Elanis

Took me a moment, but the demo is updated on Itch and Steam as well! (I had to fix some issues with the CI/CD :) )

Sometimes we're in our idea and don't see that kind of thing, that happens to me too 😄

It looks nice :) But beware, contrast between text color and background is going to be a huge issue for lots of people :)

Alchemistry - 4th anniversary: new items, new achievements, Romanian version, stats and more! - Steam News Alchemistry has been released 4 years ago, let's bring some new things to the game and share some figures!

Today's a special day! Alchemistry released 4 years ago.

To celebrate this, I released a major update on the game: new items, achievements, a Romanian community translation, and more!

store.steampowered.com/news/app/173...

Thanks to everyone who bought the game 💕

#indiegamedev #solodev

Logistik - Development status, demo and playtests - Steam News Let's talk what I've already done in the game and what I'm planning to do in the next months :)

Just published a small devblog about my current progress on Logistik :)

store.steampowered.com/news/app/392...

#solodev #indiegamedev

#10 Regularly check your store tags

Yep, it's a reminder and an advice at the same time. Check that there's no new tag relevant to your game (steamdb.info/tags/time/). And check that the currently applied tags (when logged off) still apply, because it evolves!

#indiegamedev #solodev #tips #steam

Honestly, best kind of explanation

Steam downloading summaries: Logistik - 2.3MB Completed (1) Alchemistry - 2.3MB

Casual cool gamedev moment 😎

(Beta branch updated, but still, fun to log to Steam and have this eheh)

#indiegamedev #solodev

It may seem like a small change, or even a step backwards compared to previous GIFs, but there's a big difference in the code behind it! Before, everything was more or less generated and simulated by the display, the trains followed a Date.now() modulo, hardcoded in the drawing function, and that was it. With a few hours of refactoring (yesterday's work and a few evenings in mid-February), I was able to untangle all that and start to have real train management. I've separated it into three parts: - PlannedRollingStock: planned trains (I'm going from A to B, it's a freight train, its priority is 1), - RollingRollingStock(I need to find a better name): based on the planned, I can run a given train on a given track, and it's roughly at a given position => This is my WIP, the idea is to start simulating block reservations (preparing for railroad signals), and calculate the train's position every second, bring in new trains when possible, and of course make money when the train arrives at its destination. This is the core of the gameplay engine. - The shapes displayed on the screen (everything has been fine for a long time, now I just need to add the interpolation to have the train moving at 60/144fps as before, based on the data from the previous step).

The explanation I put in Discord about the changes after some nice GIF of the simulation working again. If you want details on how it works:

It's been hard to get some motivation to work on this because I didn't know where to start, and it felt like lots of work for no visual result.

But now that I feel I finally may have some real gameplay, I'm happy c:

I'm getting close to finishing the big refactoring in Logistik, it's been a few evening I'm motivated to work on it.

I'm back to what I had visually but with some big changes in the code. I went from faking trains movement using the timestamp and a module to having some real train simulation!

- Some way to get notifications when someone post a review on my game (I use the Steamy Discord bot for that)
- My wiki is autogenerated from the game configuration, too

🧵 (4/?)

- Some basic tests to check that I'm not missing a key in the translation files in some language
- A bot to check if I should update dependencies once in a while (to prevent updating 2 years of dependencies at once when I really need the update!)

🧵 (3/?)

What I automated:
- Build of my game to Windows/Linux/MacOS
- Some basic tests to check we can play the game from start to end
- Some basic tests to check I'm not missing files (e.g, when I have an icon, check that the disabled version of that same icon exists)

🧵 (2/?)

#9 Automate repetitive things

I know, it doesn't look like it's gamedev-related. But you'll be more than happy when you'll have something to auto build&deploy your game in case of an emergency patch, to have some tests or tools to help your work, ...

🧵 (1/?)

#indiegamedev #solodev #tips

SOME GENERAL TIPS FOR STEAM GAME DEMOS
(from someone who has played so many of them)

Note: These tips also apply to games in general! They're good tips!

Alrighty, not very active recently but I'm still alive!
The news:

Alchemistry's 4th year update is ready to be released in a dozen day
Logistik won't have a demo for early march as hoped (but that's okay!)
I wrote a dozen short stories in the last 2 months (I love doing this recently!)

#solodev

D'acc! Je ne pourrais pas dire, j'étais pas sur internet à l'époque ni ne suivait trop les discussions sur les jeux 😅

Controversé, vraiment? Je ne savais pas!

C'est probablement l'un des mes favoris aussi 😄

#8 Play your game

Don't test it (playing like a developer to test a feature), play it like a player. That's when you play it like a player that you'll realize there are some small things that bothers you and could bother the end-user :)

#indiegamedev #solodev #steam #tips

Found where the bug came from: basically, when drawing railways, I'm searching for collision with the forest polygon and was adding the collision in the order of the shape segment, not sorted by the distance to the origin point.

Fun gamedev debugging moment x)

I kept cleaning games I'm not interested in anymore or buying games so it didn't grow that fast but I slowly went from 20ish a decade ago to some stable-ish figure between 60 and 80 in the last years

Here we are, the translations are merged in the beta branch along with everything I planned for the (incoming!) 4th year anniversary update :)

It's pretty fast to do :)

#7 Zoom on important parts

A mistake I did initially was to record 1080p fullscreen GIFs or screenshots and put them in the long description.

Zoom on the important stuff or reduce the window size, it's easier to see detail when the image is 700ish px wide! :)

#indiegamedev #solodev #steam #tips

Response from a friend when he saw that:

That's another fun bug I just encountered 😅
Good thing I'm just about to rewrite of the train draw functions!

Trust me I'm a pro ahah

Since Day 1 I love the visuals of your GIF, definitely wishlisted it!

(And it kinda inspires me to try an idea of a game I have for a while 😁 This kind of project looks so fun to make!)

Thanks c:

It's like the 4th time a player translate one of my game like that and every single time it's really lovely :)

What a nice way to start the day, an Alchemistry player just opened a Pull Request on my public translations repository to translate the **whole game** in Romanian.

I love when the community gives some nice surprises like that 😍

If that doesn't motivate me to do more gamedev, nothing will !