Warsim 9th Anniversary
Hello everyone!
As of March 4th just gone, Warsim finally turned 9 (well technically, Mar 4th 2015 was the first mention on the internet of Warsim, and I honestly don't remember when exactly I began before that)
I've written this article to celebrate this awesome milestone and we've got a little update coming out soon after hopefully!
This is a screenshot of Warsim's first mention on the internet, by 2015 me showing off my random little demo project to absolutely no one.
I had no plans or ambitions for it, it was just a cool little thing I was messing around with. If I'd known back then that it would evolve into my fulltime job for years and I'd still be coding in it 9 years on I'd have laughed and said 'SURE'.
[h2]Warsim's Beginning and it's Awesome Community[/h2]
It started as an experiment to learn coding, and I ended up getting extremely carried away and just kept adding to it and expanding to it. I think anyone who scrolls through the dev logs for the last few years and actually manages to make it will agree with me that Warsim is featurecreep the game.
As soon as people started leaving comments and playing it I was hooked. I loved this feeling and I still do which Is why I've tried my best to reply to every comment the game has ever had!
After a few years on reddit and getting lots of awesome feedback, Warsim, which at the time was available for free on itch.io, ended up on steam late 2017. This was a turning point for me and I remember worrying I was being scummy charging for it, especially given It had been a free project for so long.
The community response at the time was really supportive and when the game finally hit steam it was wild seeing people buying copies of it everyday.
Over the years and with a lot of work it grew and grew and so many awesome people stopped along the way to support the development in some form or another.
You guys rock, and I've scrapbooked together some of my favourite comments from over the years
A collage I made a few years ago
And a recent batch of dev fuel
I am not joking when I say these kinds of comments and reviews over the years have brought literal tears to my eyes many a time. It's the greatest fuel I've ever seen so I owe a great thanks to the tens of thousands of you that have been commenting over the years
[h2]Warsim's Codebase[/h2]
Built in C++ and written from it's very first line to it's 600 thousandth, It has become an absolute behemoth that I'd wager is among some of the biggest functional video game single file codebases on earth (mostly cause no one else would be so stupid)
Warsim is a big old beast, and so adding and expanding to it is a tough task sometimes, but I've managed it all these years so far!
As you can see the codebase is massive, which also led to the biggest moment of Warsim's history so far, I shared a post on r/programminghumor talking about how bad the codebase is and lots of people reacted and ended up checking out Warsim causing a gigantic spike in 2022 which was probably the greatest day of my gamedev career so far haha.
Who knows what lays around the corner though right?... Right?
[h2]Warsim over the years[/h2]
Warsim though originally a test project back in 2015, didn't make it's way onto steam until 2017, after which over 176 updates were released! I've managed to get some cool stats on Warsim and it's development, and my lovely girlfriend trawled through all 176 updates to manually count up the features and bugs for this report!
[h3]FEATURES BY YEAR[/h3]
Absolutely insane list, you can see where I was going nuclear in the warsim code for a few years haha!
In total since steam release until last year I added 16641 new features to Warsim and fixed 4226 bugs, so thank you for all those many many many many bug reports over the years guys! The worst thing is as great as it is to fix all those bugs I created them too lmao!
[h3]UPDATES PER YEAR[/h3]
[h3]WISHLISTS AND COPIES SOLD[/h3]
Some stats of Warsim's copies sold and wishlists on steam over the years. It's interesting to see this stuff because even as a dev that sees these charts all the time I never know what it's going to do or what tomorrow holds, it's incredible that this many copies have been sold and over the years, to all of you who are part of that I appreciate you!
[h3]The Raw Stats[/h3]
And also while scouring for stats on Warsim for this article, I found this! Now I don't know how many of those are the same people but that is more than 10 times the population of my country... Mindblown
[h2]My favourite updates from over the years![/h2]
It's a really tough one to choose a favourite update over the course of 9 years and 176 total updates in that time, especially when some of them had 100s and one time even 1000+ things in them, but I did it in the fairest manner possible, a tournament!
And after four rounds, this was the final result. Ultimately my favourite update is the one that took the game from 300k races to 50+ million and made it essentially infinite! Still makes me happy thinking about how exciting this was when it first came out and all these wild races first started getting spat out into the game. Bliss!
I've played 1000s of hours of Warsim but I still cannot predict or prepare for the random races that get spat out, and there are still some that surprise me.
[h3]Honorable Mentions to:[/h3]
[h2]The future of Warsim[/h2]
This is something that I've over the years gotten wrong trying to guess, because being honest I never saw myself working on this game for 9 years, but now I can't truly see myself ever completely putting it away. I mean it's on my body for life now...
But in all seriousness if I locked myself in a room and vowed only to work on Warsim til the end of my days I'd still have 1000s of things to expand and add to it by the time I hit 100 years old. My Warsim to do list is currently over 2000 features long and a constant wave after wave of new bright minds leaving comments with their ideas and thoughts ensures that list isn't shrinking.
I'm currently split between working on my new game project, writing and playing music with my band, and coding and working on Warsim stuff and by god is it tough to manage at times, but hey it's a lot of different dreams all at once so I can't complain.
To you folks who've supported the game in any capacity, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You guys have allowed me to live full time on an ascii game that runs out of windows CMD in 2024 hahaha, I don't know who's madder, you guys or me!
This 9 years Warsim has been a growing hope in my life and it's given me access to opportunities and beauty that my life would have been devoid of if I'd not spent the time with it. Everyone who ever bought a copy of Warsim made it all possible so thank you guys! And no to those asking, I will NEVER do Warsim DLC :)
I don't want to paygate people from more Warsim related fun, all updates for life will be free always, here's to many more good years!
Much love,
Huw
As of March 4th just gone, Warsim finally turned 9 (well technically, Mar 4th 2015 was the first mention on the internet of Warsim, and I honestly don't remember when exactly I began before that)
I've written this article to celebrate this awesome milestone and we've got a little update coming out soon after hopefully!
This is a screenshot of Warsim's first mention on the internet, by 2015 me showing off my random little demo project to absolutely no one.
I had no plans or ambitions for it, it was just a cool little thing I was messing around with. If I'd known back then that it would evolve into my fulltime job for years and I'd still be coding in it 9 years on I'd have laughed and said 'SURE'.
[h2]Warsim's Beginning and it's Awesome Community[/h2]
It started as an experiment to learn coding, and I ended up getting extremely carried away and just kept adding to it and expanding to it. I think anyone who scrolls through the dev logs for the last few years and actually manages to make it will agree with me that Warsim is featurecreep the game.
As soon as people started leaving comments and playing it I was hooked. I loved this feeling and I still do which Is why I've tried my best to reply to every comment the game has ever had!
After a few years on reddit and getting lots of awesome feedback, Warsim, which at the time was available for free on itch.io, ended up on steam late 2017. This was a turning point for me and I remember worrying I was being scummy charging for it, especially given It had been a free project for so long.
The community response at the time was really supportive and when the game finally hit steam it was wild seeing people buying copies of it everyday.
Over the years and with a lot of work it grew and grew and so many awesome people stopped along the way to support the development in some form or another.
You guys rock, and I've scrapbooked together some of my favourite comments from over the years
A collage I made a few years ago
And a recent batch of dev fuel
I am not joking when I say these kinds of comments and reviews over the years have brought literal tears to my eyes many a time. It's the greatest fuel I've ever seen so I owe a great thanks to the tens of thousands of you that have been commenting over the years
[h2]Warsim's Codebase[/h2]
Built in C++ and written from it's very first line to it's 600 thousandth, It has become an absolute behemoth that I'd wager is among some of the biggest functional video game single file codebases on earth (mostly cause no one else would be so stupid)
Warsim is a big old beast, and so adding and expanding to it is a tough task sometimes, but I've managed it all these years so far!
As you can see the codebase is massive, which also led to the biggest moment of Warsim's history so far, I shared a post on r/programminghumor talking about how bad the codebase is and lots of people reacted and ended up checking out Warsim causing a gigantic spike in 2022 which was probably the greatest day of my gamedev career so far haha.
Who knows what lays around the corner though right?... Right?
[h2]Warsim over the years[/h2]
Warsim though originally a test project back in 2015, didn't make it's way onto steam until 2017, after which over 176 updates were released! I've managed to get some cool stats on Warsim and it's development, and my lovely girlfriend trawled through all 176 updates to manually count up the features and bugs for this report!
[h3]FEATURES BY YEAR[/h3]
- 2017 - 729 Features (+343 bugs fixed)
- 2018 - 3267 features (+450 bugs fixed)
- 2019 - 3204 features (+1397 bugs fixed)
- 2020 - 4624 features (+746 bugs fixed)
- 2021 - 2594 features (+1106 bugs fixed)
- 2022 - 1670 features (+95 bugs fixed)
- 2023 - 553 features (+89 bugs fixed)
Absolutely insane list, you can see where I was going nuclear in the warsim code for a few years haha!
In total since steam release until last year I added 16641 new features to Warsim and fixed 4226 bugs, so thank you for all those many many many many bug reports over the years guys! The worst thing is as great as it is to fix all those bugs I created them too lmao!
[h3]UPDATES PER YEAR[/h3]
- 2017 - 13 Updates (though I joined steam late 2017 so this doesn't include the updates posted on reddit)
- 2018 - 29 Updates (picked up steam after giving it a break for a while, revitalised this is when Warsim become a fulltime job)
- 2019 - 53 Updates (I was obsessed with Warsim and it's development at this point, I'm pretty sure during this I did two develop-a-thons where I released a decently sized game update every single day for a full week... I thought it would be hard but it was harder than I thought)
- 2020 - 42 Updates (The pandemic I kept plugging away and putting my heart and soul into it)
- 2021 - 21 Updates (This was a deceptively busy year too with some massive updates including the long awaited combat update) (Also kind of mad 21 updates in 2021)
- 2022 - 7 Updates (2022 was a hectic and tough year for me and I'm surprised there were as many as 7 updates haha)
- 2023 - 10 Updates (The push to full release finally)
[h3]WISHLISTS AND COPIES SOLD[/h3]
Some stats of Warsim's copies sold and wishlists on steam over the years. It's interesting to see this stuff because even as a dev that sees these charts all the time I never know what it's going to do or what tomorrow holds, it's incredible that this many copies have been sold and over the years, to all of you who are part of that I appreciate you!
[h3]The Raw Stats[/h3]
- 2017 - 6370 Copies sold (+1298 wishlists)
- 2018 - 3163 Copies sold (+1231 wishlists)
- 2019 - 6695 Copies sold (+2532 wishlists)
- 2020 - 8072 Copies sold (+2600 wishlists)
- 2021 - 6871 Copies sold (+1652 wishlists)
- 2022 - 27592 Copies sold (+8834 wishlists)
- 2023 - 14486 Copies sold (5772 wishlists)
And also while scouring for stats on Warsim for this article, I found this! Now I don't know how many of those are the same people but that is more than 10 times the population of my country... Mindblown
[h2]My favourite updates from over the years![/h2]
It's a really tough one to choose a favourite update over the course of 9 years and 176 total updates in that time, especially when some of them had 100s and one time even 1000+ things in them, but I did it in the fairest manner possible, a tournament!
And after four rounds, this was the final result. Ultimately my favourite update is the one that took the game from 300k races to 50+ million and made it essentially infinite! Still makes me happy thinking about how exciting this was when it first came out and all these wild races first started getting spat out into the game. Bliss!
I've played 1000s of hours of Warsim but I still cannot predict or prepare for the random races that get spat out, and there are still some that surprise me.
[h3]Honorable Mentions to:[/h3]
- The Overwhelmingly Positive Update - This was such a fantasitc milestone and one of the happiest moments in my gamedev career, having a game with such a high rating when the game finally hit 500+ reviews at that level. As a result this update contained 500 features and fixes, including the Gnome Casino! That's right this is the update where that wild place came from and I now literally have it's mayor tattooed on my arm for life haha.
- Warsim's Not Dead Update - Made in 2018 when I came back from a backpacking trip for a month and Warsim had been decaying and I wasn't sure what I was doing. This update was a rallying call to myself to work on warsim professionally and it was at this point where I really started putting the work in fulltime
- The Lands Beyond Update - A fairly recent one but such a fantasitc addition, the adding of a shit ton of unpredictable locations, a personal favourite to me because like the race generator this is stuff that even I as the dev can't so easily predict, which keeps things fresh and enjoyable even after 9 years and 1000s of hours
- The Arena Remastered Update - This overhauled the arena into something way more fun, and as an avid arena fan that's already a big plus, but on the other side of it as the dev, this was a super fun update to make, making the announcer sound effects for the arena and pitchshifting them had me cackling on the floor when I first experienced them in game.
- Community Content Update - This was an update adding a bunch of community suggested content, with more than 1000 additions this literally broke steams announcement system and I had to split it up into three of these announcements, for that alone I love it. It was also lovely to have so many people take part and submit their ideas in such a short period of time to make this. I did this over my birthday during the first lockdowns in Covid and it made my birthday way brighter at the time!
- Let the People Drink - This update was awesome, a player suggested the ability to drink in taverns so I thought, why not and added it. Since then it's become an area of Warsim I enjoy and that was expanded way more!
- Early Access Release - More for the sentimentality, but the update also brought the dunelands and lots of other nice features, but mainly getting the game 'finished' and all the loose ends complete after so many years was a really nice achievement!
- The AI made this update - This was super fun, I spent my time throwing heaps of content from warsim into AI tools and having them crunch out weird and interesting additions and variations. It also saw the addition of some really terrible jokes to a brain damaged gnome. 921 features total in this one!
- Combat Update Alpha - This update was so long in the making it is painful to think back, I felt tormented by this update, it was such a huge undertaking for so many reasons, took me years in the background while working on other warsim updates and finally throwing myself into it and trying to smash through it still took me months of crunch, but damn it the update came and went and made the game better.
[h2]The future of Warsim[/h2]
This is something that I've over the years gotten wrong trying to guess, because being honest I never saw myself working on this game for 9 years, but now I can't truly see myself ever completely putting it away. I mean it's on my body for life now...
But in all seriousness if I locked myself in a room and vowed only to work on Warsim til the end of my days I'd still have 1000s of things to expand and add to it by the time I hit 100 years old. My Warsim to do list is currently over 2000 features long and a constant wave after wave of new bright minds leaving comments with their ideas and thoughts ensures that list isn't shrinking.
I'm currently split between working on my new game project, writing and playing music with my band, and coding and working on Warsim stuff and by god is it tough to manage at times, but hey it's a lot of different dreams all at once so I can't complain.
To you folks who've supported the game in any capacity, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You guys have allowed me to live full time on an ascii game that runs out of windows CMD in 2024 hahaha, I don't know who's madder, you guys or me!
This 9 years Warsim has been a growing hope in my life and it's given me access to opportunities and beauty that my life would have been devoid of if I'd not spent the time with it. Everyone who ever bought a copy of Warsim made it all possible so thank you guys! And no to those asking, I will NEVER do Warsim DLC :)
I don't want to paygate people from more Warsim related fun, all updates for life will be free always, here's to many more good years!
Much love,
Huw