Iron Village News

Thanks everyone for playing the Iron Village Demo - the feedback so far has been really helpful! I took care of some of the more urgent feedback (IMO) and put out a patch on Monday, but I've only just now been able to put together some release notes. Keep in mind that I cut the original demo a couple weeks before releasing it, so the 0.6.16 release includes a few extra goodies that weren't just bug fixes.

• Reworked the Train UI to be fixed in the bottom
  
• Originally this was attached to each train, and would toggle itself on when the train arrived at the station. This would anchor it to the train, and move if you moved the camera. Ultimately, getting it to play nicely with the static UI didn't seem worth the added complexity, so now it just lives at the bottom. The build panel will cover it up when you are building.
  

• Train UI elements that are just notifications are now in the top left of the screen.
  
• Gifts & passenger exchanges don't have any need for player input. The train UI that showed changes to these values took up a lot of valuable space, in the bottom, when it seemed more reasonable to display them next to the values that are getting changed. Since the resources and populations are displayed at the top left, I figured it made sense to put little notification bubbles there too.
  
• Unfortunately today I discovered that when villagers get on a train to leave, the number of outbound passengers doesn't update. This will have to be fixed later.
  

• Added smoke effects to houses (that have chimneys) that villagers are sleeping in.
  
• Demolishing stone roads gives you back the stone, as intended.
  
• Exiting a submenu of the in-game menu restores focus to the button you had pressed.
  

• Show a little bubble to indicate the player should chop down trees for wood.
  
• There was earlier feedback about this - that it was tricky to figure out how to get wood - or more accurately, "how do I get this weird brown thing?" I just hadn't prioritized it as much as I maybe should have, and it came up again.
  
• Adjusted the wood icon to be longer.
  
• All of the icons are within 8x8 pixels, so I ended up having to remove a bit of the outline - hopefully it looks a bit more log-like though.
  

• Custom Demolish Button
  
• The button to "demolish" trees is now an axe, and says "Chop Down".
  
• Fix an issue where typing a save name with W, A, S, or D causes the game camera to move as well.
  
• Passenger car doors now open when at the station.
  
• Clicking and dragging the mouse will no longer open the info box at the beginning or end of the click.
  
• You can now mouse over resources in the top left to get the name to pop up.
  
• All of the resources for the current progression level are now shown, even if you have 0 of that resource.
  
• In combination with the mouse-over tooltips, this should help players realize what the "brown thing" is.
  
• Fix a few instances where level 3 buildings are showing up in the build panel in level 2.
  

The Iron Village Demo is up on Steam now! I know the demo has been up for awhile now, and it's not a full release on Steam yet, but this is still a pretty huge milestone for me, IMO. I'm really hoping some catastrophic bug hasn't snuck in, waiting to pop out - I did test this pretty well, but of course there's some anxiety around launching on a bigger platform.

Anyway, here's the release notes since 0.6.00:

• Added Steam integration
  - Basically just logs in and can show your friends what you're playing.
  
• Added a debug menu accessible via Shift-Ctrl-C
  - Basically just to make things easier for me, don't expect it to be 100% supported. Still, here's your prize for actually reading these :)
  
• Tileable buildings can now have an override texture.
  - This makes it so roads can cross railroad tracks without weird visual glitches.
  
• Added controller support
  - Confirmed to work with an XBox controller or Steam Deck, anything else will probably work, but the button prompts could be off.
  
• Added a new texture when a button is in focus
  - "In focus" is an additional button state - whereas having a mouse cursor over a button is "hovering", "in focus" just indicates that the controller was last at that button. It's a more passive state.
  
• Added a button in the menu to wishlist the game
  - The hustle never stops!
  
• A whole bunch of work for progression level 3
  - This will be revealed later, but it's not available in the demo regardless.
  
• Added the ability to hold Shift to keep building after placing a building
  
• Paved roads now require stone, and unlock in progression level 2.
  
• Boxcar doors now open while at the station, and close on departure.
  
• Custom boxcar graphics on a per-freight basis
  - Now there's some actual variety to the boxcars based on what goods they contain
  
• Added sound effects when chopping down trees
  
• Added new music
  
• When loading a save, the game resumes from the beginning of the last music track it was playing.
  
• Added more hair colors
  - Not just realistic "natural" colors anymore.
  
• The Pride Train makes a return!
  - It now comes up as a potential freight train in level 2.
  
• The game now has an icon for itself, not just the company logo.
  
• Added a Portuguese (Brasil) translation, thanks to Thiago Mania
  
• Tweaked the Build Panel to actually fit the translations
  
• Right clicking will close build mode
  
• Screen resolution scaling logic has been adjusted
  - It's not so over sized on the Steam Deck anymore
  
• Added sounds when villagers are actively farming
  
• Many other buildings now also have sound effects
  
• The main menu now has art!
  
• When available, the Steam on screen keyboard will be used
  
• Added a Spanish translation
  
• Adjusted the railway status button to be two lines, better handling localisation
  
• The cost of a building now shows up near the cursor while building it
  
• Removed beer, added flour and an animated windmill
  - See Diary #25 for more of an explanation.
  
• Fixed a nasty bug with multi-tile workplaces where nobody could work at them after loading a save.
  - Nobody wants to work anymore!
  

Hi all, I’ve got another dev diary for your consumption today. First off, an announcement: the Iron Village Demo will be launching on Steam on October 3rd! There’s been quite a few updates since the last demo release (full release notes to follow in a future dev diary), so feel free to give it a go even if you played the Itch.io version. That one will get updated too, don’t worry!

Be sure to wishlist to get a reminder once it’s available!

The decently big change I’m squeezing in before the demo release is a change to the level 2 resources. Currently, you can take wheat and combine it with water to make either bread or “drinks”. The drinks name was already lightly covering up that it was the manufacturing of beer, which I realized I would want to steer away from – while Iron Village isn’t designed for kids, I don’t want to needlessly steer kids away from playing.

The thing is, after thinking about it for awhile, just renaming beer doesn’t really address the fact that it’s obviously beer. Like, you’re putting wheat in a brewery and getting a drink that obviously resembles beer. I decided to remove beer entirely, but that leaves a bit of a gap in the resource tree, at least as far as player choice goes.

The solution I’ve come up with is flour. It doesn’t fully address player choice, but it does at least maintain some complexity. Once you’ve harvested wheat, it can be sent to a mill. I was trying to figure out how to make the mill an interesting building, until I remembered that there’s a Minifantasy asset for a windmill. I made some changes to it (mainly separating the blades from the base building and adjusting their size), but it really helps make the mill a distinctive part of town.

https://www.instagram.com/p/C_560yjxh9r/
One of the dumbest videos I’ve made, if you put the sound on.

That of course means the rest of the production chain and train makeup have to change too. The bakery now takes flour and water instead of wheat and water. Trains that would normally buy wheat no longer do so. Just about every resource in the game has some way of selling it, but now there’s the question of whether or not it makes sense for trains to buy flour, rather than its raw component (wheat) or its finished product (bread). So far the trains have either been purchasing raw goods (because they are not yet refinable in level 1), purchasing finished goods, or selling supplies for the player. For now, flour will be sellable to the “bailout train” – the train that comes by is you run out of gold. Later levels may have trains for purchasing intermediate products such as flour, once more are present in the town.

This does complicate backwards compatibility somewhat – I’m not promising backwards compatibility until the full release, but I’m still putting in a best effort. Existing breweries will still load, but new ones will not be buildable. That way, old saves with breweries won’t disrupt loading, and will still function – but with the other changes, gameplay will no longer function the same way.

Anyway, I hope that explains the changes that have been made, look forward to the updated demo coming to Steam on October 3rd!

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.



First 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!