So it looks like the Iron Village 1.2 launch has gone pretty smoothly! Apart from the bug that caused 1.2.03, there haven’t been any significant issues, and the launch sale has gone well so far. (As long as you say it’s “25% off” instead of “$2 USD off”, it sounds like a decent discount, haha.)
[Another] Side note: if you’ haven’t ‘ve bought Iron Village, but haven’t left a review, please take the time to do so! Iron Village only needs two more reviews to reach the magic 50, which puts the word “Very” in front of “Positive”. I’m not entirely sure if it has a direct algorithmic impact, but it definitely has an impact on people when viewing the store page, and the resulting purchases and wishlists do have algorithmic impacts!
So what now? Well, serious work began on the new project (nicknamed Project OY for now) at the start of September, and it’s been basically full time for the last week and change. There are still a few things I’d like to fix and add on to Iron Village, but for now I need to get a move on and get some core mechanics built for OY. I’ll probably revisit Iron Village later, there are a couple of player suggestions I really want to implement, but it felt like if I didn’t switch and dedicate a solid length of time to OY, it would take forever to actually build it.
👀 Those of you that are familiar with Jamie Brownhill’s work might find this style familiar, but I’m afraid that’s all the context I’m giving right now. Very WIP.
I would be sharing more about Project OY so far (and I do have things to share!), but of course there’s a thing called marketing™ that has to happen. Doesn’t mean there won’t be any teasers though! (Look up!) The plan is to get a Patreon set up at some point in October, and I’ll have a steady feed of new info coming in there.
These dev diaries aren’t going away though! I want to push something out every week, alternating between the sneak previews and public-facing dev diaries. Nothing on Patreon is going to be exclusive forever either: once project OY has a proper announcement, I’ll share it all, but that’s the first marketing/PR beat that I have to plan out beforehand.
“But Chappington”, you ask, “what will those dev diaries be about if you’re not actively working on Iron Village, and not revealing details about project OY?” Good Question.
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I was really tempted to leave that as a cliffhanger. At the start of Iron Village, the idea was that this is an experiment to see if I can pull off making (and releasing – that’s the most important part) a game. After any good experiment though, we have to look back and see what actually happened, and share some data. So that’s the plan, try and do some deeper analysis into how it went, and hope it comes across as interesting!