "Going to Work", but their job was null.
• Hide the Train UI tutorials when the Build Menu is open
• Added an option to change the town and railway names in the middle of the game, rather than just at the beginning.
• Fix a significant source of mid-game (i.e. later than I expected most people to play in the demo) lag. When villagers are looking for work, they look at every single building that *might* have a job, and the way they were iterating through them was very slow.
• Villagers now pick a random job (with demolitions prioritized), rather than the first one they find, which should do a better job not leaving some workplaces unattended.

Hi all - it's time to drop another demo! Huge shout out to Bea for testing and logging a bunch of bugs, this new build doesn't cover everything but should address the majority of issues raised.
Also, we have new store art! Thanks to Nico Square (https://nicosquarepro.myportfolio.com/) for that, I commissioned him to put together the "capsule" art and it is fantastic! The demo is up on Google Play too - it's out as a public test, which should make installation a bit easier than sideloading it from Itch. I've got a list of release notes if you're curious about all of the changes.

• Adjusted the Build Menu to fully block the Train UI when open.
• Upgraded Godot to 4.3
• Fixed the Build Menu to make click and drag work as a scroll method. (Mainly to make the Android version work better, but this is technically cross platform.)

• Add a "Loading..." pop-up, and load in background thread(s)
• - Known Issue: Single-threaded loading in MacOS, for some reason multi-threaded loading caused the game to crash.
• Make sure controller hints stay hidden at the start - this would be confusing for Android players (assuming they don't have a controller connected).
• Added new settings:
• - Enable/Disable Tutorial Hint Bubbles
• - Toggle "Extra Zoom" - Adds +1 to the scale factor between the game's coordinates and the screen coordinates. See Diary #11 So You Want a Resolution for more info.
• - Fullscreen is no longer an option in Android - it's always on.
• Certain in-game pop-ups are shifted to the left on Android, to allow room for the on-screen keyboard.

• Change the Build Menu to put buildings in separate tabs.
• - This also includes an ordering system, so that within each tab there is a logical ordering.
• Add steam engines that can travel to the right. (Not available in the demo.)

• Create a more in depth tutorial system. (Still not huge, but should be enough to get most people started.)
• Fixed an issue where selling goods to a train would replace the goods already present.
• Can now click and drag a stone road over a dirt road to upgrade it. (Required demolishing and rebuilding prior to this.)
• Fixed an issue where one type of tree said "Demolish" instead of "Chop Down".
• Fixed an issue where a transparent part of the Train UI was blocking clicks to other UI.
• Rather than displaying the next train's spawn time, the UI will show an estimated arrival time.
• Finally fixed a navigation map generation error that occurred on the second load since start.
• - I'm not sure how often this actually had any real impact, but there would always be a weird log message about the navigation mesh having overlaps whenever I started a game, exited to menu, and then started or loaded another game. Turns out I just forgot to do some cleanup on exit.
• Switch LT/RT with LB/RB - Train UI now uses the bumpers for navigation, time uses triggers. This allows us to use bumpers for build menu tabs as well.
• Later steam engines require more water.
• Adjust cargo train/passenger train ratio in favor of cargo, to reduce immigration rate. (Having too many people was making the game too easy.)
• Block demolition (or chopping trees) when the storage is too full to hold the resulting refund.
• Keep the cursor in bounds when the camera moves, and vice versa.
• Reserve capacity when demolishing. This prevents a workaround where you queue up a bunch of demolitions, and then go over wood capacity when they finish.
• Fix a issue where trying to overwrite a save in "Save As..." would still hide the dialog, despite requiring further player input.
• Use Godot's own translations for built-in UI (i.e. Save & Load Dialogs)

Those of you who have followed Iron Village for awhile may have noticed the train cars getting a little more colorful recently - some parts get a little splash of color, others getting a full paint job. For today's Dev Diary, I wanted to talk a little about the train cars and their designs.
The first train that arrives at the station, consisting of a 4-4-0 steam engine, a tender full of coal, a passenger car, and a box car with gold. First, the steam engines - the locomotives that pull the trains. Unlike with a lot of the art in Iron Village, these were put together by me from the start (with the help of references of course, some of which were in Minifantasy anyway). The very first train asset was the engine you predominantly see in progression level 2: a 4-4-0 locomotive. A note on "4-4-0": that is an example of Whyte notation. Basically, there's 4 wheels (2 per side) in front that are basically just supporting the engine, 4 wheels that actually drive the train, and 0 wheels behind the drive wheels. (This makes me sound like much more of a train nerd than I really am, please don't give me that kind of credit, haha...)
The key to success in the first progression level is selling your agricultural goods to this train. It's led by a 0-4-0 and a tender that's nearly as big, and carries a hopper for grain and a box car for harvested giant mushrooms. Since the trains are the stars of the game, and the locomotive is the face of the train, I figured there should be some variety and a sense of progression with them. So the next locomotive is the first one - the little dinky 0-4-0. This one basically involved shrinking the height by a few pixels, and then chopping off a section from the front, resulting in a locomotive approximately 200% cuter. Because yes, apparently that is an adjective you can apply to coal burning steam tanks.
To wrap up the locomotives so far, here's what the star of the third progression level is going to look like - this bigger 2-6-4 engine. It is "done", but I'm still not entirely happy so far. Maybe I'll like it more once it's actually in the game, or maybe I'll be redoing a decent chunk of it, who knows. Next, you need fuel for your train. For these steam engines, we're using one of the most dangerous chemicals in history - coal! Rather than take up space on the locomotive though, we can just tow along our fuel in a separate car - and that is the tender. It's just barely big enough to fit four Latin characters, giving the railway some identity. (Can you change them? Not yet.)
A passenger train consisting of a steam engine, tender, and one passenger car. Typically trains will either serve just passengers or just freight - but this isn't always the case! The locomotive exists to pull other things though - so now we dive into all of the train cars. Your villagers arrive (and depart) on passenger cars, which are designed to at least be somewhat comfortable for people to ride on. Everything else is a freight car. Depending on the particular good's size, shape, and sensitivity to outdoor exposure, they can go on flat cars, hoppers (both open and closed), tankers, or box cars.
Two flat cars - one with logs and one with stone slabs. Flat cars are good for carrying big goods that don't mind getting a little wet. In Iron Village, that means stone cars (although they have a raised lip) and log cars, which have stakes on the sides to keep the logs in place. Hopper cars are basically big buckets carrying loose resources. These are ideal for things like coal, and you can slap a roof on top to protect loads of grain. Then there's tankers for when the resource is so loose, it's literally liquid.
The more boring box cars still have a little logo on the side. I've saved box cars for the end though, because they are the most versatile. Containerization isn't a thing in Iron Village, so most goods are just going into boxes. The exteriors also serve as blank canvases, so of course I had to get a little creative!
The pride train returns! Unlike during its debut, the doors actually work. That flexibility of colors was also what let me put together the pride train for my 2024 Pride Month demo release. (That train has since been rotated into the regular cast of trains in progression level 2.) Hope you found that interesting, or at least enjoyed looking at the pretty pictures! To close out, here's a preview of a couple of level 3 freight cars!

Thanks everyone for playing the Iron Village Demo - the feedback so far has been really helpful! I took care of some of the more urgent feedback (IMO) and put out a patch on Monday, but I've only just now been able to put together some release notes. Keep in mind that I cut the original demo a couple weeks before releasing it, so the 0.6.16 release includes a few extra goodies that weren't just bug fixes.

• Reworked the Train UI to be fixed in the bottom
• Originally this was attached to each train, and would toggle itself on when the train arrived at the station. This would anchor it to the train, and move if you moved the camera. Ultimately, getting it to play nicely with the static UI didn't seem worth the added complexity, so now it just lives at the bottom. The build panel will cover it up when you are building.

• Train UI elements that are just notifications are now in the top left of the screen.
• Gifts & passenger exchanges don't have any need for player input. The train UI that showed changes to these values took up a lot of valuable space, in the bottom, when it seemed more reasonable to display them next to the values that are getting changed. Since the resources and populations are displayed at the top left, I figured it made sense to put little notification bubbles there too.
• Unfortunately today I discovered that when villagers get on a train to leave, the number of outbound passengers doesn't update. This will have to be fixed later.

• Added smoke effects to houses (that have chimneys) that villagers are sleeping in.
• Demolishing stone roads gives you back the stone, as intended.
• Exiting a submenu of the in-game menu restores focus to the button you had pressed.

• Show a little bubble to indicate the player should chop down trees for wood.
• There was earlier feedback about this - that it was tricky to figure out how to get wood - or more accurately, "how do I get this weird brown thing?" I just hadn't prioritized it as much as I maybe should have, and it came up again.
• Adjusted the wood icon to be longer.
• All of the icons are within 8x8 pixels, so I ended up having to remove a bit of the outline - hopefully it looks a bit more log-like though.

• Custom Demolish Button
• The button to "demolish" trees is now an axe, and says "Chop Down".
• Fix an issue where typing a save name with W, A, S, or D causes the game camera to move as well.
• Passenger car doors now open when at the station.
• Clicking and dragging the mouse will no longer open the info box at the beginning or end of the click.
• You can now mouse over resources in the top left to get the name to pop up.
• All of the resources for the current progression level are now shown, even if you have 0 of that resource.
• In combination with the mouse-over tooltips, this should help players realize what the "brown thing" is.
• Fix a few instances where level 3 buildings are showing up in the build panel in level 2.

The Iron Village Demo is up on Steam now! I know the demo has been up for awhile now, and it's not a full release on Steam yet, but this is still a pretty huge milestone for me, IMO. I'm really hoping some catastrophic bug hasn't snuck in, waiting to pop out - I did test this pretty well, but of course there's some anxiety around launching on a bigger platform. Anyway, here's the release notes since 0.6.00:

• Added Steam integration - Basically just logs in and can show your friends what you're playing.
• Added a debug menu accessible via Shift-Ctrl-C - Basically just to make things easier for me, don't expect it to be 100% supported. Still, here's your prize for actually reading these :)
• Tileable buildings can now have an override texture. - This makes it so roads can cross railroad tracks without weird visual glitches.
• Added controller support - Confirmed to work with an XBox controller or Steam Deck, anything else will probably work, but the button prompts could be off.
• Added a new texture when a button is in focus - "In focus" is an additional button state - whereas having a mouse cursor over a button is "hovering", "in focus" just indicates that the controller was last at that button. It's a more passive state.
• Added a button in the menu to wishlist the game - The hustle never stops!
• A whole bunch of work for progression level 3 - This will be revealed later, but it's not available in the demo regardless.
• Added the ability to hold Shift to keep building after placing a building
• Paved roads now require stone, and unlock in progression level 2.
• Boxcar doors now open while at the station, and close on departure.
• Custom boxcar graphics on a per-freight basis - Now there's some actual variety to the boxcars based on what goods they contain
• Added sound effects when chopping down trees
• Added new music
• When loading a save, the game resumes from the beginning of the last music track it was playing.
• Added more hair colors - Not just realistic "natural" colors anymore.
• The Pride Train makes a return! - It now comes up as a potential freight train in level 2.
• The game now has an icon for itself, not just the company logo.
• Added a Portuguese (Brasil) translation, thanks to Thiago Mania
• Tweaked the Build Panel to actually fit the translations
• Right clicking will close build mode
• Screen resolution scaling logic has been adjusted - It's not so over sized on the Steam Deck anymore
• Added sounds when villagers are actively farming
• Many other buildings now also have sound effects
• The main menu now has art!
• When available, the Steam on screen keyboard will be used
• Added a Spanish translation
• Adjusted the railway status button to be two lines, better handling localisation
• The cost of a building now shows up near the cursor while building it
• Removed beer, added flour and an animated windmill - See Diary #25 for more of an explanation.
• Fixed a nasty bug with multi-tile workplaces where nobody could work at them after loading a save. - Nobody wants to work anymore!

Hi all, Ive got another dev diary for your consumption today. First off, an announcement: the Iron Village Demo will be launching on Steam on October 3rd! Theres been quite a few updates since the last demo release (full release notes to follow in a future dev diary), so feel free to give it a go even if you played the Itch.io version. That one will get updated too, dont worry! Be sure to wishlist to get a reminder once its available! The decently big change Im squeezing in before the demo release is a change to the level 2 resources. Currently, you can take wheat and combine it with water to make either bread or drinks. The drinks name was already lightly covering up that it was the manufacturing of beer, which I realized I would want to steer away from while Iron Village isnt designed for kids, I dont want to needlessly steer kids away from playing. The thing is, after thinking about it for awhile, just renaming beer doesnt really address the fact that its obviously beer. Like, youre putting wheat in a brewery and getting a drink that obviously resembles beer. I decided to remove beer entirely, but that leaves a bit of a gap in the resource tree, at least as far as player choice goes. The solution Ive come up with is flour. It doesnt fully address player choice, but it does at least maintain some complexity. Once youve harvested wheat, it can be sent to a mill. I was trying to figure out how to make the mill an interesting building, until I remembered that theres a Minifantasy asset for a windmill. I made some changes to it (mainly separating the blades from the base building and adjusting their size), but it really helps make the mill a distinctive part of town. https://www.instagram.com/p/C_560yjxh9r/ One of the dumbest videos Ive made, if you put the sound on. That of course means the rest of the production chain and train makeup have to change too. The bakery now takes flour and water instead of wheat and water. Trains that would normally buy wheat no longer do so. Just about every resource in the game has some way of selling it, but now theres the question of whether or not it makes sense for trains to buy flour, rather than its raw component (wheat) or its finished product (bread). So far the trains have either been purchasing raw goods (because they are not yet refinable in level 1), purchasing finished goods, or selling supplies for the player. For now, flour will be sellable to the bailout train the train that comes by is you run out of gold. Later levels may have trains for purchasing intermediate products such as flour, once more are present in the town. This does complicate backwards compatibility somewhat Im not promising backwards compatibility until the full release, but Im still putting in a best effort. Existing breweries will still load, but new ones will not be buildable. That way, old saves with breweries wont disrupt loading, and will still function but with the other changes, gameplay will no longer function the same way. Anyway, I hope that explains the changes that have been made, look forward to the updated demo coming to Steam on October 3rd!

Hey all, so its been awhile! Im back at my day job, so theres been less dev time, but Ive still been busy.
First up, controller support. I dont have fully customizable controls setup, but its now possible to play the game with just an Xbox controller. I assume other controllers work too, I just dont have any others to test with. It definitely took some work to retrofit the UI to work that way, since its a different paradigm. Instead of having a mouse cursor that you move around the screen (and always exists), one button is in focus at a time, and moving a joystick moves you to the next button. Godots UI system really helps, but you still have to wire everything together. That, and make sure something is always in focus, otherwise the controller basically gets stranded in the UI and cant select anything. The most complex part is that the joystick has to handle both navigating the map and navigating the UI. Its not terribly complex, basically it just needs to track if the player is actively using the UI, and allow the player to back out of the UI with the B button and give up focus of any buttons, just not completely trivial either.
The controller setup also means we can properly support the Steam Deck and Im happy to announce it works! Theres a few quirks to fix: I need to change the screen resolution scaling math, and at startup the steam deck compatibility tool gets confused and tries to run the game as a Windows app, rather than the native Linux app that it is. However, theres no major problems, it actually works! The last major thing to talk about is the demo. Its been available on itch.io for awhile, but itll be coming to Steam sometime in mid-September. Its uploaded and working already, so why wait to push it live on Steam? Marketing. Im very much not an expert, but based on new changes Valve has made for Steam, as well as the actual expert opinions Ive read, releasing the demo on Steam kind of counts as a game release now. Like, demos can now come up as new and trending in the store soon after releasing, and theres other algorithmic advantages for new titles which now include demos. So, I have to put my best foot forward for releasing the demo or at least, get a few more things together to be super presentable. Theres some parts of the game itself I want to get done, but the biggest thing is the actual store art, a.k.a. the capsule art. (Valve doesnt even remember why they call it that.) Ive commissioned an artist to make that, so therell be a bit of wait time there, but then itll be the big reveal of a demo thats already published. Lol. Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!