Devlog December 2025
07. January 2026
After a new year holiday break, I'm back!
My first year as full time solo game developer is over and it was great. The game was released as Early Access and I sold over 100 copies on Steam. This shows the potential it has and that Open Source games can make money.
v0.5.4 to v0.5.7
During December 4 versions have been released. Notable improvements are related to transfers and the match engine. There are now also more tests and quality checks, that will reduce bugs and errors in future.
You can find all detailed changes in the releases page on Codeberg.
18 months of progress
Recently I found an old post on Mastodon with some screenshots of the game 18 months ago. This shows how much the game has evolved and it makes me really proud.
The calendar and the whole dashboard had a complete redesign. The use of icons, better spacing, color gradients and a background make the game look much better. 
The formation screen looks also much better. The player list has better coloring and it looks much more polished. 
The match screen is the one that changed the most in my opinion. Not to mention the whole changes in the match engine itself. Well, actually in 2024 no real match engine existed at all. 
This progress fuels my motivation a lot and I can't wait to see how the game will evolve during 2026. Often I feel slow or that I don't make real progress. But exactly side by side comparisons like this ones, show me the opposite.
FOSDEM 26 talk proposal not accepted
Sadly my talk about the game at FOSDEM got not accepted. It would have been a big opportunity to showcase it to people that also care about FOSS games.
I will continue to submit talks at other conferences in 2026. If you have any suggestions, please let me know!
2026 will get more technical
In 2026 I want to share more technical details on how the game was made. The game implements some interesting concepts and ideas that in my opinion are worth sharing. The match engine and how all the players data is saved as csv files are the best examples.
I still don't know if I will publish one big blog post or multiple smaller ones. Anyway it will be a separate series, alongside to this general monthly devlogs.
Website changes
This website has been re-organized and the text on the home page has been reduced. It has now direct links to socials, chats and where to get the game with a minimal description. The roadmap and trademark policy have now dedicated sites.
No more Bluesky
I decided to no longer use Bluesky and only keep Mastodon to post about the game. While my posts got some visibility on Bluesky, I simply prefer to use just Mastodon. I personally prefer Mastodon because it is truly federated and also has no user tracking. This might change in future, but for now I prefer to keep it simple and FOSS.
Translation updates
There where also some minor changes to the translations repositories on Weblate. The store pages component has been deleted. The short and long description have been moved to the games about page. This unifies all translatable content to one single component. Both descriptions are now also shorter and more generic as this should prevent changes in future.
The greatest news for me is the start of translations in Chinese (Simplified Han script). So the next release will also be partially playable in Chinese (13% translated at time of writing).
New videos
I updated the short video with v0.5.5 and created also a longer video. In future there will be more longer videos, to show the actual gameplay. This is very useful for myself, when I want to show the game when I don't have a computer at hand.
I wish you all a happy new year!
Every feedback is welcome
Feel free to write me an email at info@99managers.org and comment on Mastodon.
