Demo Release and Polish

Overview

A LOT happened over the past month, but the biggest thing is that the demo has been soft launched on Steam in anticipation of Steam Next Fest. If you want you can download it at the link at the end of this post. Linux and Windows versions are both available.

The amount of work that has gone into this has been a lot, and we cover a good amount of it here.

Steam Next Fest

Nice little Demo download button.
Nice little Demo download button.

Big news is that we are officially participating in Steam Next Fest October. We finally have everything in place and approved. This was a shockingly difficult process and was more complicated than I thought. Turns out that you can't simply upload an ELF/.exe file to Steam and have them distribute it. You have to use quite a bit of Steam-specific tooling. Which to Valve's credit does run natively on Linux. It's just a lot to learn and process, particularly when you gave yourself a day to do all the packaging and uploading to Steam.

I will say a major piece of advice I have for programmers turned game devs would be to give more time to packaging than you think you might need. For me, packaging a game for Steam was more difficult than preparing an RPM or DEB distributable.

The good news was, in the end, the game made the deadline, but with intense timing difficulties.

Testing Mistakes Made

This leads to the next major point. If you signed up for alpha/beta testing you were not forgotten or passed over. Due to:

  1. The unexpected (by me) delays in Steam approving the game.
  2. The unexpected (by me) difficulties in packaging the game.
  3. The sheer number of "breaking" bugs that I was crunch fixing found by friends and family.

I was not able to upload and get early testing keys before the Demo had to be soft launched for Next Fest.

My apologies. My plan going forward is to structure the game development process in a more streamlined way with dedicated feature, testing, and polishing time windows. So for the main game itself, we should have more structured testing periods.

Animations & Mechanics

Lifters, Belts, Splitters, and Mergers

This is where most of the crunch time was dedicated. I will say a disadvantage of ECS is that syncing independent animations is a bit harder. It feels like the world animations run on some Leibniz-style pre-established harmony. No linking or hierarchy to speak of. Just async systems running in such a way to give that illusion.

Long story short, the game now behaves like a game should, animations, sound, and all.

Demo Released + Trailer

Here is the fun part. While no emails have been sent yet, the demo can be downloaded and played. I may be able to squeeze one more bug fix build in before Next Fest officially starts, so if you see any bugs you can report them in the Exofactory Bug Report Discord Channel.

We also have a small gameplay trailer! In the interests of bandwidth and new YouTube accounts not being allowed to upload videos until they are verified, it can be watched on the Steam page.

Roadmap

The demo is just the start. The full game continues on with major improvements incoming. Among these are the following. This being said, I am open to player recommendations. You can provide them at the feature suggestion channel in Discord.

I will be providing a more detailed roadmap on this site soon. These lists are preliminary and VERY VERY incomplete.

Coming Sooner

Accessibility Prioritized Steam Deck and Controller Support
Accessibility Prioritized Steam Deck and Controller Support

Coming Later

Conclusion

The demo is out and I look forward to working on the full game. I am looking forward to seeing what people make.

Demo on Steam