A literal anti-fascist locomotive at the Museo del Ferrocarril de Madrid. (Full description in the image below.)
Alt text for this available at https://bsky.app/profile/mgruar.bsky.social/post/3lnfxgflins22 It has been a properly insane three weeks since the last dev diary. Somehow I have actually got a bit of work done on Iron Village (more on that in a bit), but I felt like sharing a least a little of whats happened:

• A pretty great family vacation to Madrid.
• Horribly bad pollen allergies that made me legit need to take sick days from the day job and this job.
• GodotCon & PAX East

The first two are fairly self-explanatory, I hope. On Tuesday and Wednesday I went to GodotCon Boston, where the regular GodotCon expanded to hold an additional event over on this side of the Atlantic. There was a small showcase of games being worked on with Godot (the open source game engine Iron Village uses), as well as a bunch of talks around Godot and game dev in general. I didnt get to stay for quite as long as I wanted, but it was great to meet so many Godot devs, and the talks that I did attend were really interesting its definitely going to have an impact on how the next game gets built.
Free (and paid) handouts at the Boston Indie Game Developers booth (18105). I was also at PAX East on Thursday! There are prints of the Iron Village capsule art available for sale at the Boston Indie Game Dev booth if you feel like supporting them! Theres so many good games throughout the whole expo floor though, if youre also at PAX East its really worth checking them out.

Iron Village 1.1 Progress

An screenshot of Iron Village 1.0.27, with a lot of the 1.1 features implemented. Also featured: the grey void. Work on version 1.1 is in the finishing stretches now. Ill be making a more cohesive listing of features, but heres the rough version of what has been done so far:

• The Traditional Chinese language option has been split into Taiwan and Hong Kong versions.
• Korean and Russian have been added as language choices.
• Added the Royal Train that brings in Monarch Faearn for the City Establishment Ceremony
• Added Autopurchase functionality
• Added the ability to pause (and resume) production in resource producing buildings
• Added zoom buttons (although right now zooming out in a large window will allow you to see the grey void off the edge of the map).
• Added Screenshot Mode, which hides the UI for the purpose of taking screenshots. (The mode does not handle actual screenshot taking though, thats on you.)
• Added functionality to the Royal Palace so that the player can stock up everything they need for the ceremony.
• Added 12 farm fields and 21 orchards, as well as 12 large houses.
• Added new stone house variants.
• Allowed for resource producing buildings to discard some output if its able to store other output. This is mainly for the deep mine, so you can still get gems even if stone storage is full.
• If you use a different window resolution, the game should now remember it.

Theres a bit more work planned, as well as a good amount of testing, but it really is the finishing stretches!

Iron Village on Android

So remember when I said the Android version was coming out in April? That obviously didnt happen, but I should get it out with 1.1. The main thing that has to be done is handling text boxes (they can get covered up by the keyboard, which isnt ideal), and there is some UI that might need to be bigger. Apart from that, the main thing is getting the Google Play Games SDK in, and then itll be at full feature parity. There is the open question of price. Obviously most mobile games are free, with somewhat manipulative ways of getting money later through in app purchases. Were going with the old school route of a paid product (with a free demo). A lot of the time when a Steam game gets an Android port, the Android version is sold for less. Its a little odd since its theoretically the same game, but that seems to be the price mobile game buyers are willing to pay. However, theres a couple of complications there: Google Play Games for PC, and Itch.io. First, Google Play Games for PC. Theres a new feature in Beta that most games were opted into by default where you can play Android games on a PC. I still need to test how Iron Village works in that situation its a bit odd since theres a literal PC version, but whatever, I dont have any reason to stop it. If it works well though, I cant justify giving it the Android version a lower price tag it would also mean selling the PC version for cheaper on one store than another. (That wont stop be from making a sale for launch though.) Second, Itch. While I havent exactly had a ton of sales there (6, to be exact), Im still planning on supporting it. A purchase on Itch gets you a copy for all platforms, which will include the Android version too. I dont really want to be selling the Android version for a higher price on Itch vs. Google Play, so I think Im stuck with the full $7.99 on Android. That probably isnt going to go down too well. Still, PCs (of all operating systems) are the primary target for Iron Village, so I guess thats just how its going to go. Anyway, thanks for reading!

[ 2025-05-10 13:08:51 CET ] [ Original post ]