Hey all, so it’s been awhile! I’m back at my day job, so there’s been less dev time, but I’ve still been busy. The biggest news is Iron Village is up on Steam! You can go ahead and head over to Steam to add it to your wishlist – and please do, it helps make us look better to the algorithms, and notifies you once it launches.

Next up, controller support. I don’t have fully customizable controls setup, but it’s now possible to play the game with just an Xbox controller. I assume other controllers work too, I just don’t have any others to test with. It definitely took some work to retrofit the UI to work that way, since it’s 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. Godot’s 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 can’t select anything.

The most complex part is that the joystick has to handle both navigating the map and navigating the UI. It’s 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 I’m happy to announce it works! There’s 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, there’s no major problems, it actually works!

The last major thing to talk about is the demo. It’s been available on itch.io for awhile, but it’ll be coming to Steam sometime in mid-September. It’s uploaded and working already, so why wait to push it live on Steam? Marketing. I’m very much not an expert, but based on new changes Valve has made for Steam, as well as the actual expert opinions I’ve 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 there’s 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. There’s 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 doesn’t even remember why they call it that.) I’ve commissioned an artist to make that, so there’ll be a bit of wait time there, but then it’ll be the big reveal… of a demo that’s already published. Lol.

Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading!