Devlog October 2025

31. October 2025

The October was a impressive month, driven by the Steam Next Fest!

Steam Fest in numbers

This was my first Steam Next Fest and I can only recommend it to every game developer out there. The visibility a demo gets during this day is impressive! The only mistake I made was not having a stable game, so most only played a few minutes.

This are the results in numbers

• 363 Wishlist Additions
• 506 got the Demo
• 5 max concurrent players (new record!)
• 15 new Steam Community members

Now the game has more than 800 outstanding wishlists! As you can see, I got more than 30% of my total wishlists during the Steam Next Fest. I cannot give exact numbers, because some wishlists have also been deleted during the event. But I don't know if the deleted wishlists of that period where new or old ones.

4 new beta versions, with 5th around the corner

The versions v0.4.3, v0.4.4, v0.4.5, v0.4.6 got released this month. They not only fixed bugs, but also introduced new! There was the first hot fix update, after I saw that saving the game didn't work.

A new version v0.4.7 is already on the way and will be probably released this weekend. I hope this will be the most stable version of the game so far, fixing a lot of bugs. Of course it brings also new features, such as improved formation control, camera settings and more!

Cross platform Steam Cloud Save

This is one of the biggest news of this month! The game supports now cross platform Steam Cloud Saves. This means you can play the game on different devices with different Operating Systems. Settings and save states will be synced between all devices by Steam.

This was more difficult to implement, than I expected. My first guess was that it is enough to point Steam Cloud to the save states directory and done. But first, Steam cloud does not delete files, it only syncs existing files. So I had to create a trash system, with the trash folder not synced. Second, it does not make sense to sync all files that are located there. Logs, configurations and some settings like audio or interface settings should be device specific. Now the game has internally local and sync settings.

I don't want to go much further in the technical details of this implementation. But as usual, simply check out the source code to see how it's done. I guess this could actually become a nice blog post on my personal blog.

Release checklist

While v0.4.5 introduced working Steam Cloud saves, it had a major bug with saves. A game could be saved only once. The second time the backup would fail and the game crashed. This was really bad, especially during an event such as the Steam Next Fest.

So I decided to introduce some quality assurance checks, aside the automated tests I already have. It can be found on Codeberg.

This list contains some manual checks to make sure, that such bugs don't exist in a final release. It also contains all other steps I should not forget before and after releasing a new version. I hope this document brings a bit more stability to the game and prevents such disasters.

Early Access

In less than 2 weeks, the game will enter in Early Access on Steam. I'm really excited and also think that the game is ready for it. And if not, I hope that most players show mercy and are happy with the frequent updates and fixes.

The demo, that actually is the full game, will be removed from Steam by then. So you can get the game on Steam, only by buying the Early Access version for 10€.

As I mentioned already everywhere, the game will stay free on itch.io, Flathub and Codeberg. I cannot mention this on Steam, because it is against their TOS to guide players to other platforms.

So wishlist the game if you have not done it already and get the Early Access!

Every feedback is welcome

Feel free to write me an email at info@99managers.org and comment on Mastodon.