Last year I released a web game called Lord of the Manor as a small project for my portfolio: lordofthemanor.io. People really liked it, and I've had a few suggestions that I might be able to get a bit of money for it, so I've decided to take the plunge and get it on Steam. Of course, there are a lot of aspects I need to improve upon to bring it from a free prototype to a commercial product, these include:

• A lot more content and balancing: it's currently very fast to progress to the "endgame". This should involve a couple more housing tiers, quite a few new resources and various industries.
• Performance improvements: the general simulation gets pretty slow when you make a large enough city, and there are issues with the road connection algorithms above a certain sized transportation network.
• Better UI and in game feedback.
• Sounds and music (I'm also a musician, so I'll whip something up myself).
• More interesting trading: the trading system is currently too simplistic and it's very easy to get practically unlimited resources late game, convenience features such as auto-trade above/below certain amounts.
• Various improvements to management such as the ability to globally analyse and control resource production and some visualisation of employment and happiness.
• Make the game more challenging.

So far I've been focused on setting up this website, some social media accounts and of course the Steam page. You can already follow my progress on Twitter, Facebook and Discord.

I've also ported the game from the web to Electron which turned out to be very straightforward. At its most basic you can just create an Electron window and point it at the index.html of your website and it just works. However I'm making the most of the fact that it allows you to use NodeJS features in a browser app. This has enabled me to rip out the autosave feature from the web version which uses IndexedDB which is not only unreliable for large cities, but responsible for some performance issues, and replace it with saving to disk on closing the application. I will also use this ability to make it simpler for players who want to have multiple savegames at once.

Now that I've got the project running in a desktop environment I've been trying out some UI ideas. I realized that I may as well fully embrace the pixel art nature of my game and make the interface more reminiscent of some classic 90s games. To this end I've replaced the rather flat feel with a parchment texture and some pixel art fonts. This is in no way final, but I think it already fits the style much better. I'm also adding some "juice" little by little, like animations when you mouse over buttons to give some feedback that it's an interactable element.

What next?

I need to make a cool trailer for the Steam page and generally make it look nice. Once that's ready I intend to start a wishlist campaign while working on the game. My objective is to release in Early Access around the start of 2021 with most of the basic issues fixed to make playing the game a smooth experience. After that I can work on content and balancing.

For the foreseeable future I will be continuing to do freelance web and game dev jobs to pay the bills (hint hint), hopefully I can work on Lord of the Manor about half of the time.