Dev blog
Hello hello, it has been a while. Just a little over a month ago the game released in EA and it has been super busy since then. The increase in amount of bug reports and suggestions on how to improve the game as it gets a rush of players never ceases to amaze me. As a solo dev, you can plan and scheme and design and ship features, and then even test them with a small amount of playtesters as much as you want, but you can never fully predict how things are going to be received until they're actually battle tested.
This is why Early Access for indie devs is critical. There has been so much great feedback, especially on the Discord, that I want to thank you guys again! When I get some free time, I will be making a credits section and include all y'all beautiful people!
Anyway, now things have calmed down. Steam's algorithm has decided to not show the game to potential new players anymore, so player count is now very low (average indie dev experience!). This is of course sad, but also a good thing in a way. It gives me time to work on the game with a lot less pressure. The past month has been a bit stressful, trying to keep up with all the reports and parsing through what's a real issue and what's not, fixing things, trying not to feel bad when coming across random hateful comments, watching all the streamers and content creators to see how they react in real time to certain mechanics, all while working a (real) full time job and raising a family. So this newfound silence is not so bad.
But it's not all doom and gloom! The other day, I noticed someone created a mod on the Steam Workshop and that was an amazing feeling. To think someone took a bit of time to make some changes on the game to make it more fun so that others can also share in that fun is incredibly satisfying. It's a simple mod: every player module is 5x more powerful, meaning you can run and craft a lot faster, more drones etc, but it's very cool nonetheless. Shout out to the first modder of Swarmdustry Rollinggrandy!! You sir rock.
Also another cool thing was seeing people's bases after they put in 10, 20, 40 or even 60+ hours into their hive! The spaghetti I have seen is extremely... delicious. Some bugs only occur in very special situations so players shared their savefiles with me so I can have an easier time identifying the bug. A side effect of this is that I now have a library of real life Swarm bases to mess around with. This greatly improves my ability to fine tune certain game features as opposed to always just using the ingame dev tools.
I'm also proud of the performance of the late game. I've seen comments before the release saying stuff like it will never scale or run smoothly. Yet here we are, with super bases spanning thousands and thousands of bugs (Swarm bugs, not the software bugs I was talking about earlier. I know this can get confusing sometimes :D) while still maintaining a smooth, stutter-free 60fps. It seems so far nobody has dropped below that, at least no reported case of that happening other than a (software) bug that has already been fixed. I wonder who might be the first to hit a performance ceiling and when that might happen.
When I started writing this blog, I had the intention of writing about what comes next, but it seems I got carried away in a sort of a small recap of how the EA launch went. I'll leave that for the next blog. I will say, however, that I'm still working through the backlog of existing player reports. Expect more small fixes and QoL improvements over the next few weeks!
Thank you again to all who gave and continue to give the Early Access version of the game a shot! Happy gaming!
The swarm must grow.