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!