Iron Village News

Diary #47 – Vacación, Deadly Pollen, and Conventions

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 what’s 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 didn’t 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 – it’s 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! There’s so many good games throughout the whole expo floor though, if you’re also at PAX East it’s 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. I’ll be making a more cohesive listing of features, but here’s 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, that’s on you.)
Added functionality to the Royal Palace so that the player can stock up everything they need for the ceremony.
Added 1×2 farm fields and 2×1 orchards, as well as 1×2 large houses.
Added new stone house variants.
Allowed for resource producing buildings to discard some output if it’s 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.

There’s 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 didn’t 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 isn’t 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 it’ll 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. We’re 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. It’s a little odd since it’s theoretically the same game, but that seems to be the price mobile game buyers are willing to pay. However, there’s a couple of complications there: Google Play Games for PC, and Itch.io.

First, Google Play Games for PC. There’s 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 – it’s a bit odd since there’s a literal PC version, but whatever, I don’t have any reason to stop it. If it works well though, I can’t 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 won’t stop be from making a sale for launch though.)

Second, Itch. While I haven’t exactly had a ton of sales there (6, to be exact), I’m still planning on supporting it. A purchase on Itch gets you a copy for all platforms, which will include the Android version too. I don’t really want to be selling the Android version for a higher price on Itch vs. Google Play, so I think I’m stuck with the full $7.99 on Android. That probably isn’t going to go down too well. 🙃 Still, PCs (of all operating systems) are the primary target for Iron Village, so I guess that’s just how it’s going to go.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

Diary #46 – Mid-April Status Update

Hey everyone, I just wanted to pop in with a little status report before I’m off on a family vacation for a bit over a week.

As I’ve mentioned before, the first main update to Iron Village is to give it a “soft ending”, tying up the (light) story of why you are building this village and signaling to players that there’s no more “content” beyond this point. For Iron Village, this takes the form of a City Establishment Ceremony. Monarch Faearn shows up in their Royal Train, conducts a ceremony, attends a feast, and then officially designates your town as a City. All of the preparation, as well as the train and the monarch themselves, have been implemented, the remaining work consists of having the ceremony actually occur, and figuring out what to do with the Monarch afterwards.

The Royal Ceremony isn’t the only thing in the 1.1 update though, there’s a few feature requests that made it in, as well as some features that didn’t quite make it into 1.0:

Buildings can now be freely moved: no more demolishing and rebuilding.
Production can now be paused: open a building’s info panel, and click pause (or resume) production.
Autopurchase: automatically buy resources from trains as they come by. This can be really helpful to combat food and water shortages.
Screenshot Mode: Hide all of the UI (apart from the little screenshot mode button) in order to take screenshots with just the pixel art.
Added rotated versions of farms & big houses. They are different buildings, you can’t actually rotate one into another, but that should give you more flexibility in building your towns.
When a building tries to store the resources at the end of a production cycle, it will wait until it can store something, but then discard the rest and move on. This should help with the Deep Mine, where before it would stop producing anything if even one storage was full – usually this made it really difficult to actually get gems.

No promises on what else will make it into 1.1, but the bigger features that are planned include:

Allow demolition even when there is insufficient storage for the resulting resources – as long as the game warns you first.
Make necessary changes to the UI to ensure the Android version works well before release (which may be pushed to May).
Zoom In and Out: Actually zoom in or out in the game, without also changing the UI scale.
Villager working animations: the way clothes are implemented might make this annoying to implement, but I have some animations for the villagers to actually mine, and I can probably pull something together for farming.

Also coming up in the beginning of May is the Boston GodotCon and PAX East – I’ll be at both! Just as an attendee though, I’m not shelling out for a PAX table, haha.

Diary #45 – How Much Does an Iron Village Cost to Make?

It turns out, $3681.54 USD.

That is quite a bit of money! And it doesn't even include my own labor! Although, it’s also a very low budget, depending on how you look at things. I’ll note that technically, none of these expenses are strictly mandatory. You can absolutely make a game for cheaper, if not free. This diary is not presented as advice, but rather a retelling of the development process from the point of view of dollars and cents. (and Euros!)

This definitely feels like one of the more personal dev diary entries. Like, even though we’re talking about something relatively boring like a budget, it is also exposing my privilege: I’ve been lucky enough to be able to scrape this money together over the course of a year and a half. Still though, as someone who believes in pay transparency, it’s time to put the money where my mouth is. My hope is that this will be helpful for anyone else who wants to attempt solo game development, and you can piece together what you really need. At the very least though, I hope some of you find it interesting.

I’ve broken this down by category, so it doesn’t correspond with when the expenses occurred. For the most part, these occurred over about a year and a half from September 2023 through March 2025.

[h2]Publishing Fees: $224[/h2]
This is the category for paying the gatekeepers. This is probably the most necessary expense of the bunch, but Itch.io is free, so you could still distribute a game without any of these.

$100 Steam Direct Product Submission Fee: Technically, this will count as $0 once the first check comes out, since they return this if your game makes at least $1000 USD in revenue. (Iron Village has done so, I’ll talk more about that in a future dev diary.) However, I haven’t seen it in the company account yet, so it counts as an expense.
$25 Google Play Developer Fee: This is a one-time payment, so any future Lunar Chippy releases on Android would be covered as well.
$99 Apple Developer Program: There’s a longer story to tell about this annual fee, but I signed up for two reasons: App Notarization for MacOS, and potential iOS development. App Notarization avoids the app getting blocked by the OS from running, which is user-overridable, but only if they make the effort to go into security settings and allow it. However, my account randomly got caught in some sort of automated spam or fraud detector algorithm after a few months, and Apple shut it down with no reason given. The support person was like, sorry, I can’t tell you anything, maybe try making a new account? If the Android version does really well, maybe I’ll try it again, but I’m not really in the habit of throwing away $100 for nothing.

[h2]Legal Fees: $770[/h2]
This is mostly the $520 for establishing an LLC (Limited Liability Company) as a separate legal entity, rather than just publishing as myself. Mobile games tend to be less restrictive towards companies (i.e. less rigid testing policies), whereas I don’t know much about what the difference is on Steam. Mainly though, this gets you legal protection in case you somehow get involved in legal issues – worst case scenario, the company is held responsible, not you.* Either way, my partner’s side of the family has multiple lawyers, so I couldn’t get away without doing this. The $520 is for establishing in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most US states are lower as far as I’m aware. Outside of the US, I have no idea what the costs would be.

There’s also a $250 fee for filing a trademark claim with the US Patent and Trademark Office for “Iron Village”, though this process is ongoing.

[h2]Assets: $483.57[/h2]
To be sure, this is not the cost of just what I actually used in Iron Village – a solid chunk of this was bundles of everything a creator made during seasonal sales on Itch.io. Those assets may or may not show up in later projects. Either way, it turns out I’m a sucker for pixel art.

In addition, some assets were obtained through Patreon memberships, which totaled $176.29 over the course of development.

[h2]Translations: $811.87[/h2]
This is the most expensive category, but also one that can act as a significant multiplier to letting people around the world play. Some places are fine playing games in English, even when it isn’t their first language: the most extreme example is probably the Netherlands, which is one of the best selling countries per capita for Iron Village, despite there being no Dutch translation. On the flip side, players definitely notice well done localizations, and there are many players who you otherwise wouldn’t reach without translating into their language.

$0 for Brazilian Portuguese: I was contacted by Thiago Mania pretty soon after the store page went up, who volunteered to do this translation.
$0 for Spanish: This was a combo of 4 years of high school Spanish classes, looking things up with Google Translate, and cross checking with the Brazilian Portuguese translations. Each of those three things by themselves is not enough: my Spanish is hella rusty, relying on Google Translate is a great way to get yourself into una situación embarasada**, and Portuguese is a totally different language, just with similar-sounding words.
$761.87 for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese: I worked with WeMavin Languages for these.
$50 for two international wire fees for those translations: turns out wiring money internationally can be expensive!

[h2]Capsule Art: 600€ ($653.03 USD)[/h2]
Capsule Art is the images you see that represent each game, usually some form of title and artwork. It’s the digital equivalent of box art. For Iron Village this was done by NicoSquare, a French artist, hence the payment in euros.

[h2]Physical Marketing: $739.07[/h2]
This was mostly related to attending BostonFIG, but includes other physical supplies.

$38.95 for the shiny Lunar Chippy Games stickers
$118.75 for a bunch of train sticker sheets I was going to hand out at BostonFIG, but didn’t arrive in time.
$368.06 for the BostonFIG Indie Sponsorship
$157.36 for a a ton of business cards, the posterboard, and stand
$55.95 for a Target run to get other supplies (mouse, headphones, tablecloth, etc.) for BostonFIG

[h2]Online Marketing[/h2]
In hindsight, this was an area that could’ve done with more investment, largely on time. I did end up doing one paid short video (I forget how much it was, maybe $20?), and talked with a couple of PR companies, but those didn’t really go anywhere. Thanks to everything else going on in my life, there wasn’t really time to make a PR push myself, so I was left to a bit of social media and hoping that the Steam algorithm would look kindly upon me. I think it did, but I’m calling this out as an area that could have used more love.

[h2]Total: $3681.54[/h2]
The flip side of this, of course, is income. That is going to get its own dev diary, once the checks start coming and I can see exactly how much Steam is taking for itself. (Steam pays out by the end of the month for all the sales that occurred the previous month, so that’s the end of April for Iron Village.)

*Technically you can be held liable if you do something so far outside of the scope of your business that it’s your fault personally, but as I understand it that’s a much higher bar. I am not a lawyer, do not listen to me for legal advice.
**The joke here is that embarasada does not, in fact, mean embarrassed. It actually means pregnant.

Iron Village is a sweet super-casual city-builder and railway manager out now

If you prefer your games a bit cosier and sweeter perhaps Iron Village might be your next one to pick up. Especially if you like building and management sims.

Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/04/iron-village-is-a-sweet-super-casual-city-builder-and-railway-manager-out-now/

Diary #44 – Oops, 1.0.09 Release Notes

So I was feeling proud, thanks to my efforts, all of your efforts as players of the demo, as well as Bea’s efforts in bug hunting, the 1.0.01 release went off without any major game-breaking errors. I managed to mess that up with 1.0.06 and those doors nobody asked for 😅. It’s possible that plenty of you never actually noticed the bug, but here’s what happens:

A villager is heading towards home. Before 1.0.06, they just knew the game coordinates where they were going, and that they were going to rest. However, in order to get them to open doors just before arriving, I added a variable to store the building they were going to.
You upgrade the house that they live in. (Demolishing it might cause the same problem.) This technically destroys their old house and builds a new one in the same location, except your original gold payment gets credited to the new building.
They get really close to their destination and try to open the door on a building that no longer exists. (The same things happens if you demolish it while they’re sleeping: they finish sleeping, then try to open that door.)
In many cases, Godot’s error handling deals with it decently well, and apart from a missing door sound & animation, the villager moves on with their life.
However, the old building and door may have already gone through garbage collection. To oversimplify a technical concept, the garbage truck has already come by to take the trash out of the dumpster. So Iron Village crashes.

Since there’s a possibility of crashes, and the error handling can have side effects in how the simulation runs, I’m pushing out another build, 1.0.09. As an added bonus, you get a new piece of UI and a couple of tweaks I was working on for 1.1. (Some other incomplete features have been disabled.) Here’s the full list:

Fixed coal and iron hoppers to carry their loads 1 pixel higher.
Added “Meals” to the Level 4 Permit Document

Autosale Notifications! I meant to get these into 1.0.06, but didn’t quite find the time. Anyway, now when an autosale gets made, you’ll see a summary of the gold you made, plus the goods that were sold.