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[vivaladav]

Cool, it was fun to watch you play on this enormous screen. The touchscreen controls fit the abstract high tech vibe of virtueror. I could imagine Mr. Spock playing virtueror instead of 3D chess

It's a shame Leonard Nimoy left us already, I could have contact him on Twitter for a commercial...

My favorite part of the video was this:
"This is another type of special material. It is called Blobs. You find it and use it for special stuff."...

LOL, in theory that's a temporary name, but you can clearly see how I am not a writer and I doubt people playing my game will be too much interested in these details (well, I hope at least), so that name might also stay like that till release. 

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I wanted to say "wtf did you changed the visual style?" then I saw it was posted by Alain )))

Yeah, now Alain is working with me to add characters to my game...

I watched the video, good material, I can almost visualize the combat mechanics. Also, I am glad you decided to make it so that players can upg walls with turrets and awesomeness. Just a bit more!

You really can't wait so see some combat... I am working on it right now, but I am afraid you might be disappointed when I am going to show something next week as it's a complicated feature and I am only going to start with something very basic. Hopefully it will get better in a month or 2 though.

[Alain]

My favorite part of the video was this:
"This is another type of special material. It is called Blobs. You find it and use it for special stuff."...

LOL, in theory that's a temporary name, but you can clearly see how I am not a writer and I doubt people playing my game will be too much interested in these details (well, I hope at least), so that name might also stay like that till release.  

I totally agree, no need to change it. I just found it funny, because I am a big fan of the original Blob movie and I had to think of it. There is no reason why you should give something a crazy alien fantasy name when it is essentially... a blob

[vivaladav]

I published a new dev log video to show the main new features I added to Virtueror in the last month of development:




In this episode you will see:

Map navigation - that's something I previewed with a GIF in a post from a couple of weeks ago. Now you can see it in action on video.

New units - now it's possible to create different unit types and each has its own attributes, RPG style. There's also a new dedicated dialog to do that:

Combat and shooting - I implemented some very basic combat and shooting mechanics. There's still a lot to do, but it's nice to start to see some more interaction in game!

In the video I am also talking about what I am planning for the next 4 weeks, but I'll leave you to find out that by watching if you want to know more.

For any feedback feel free to post a comment on here on on YouTube.

[Alain]

Great update as always, I feel like you are moving at warp speed! Let us know about the alpha build

[Ramos]

Solid progress sir!

My question is when you want to build new units does the game pauses and you have that build menu popping up or will you have a classic UI build menu in real-time?

[vivaladav]

Great update as always, I feel like you are moving at warp speed! Let us know about the alpha build

Thanks Alain, I am trying to push things as much as I can, but I guess I will need a holiday soon... 

Solid progress sir!

My question is when you want to build new units does the game pauses and you have that build menu popping up or will you have a classic UI build menu in real-time?

Thanks!
At the moment there's no pause planned for when you open a menu, also because all actions have key bindings which can make things very quick. For example creating a new unit with your keyboard takes only 1-2 seconds.

[vivaladav]

Yesterday I spent most of my day playing my game and taking screenshots for the upcoming Steam and itchio pages.

I wanted to share with you one that I am probably going to use for the game pages:

It's been very time consuming, also because I only have 1 test level at the moment, so showing different things has been pretty challenging, but I managed to get 6 decent screenshots in the end (after taking about 40...).

I also ended up coding a few little debugging features that will help me in the future and I started to think about game balancing and spotted a couple of new bugs.
Overall it took more than I anticipated, but putting all together it's been a good step forward toward my long journey!

[Alain]

Looking good, I like the screenshot. It hints at a lot of complexity.

Btw. people say "don't show your UI in Steam screenshots", but in your case your UI is very clean and minimalistic, so I think you can use it in some of your screenshots.

[vivaladav]

Looking good, I like the screenshot. It hints at a lot of complexity.

Btw. people say "don't show your UI in Steam screenshots", but in your case your UI is very clean and minimalistic, so I think you can use it in some of your screenshots.

Thanks Alain and I am glad you like it!

I am going to show game UI in half of my initial screenshots, hopefully that will do it...

[vivaladav]

The fact that I am posting this update on a Saturday night at almost 1am should give you an idea about how busy my week has been...

On the bright side I have also some important news to share, but let's start with the update.

Early this week I have published a new monthly dev log recap on the blog of Virtueror. This one covers the progress I made with my game during the month of May.

One of the latest new features is defensive towers:

You will find more details and also a new bug of the month in the blog post, so I'll leave you to it.

I mentioned some important news and here it is...

The Steam page of Virtueror has been approved and it will go live soon, on the 9th of June:

I know this is just one more step of a very long journey, but it feels like things are getting real now and it's scary and exciting at the same time!

[Alain]

Nice, congratulations on the Steam page

[vivaladav]

I am super happy to announce that Virtueror is now on Steam!

I would appreciate any feedback you might have on my page and I hope you will wishlish and follow it if you like what you see.  

I have also managed to bump the completion icon to 20% thanks to the latest effort in development. I will probably show you something new in my next post.

Obviously there's still a lot to do and I know well it will not be easy, but I am excited for the progress so far.  

[Alain]

I love the available date :D

You did a great job on the Steam page. My only comment would be that somebody who does not follow your development will most likely not know what they do in the game from the screenshots. But this is often the case if you look at screenshots only (I have the same problem, I think). And you will illustrate gameplay in a trailer eventually and people can just scroll down to the gifs or read the description.

[logophil]

I am super happy to announce that Virtueror is now on Steam!

I would appreciate any feedback you might have on my page and I hope you will wishlish and follow it if you like what you see.  

Wishlisted and followed! My only thoughts on the Steam page are
1) it might be good if there were any other parts of the game you could show as a screenshot (e.g. some kind of inventory, or management screen) as all the screenshots look a little similar at the moment, but perhaps that's just the way the game is?
2) You don't mention a storyline or lore or anything, but the visuals suggest to me a quite intriguing and original setting - the game title itself suggests something maybe in virtual reality, I wonder if that's something you could bring out?

[vivaladav]

Alain

I love the available date :D

Hehe, me too... and that probably means we are old!

You did a great job on the Steam page. My only comment would be that somebody who does not follow your development will most likely not know what they do in the game from the screenshots. But this is often the case if you look at screenshots only (I have the same problem, I think). And you will illustrate gameplay in a trailer eventually and people can just scroll down to the gifs or read the description.

Yeah that's completely fair at this stage. A big issue is also that I am not showing any screenshot with 2 factions yet, so things might not be super clear yet, but hopefully I will be able to add more stuff soon.
A trailer will help for sure, but I believe the screenshots can also work as "static" trailer. I just don't have all the available content yet.


logophil

Wishlisted and followed!

Oh thanks!
I did the same for you and Alain. To be honest I already wishlisted your games a long time ago, but for some reason I didn't think about following as well. Anyway, done now.

1) it might be good if there were any other parts of the game you could show as a screenshot (e.g. some kind of inventory, or management screen) as all the screenshots look a little similar at the moment, but perhaps that's just the way the game is?

You're totally right, it's just that most of the other content is not ready yet.
Hopefully soon I'll be able to show more!

2) You don't mention a storyline or lore or anything, but the visuals suggest to me a quite intriguing and original setting - the game title itself suggests something maybe in virtual reality, I wonder if that's something you could bring out?

Good point. I didn't have time to write anything about the storyline yet, but I definitely need to add a paragraph about that.
Right now I am also working on the design of a new screen to select your faction and maybe I will also add that to the screenshots as visual extra.

[vivaladav]

After Steam I also created a page on itchio, as that's where I am planning to run the closed alpha of Virtueror.

You can already add the game to a collection and follow me on itchio. That will allow you to find out when the closed alpha starts and to keep an eye on all the major updates that will be published in the dev log of the project.

Despite all the marketing and production work I also found some time to work on the actual game. The most notable result of this recent work is a new building: a radar station.

After you conquer it, you have to connect it to your base to activate it. That's a core mechanic of Virtueror as I have already shown you in some of my previous posts.
In the future it will also be possible to build it with your units and to expand its range with upgrades.

[Alain]

That's great, you're moving fast!

[vivaladav]

June has been pretty hectic for me...

First I launched the Steam page of my RTS game Virtueror, then the one on itchio that I will use to run my alpha testing and on top of that I had to keep the development going.

The main new feature I haven't introduced yet here is a brand new screen for selecting your faction when you start a new game.

That also allowed me to start to introduce the playable factions as suggested by logophil here on the forum.
I know it's not much yet, but more information will come in the next few months.

For the full update you can check out my post on Steam where you will find more development stuff, but also a special "bug of the month".

If you prefer, you can also watch the video dev log on YouTube:

That's all for now!
I will try to post again next week, but in the meanwhile I would really appreciate if you could wishlist and follow Virtueror on Steam if you like it as that's going to help me a lot (both with my morale and the Steam algorithm).

[Alain]

Great update, I just watched the video. You asked what we think about this type of free-talk devlog and I think it works fine, because you still explain in a structured manner and don't drift off rambling

[vivaladav]

As the title says... indie development is hard, especially if you have a day job.

Recently I have been struggling to do much in terms of development and marketing and as result in the last 3 weeks I did less than what I used to do in a week the previous month.
The main difference is that this month I didn't have any day off from work and I also had to put some extra hours into my day job because of a deadline.
That, combined with temperatures up to 35C/95F for many days, kept me too tired to do anything relevant.

At least things are looking better now.
I spent the whole weekend working on 2 new features (that I am going to show you soon) and I took 1 day off per week (starting from this one) for the rest of the month.

I also put up a poll in my game Discord server to ask if people wanted to try the game as it is now or in 4-6 weeks to have a better experience in terms of gameplay.



Not everybody voted yet, but it's clear what people prefer and that's what I am going to do.

If you want to follow my progress from close and if you would like to influence the development of Virtueror, you can join my Discord server too.