So things are changing over here, and I’m going to potentially overshare personal life things that are relevant to Iron Village & Lunar Chippy Games as a whole.
First off, the job at the global megacorp, or whatever I called it back at the start of these dev diaries, is coming to an end. There was a “voluntary exit program” with severance pay offered, and I figured it was time to make the jump. I’m not going to go into all of the details (personal privacy reasons mainly; everything I’m talking about is discussing working conditions and is therefore protected activity in the US – at least as long as the NLRB exists 🙃), but the gist of it is:
- Growing disillusionment with the company, its direction, and especially its leadership
- Other parts of the company allegedly profiting off of genocide (according to the UN)
- Having vaguely defined “performance issues” or nitpicks raised by my manager every week, only for the goal posts to shift every time I successfully deal with them.
- All of the above completely destroying any semblance of mental health.
Based on some of that, I probably should have left a couple of years ago, but now the opportunity has lined up to bail out of that job. With a decent amount of savings, I’ll be working full time on a combination of recovery & Lunar Chippy Games.
So where is Iron Village right now? The different analysis windows are now done, as are the HQ buildings. The fifth level technically isn’t a headquarters upgrade, instead there’s a separate building on the other side of the tracks: the Immigration Office. This is the answer to the question, “why can’t I have more than 12x villagers?” (usually 122 or 124) – there’s a population cap. With the Immigration Office, you can adjust the cap to your heart’s content. Want to set it to 0? Sure, it won’t kick anyone out, but you want get any new villagers. Want to modestly increase it to 2147483647 + 1? You’re limited to going up in 5s, so that may take awhile. But theoretically, sure! Otherwise though, this lets you keep growing your town/city as much as you want, until you run out of space.
With that, the “star features” are done, although there’s a decent set of other features & bugfixes to go. The main thing I’m trying to do this time is get all of the text finalized now, so I only have to send over one batch of text to the translators. Every time I thought I got everything together, a week or two later I’d discover, “oh shit, I need to add text here too”. So instead, I’m trying to wait until I get way more done before sending it over, and hopefully this time I’ll actually pull it off. With this plan, I should be able to get 1.2 out some time in September 🤞.
Now above I mentioned I would be working on “Lunar Chippy Games”, not just “Iron Village”. When I started work on Iron Village, the plan was to make a small game as a learning exercise, and see if getting into game dev is a feasible plan. The answer so far is… maybe? Last time I ran the numbers myself (a few days ago), the company has lost about $100 USD. Considering the profit margin the last time I went through expenses, that isn’t terrible? This whole thing is so close to actually making profit, not bad for a little game without enough marketing! But obviously that isn’t enough to live off of, so it’s time for game #2: this time with full time work and actual marketing! I’ll have a proper announcement at some point, but this is a heads up that Iron Village development will be slowing down.
The thing I’m going back and forth on is Patreon: I think it could be a helpful way to make this a little more sustainable, but also it just doesn’t seem to be a common way to fund a lot of games. (The huge exception here is adult games – but I don’t know if that’s just because it’s a different market, or if that funding model is actually applicable here.) Is there a reason for that? Is it just gamers™ thinking it’s greedy, or is it actually too much? Do I have to start putting some dev diaries behind a paywall, or just figure out something else I can do that’s more easily monetizable? Maybe it’s a bad idea, maybe it’s a good one, I’m curious if anyone has thoughts?
Anyway, TL;DR is the full time job is ending, so there’s going to be more dev time – but not on Iron Village. I still might put some more updates into it post-1.2, but I have to start deprioritizing it in favor of the next game.
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