Blêktre 2081 finally got its 10th review and earned the (100%) “Positive” badge on Steam! That was the final achievement I wanted before moving on.
To be honest, that’s only 100 copies sold, and it’s not a lot for such a “big” game. More importantly, it wasn’t profitable at all, but that’s more about market and marketing dynamics than the quality of the game, which still receives a lot of support from players.
Still doing some coding on the “full picture layout” (mobile) for Blêktre, but since no bugs have been reported lately, I’m moving on.
I’ve learned a lot, and I’m starting new projects with those lessons in mind.
PROTOTYPING ON GODOT
I tried to create a full pathfinder in GDScript, but it started to lag with more than 200 agents.
So I learned C++ and implemented it as a Godot extension. The result is over 2,200 agents running at more than 60 FPS, about a 10× performance boost. The approach is a classic RTS-style system using multiple flow fields with steering.
My latest implementation are explosion forces.
I’m aiming to prototype an RTS using these mechanics.
LOOT GENERATOR
While trying to help my brother with his own game, I came up with the idea to create a JavaScript loot generator for ARPGs (Diablo-like, actually super inspired by Grim Dawn, my favorite). It’s highly customizable and it should fit my brother’s game needs at some point. He also had the idea to turn it into a versatile tool we can distribute to other developers.
Well, that’s a secret sauce, so I’m not sharing anything except these screenshots:
I’m pleased to finally announce the official expansion of the base game Blêktre 2081!
The new features have been live for some time for testing, and it’s time to make it official.
Those who have already played will immediately notice the major overhaul of the graphics, UI, optimization, debugging, and balancing — the bare minimum.
But let’s talk about what really matters: the real new content.
Stunfest was amazing for Blêktre 2081 — people played for a long time and had a great laugh. It really stood out as a UFO of a game, praised for its originality and the integrity of its concept!
I sold the game as pay-what-you-want, and the lovely players paid an average of 8 euros. So I decided to set that as the price on Steam!
I got to refine my pitch by repeating it 250 times over 3 days, so now I can finalize the Steam page and officially declare the international release!
What’s next? I’ll be polishing the end-game elements and a few ideas that came up during those 3 intense playtesting days. Overall, Blêktre 2081 is nearing its final form feature-wise — already quite rich, I’d say. It’ll just take a bit of time to tighten all the bolts on something of this scope!
The real future evolution will be offering more servers, including private ones. I was advised to provide that option for people who’d like to stream with their communities. Later, I might also offer private servers for playing with friends, or with custom rule variations, etc. Oh, and I think I even found a way to make a fully offline solo version. To be continued!
Other duties call in parallel, so for now I’ll focus on maintaining the current instance 🙂
And welcome to everyone who joined during this event — don’t hesitate to throw your feedback, opinions, bugs, or issues my way, it’ll only make the game better!
Here I am, standing at the final step of the long journey that was the development of Blêktre 2081.
It all lasted about three years — from the first prototype in 2022, the funding in 2023, the release in early 2025, up to the “deluxe” version now being published.
That’s quite a few lines of code and pixels laid down. Blêktre doesn’t look like much, with its “lo-fi” aesthetic, but there’s real work under the hood.
It’s not my first experience as a developer — far from it — but it’s the first game I’ve truly taken to a commercial release. Since I put in the effort, I had a few ambitions in terms of sales! But let’s be honest: it wasn’t the heist of the century. After six months on the market, I haven’t had much media coverage (JV le Mag, a few e-zines). Despite my efforts (launch event, participation in Stunfest), the small hundred copies sold so far make it clear I haven’t broken into the circle of “cool” indie games.
And yet, it’s impossible to be disappointed. The few dedicated players I’ve had brought me a lot — and they clearly had fun. You could count them on two hands, but they truly supported me and fully played along!
As for me, I’m genuinely very satisfied with the result. It’s really the game I wanted to make — the kind of game I’d be thrilled to discover myself. In fact, I wish I could stumble upon something similar!
So, will Blêktre 2081 ever get the recognition I think it deserves? It’s better to be realistic: in 2025, the internet is already flooded with both good and bad games, and it’s hard to say whether there’s still room for this kind of “experience.” But I’m proud to have made something unique and sincere in an era of industrialized entertainment products.
To preserve my sanity — and unless there’s a sudden surge of public interest — I’ll soon move on, at least for a while. I have a few other game ideas, and I think I’ll start working on them gradually, drawing from this rich experience.
But first: there’s still Stunfest ahead, and surely a few bugs still lurking in the shadows here and there — yes, I’ll stay a perfectionist with my baby. ^0^
Sorry for the slightly clickbait title: first of all, I want to say that development is still very much active, and a major update is on the way!
Blêktre 2081 was first created as a conceptual experiment. Since it was also a video game, publishing it on Steam felt natural. It allowed me to discover what the video game market is really like. After six months of operation, and a rather normal lack of mass appeal, I considered smoothing out Blêktre to make it more compatible with market expectations.
But after working in that direction, I realized it was stripping away the game’s original idea: offering a radical, sad, and mocking experience that tells the story of an unjust society. I still believe this is an interesting and even fun idea — but clearly not for everyone. And if I were to twist Blêktre’s concept to appeal to the widest audience, I think it would end up pleasing no one… starting with me.
So I decided to drop any commercial ambitions for Blêktre and make the game free via the demo version (web and Steam). This free version will now have no restrictions, including the save disks that were previously disabled in this mode: you will now be able to resurrect like everyone else.
Oh, but of course there’s a twist! To truly simulate real life, you have to know that while all citizens are equal, some are more equal than others… A new major privilege is now granted to the player who reaches the very top of the pyramid — the position of mayor of the city: they will now be able to set the law and decide, among other things, whether refugees playing on a free account can be pursued by player-police officers. With some skill, those refugees can still evade them and climb the ranks to ultimately change the law in their favor…
Freeing Blêktre from commercial ambitions allows me to imagine more radical, more unfair ideas — but also ones that are more consistent with the nature of the game. I’m convinced this won’t stop it from being fun and balanced — quite the opposite. Opposition always finds a way!
This update is planned for Fall 2025. I hope to see you among the testers of this experience, which I now consider more refined than ever. The next version will bring many changes, and I will get back to you with the full details of this true expansion.
In the meantime, I hope real life isn’t that harsh for you — even if you’re prepared with such a high-quality simulator.
Blêktre 2081 is the second game in the Blêktre series.
The first Blêktre (which I call Blêktre 1) was developed in 2015, initially during my working hours as a web developer in a t-shirt printing company, but it quickly spilled over into my free time. It was my very first game, developed in PHP and illustrated in Flash, with code that was really quite shaky.
Under a vaguely “visual novel” appearance clearly inspired by “choose your own adventure” books, it was actually an adventure game whose particularity was that it was asynchronous multiplayer — other players would soon take on the roles of the various characters in the story through a “roles” system.
You played as a huge loser, a drug addict who quickly became unemployed, and your biggest goal was to seduce Josiane, a capricious woman courted by all the players since everyone was in the same instance, putting everyone in direct competition.
For a free, ugly, poorly coded game available only in French, its success was greater than expected. Thanks to the promotion I did on the comic blog I was running at the time, about 5,000 players created an account in the two years after its release. But the most amusing part was that well-known author Nathalie Quintane decided to turn it into a play, and recognized contemporary director Yves-Noël Genod actually staged it, which incidentally introduced me to the existence of contemporary theatre.
In short, this game was a strange oddity.
Fifteen years passed and the times changed. The crude humor and misogynistic jokes of Blêktre 1 aged poorly, and Flash ceased to be supported by browsers. It was time to dismantle Blêktre 1 — it had run its course.
Over the next decade, I kept honing my development skills and produced several prototypes.
The development of Blêktre 2081
In 2023, I decided to start developing Blêktre 2081, a sort of modernized variant.
I applied for a grant to support artistic creation (from the city where I live: Rennes), and it seems the satirical and bizarre nature of this game made it valid as an artistic work, since the funding was granted. It’s still a strange game, not built for the market: you can see it as a social experiment exploring the effects of capitalism on individuals.
The concept was as follows: keeping the asynchronous multiplayer and caustic narrative of the first game (no anti-princess to seduce this time, but rather a rotten society to dominate, exploring its generally grim facets) along with a satirical sci-fi backdrop, I wanted to create a truly living little world with an economy and a population that never sleeps — like an aquarium players can enter and leave at will, climbing the different strata of this micro-society, from beggar to tycoon.
To do this, I evolved the “roles” system from the first Blêktre into the ability to take over entire businesses. Each business meets a real need in the game (for example: providing food, shelter, toilets). The inhabitants of Blêktreville (players or bots) then consume in these businesses and enrich their owners, in a sort of Monopoly. As a player-owner, you earn money even when you’re offline because your businesses run 24/7. And the worst part? The more businesses you own, the more your profits are multiplied — simulating real-life snowball wealth accumulation.
But it wouldn’t have been fun to let the first rich player dominate the game forever, so I developed an entire arsenal of counter-powers to overturn the balance. Poor players can ally, rob, burgle, and poison big entrepreneurs to get rich and buy businesses in turn. Competition can therefore remain fierce.
The release
Thanks to good progress in development, playtests, and the game’s exposure, I eventually decided to publish it on Steam.
And now ? A massive expansion is now planned of the end of the year. Stay tuned for details.
As I’m working hard on the next Blêktre expansion, I had a sad surprise yesterday morning.
Scaleway — Blêktre’s server host — had a hard drive failure, and I had to move the game to a new machine. This wasn’t too worrying since I have daily backups (a similar incident happened three months ago), and this time, nothing was lost except a day of work—and a bit of faith.
I’ve switched to an OVH server since hardware failures seem frequent with Scaleway. We’ll see if this other low-cost provider does better. At least now Blêktre have more RAM and bandwidth!
Unfortunately, I wasn’t as careful with the blog, so I’ve lost all my posts, which is a real bummer.
From now on, I’ll simply write my devlog on Blogger. It’s not flashy or indie, but it’s safer—and I just don’t have the mental space to worry about those details anymore.
So, here we go again.
I can’t wait to share more about the upcoming Blêktre expansion. I probably should have released Blêktre 2081 in early access, but what’s done is done. That said, the game still has to evolve into its final form, and I’m not stopping now.
I hope to see you there. I could really use a bit of energy, so don’t hesitate to try the demo, wishlist the game, and share any thoughts, ideas, or frustrations you have. It really helps!
