A nice person I met at Stunfest advised me to submit to the A.MAZE festival in Berlin. It is an alternative festival focused not only on games, but on all forms of interactive digital arts with a playful approach.
While I can’t expect the game to win an award, I could imagine Blêktre being nominated and therefore I would attend this festival, and I’m quite excited at the idea of seeing and meeting new creators.
It’s also been a while since I visited the lovely city of Berlin! Even though I’ll have to speak with my shitty ass English accent.
First of all, thanks to all the new players who joined the game! Christmas did bring a couple of newcomers to the English version of the game, and it is clearly motivating me to work on the next big update.
My current focus is, like the title says, to bring more RPG into the game. And I am quite happy with how things are turning out !
Alignement & Ideology
Besides the main story being fleshed out with more memorable characters, the player will be able, and required, to define their character more radically, with a moral alignment (from samaritan to asshole) and a social ideology (from socialist to capitalist).
Traits
Bonuses will be broken down for more detailed comprehension of your capacities
The Traits (formerly known as Perks) have evolved, they can now more clearly influence your stats and therefore the way you can resolve situations.
For example, when you act brutally, this Trait can increase, and every 1% of Brutal makes you stronger in combat. But it also increases your asshole alignment!
Of course, many new possibilities will open so every kind of build can carve their own way.
skills are being refined
Let’s just mention one example, when you were previously forced to resolve a situation with violence, you will now have alternate paths, using your charm, your social recognition, or confusing your opponents with mental jokes.
You will even be able to complete the game without actually hitting anyone !
Different endings and influence on the world
The way you play will of course define the kind of ending you can get, but also how it will shape the world.
For example, if you rule the game as a true samaritan socialist, new players might start with more money, but big bosses will pay more taxes!
And … the nerd paragraph … Blêktre Editor
Because I have more and more text to manage, I developed a brand new dialogue editor. When laziness actually makes you work more…. It’s JS and node server based.
I must admit LLM codex tools type faster than I do, and this is really accelerating my development workflow. I would not call it vibe coding though, because I read and understand everything, so I know there are no mistakes or blurry things.
Conclusion
As these upgrades bring more content to the game (new stories and dialogue, new skills, UI and graphic enhancements, and you might finally be able to buy those cats for your house), I can tell I am not finished with the work, but the truth is I am enjoying it ^0^
Blêktre 2081 has been a fun journey to develop, and aside from the mobile version still in progress and some quality of life improvements that would be welcome here and there, it almost feels feature complete now. But not quite, at least not for me !
Since I have seen a few new players joining during the winter sale, and with all the love I have for this game, I feel like doing things properly. May this update be my very last before fully moving on to my next game !
The mobile version will support swipe gestures to display menus, like it is 2014 again!
What’s being worked on :
A new narrative, sort of “main campaign”, will guide players through the many systems of the game in a more engaging way than a massive tutorial (even though I am pretty sure you would enjoy introducing Tutoman to your parents)
Alternative paths : I want to make sure that every token can be obtained in multiple ways, and that every character and every adventure feels more unique depending on how you play. You should be able to become a smart entrepreneur, a kind samaritan, or a complete asshole.
A perks system overhaul is being implemented to serve this purpose. It will now work with percentages instead of a simple true or false system, so you can even be a 49% asshole !
An extended ending to summarize who you became, what you accomplished, and how you shaped the city.
Rebalancing of the liberal layer : entrepreneurs who do not take care of their businesses will see their empires slowly decay over time, making room for newcomers at that level.
And of course, get rid of the remaining glitches, translation mistakes, and missing quality of life features.
Once those are done, I might be able to let the game live its own life in the background while I do other things =)
Blêktre 2081 received a small update with a few fixes. The main change is a complete rewrite of the Steam web client, removing the dependency on Construct 3.
Construct 3 is an effective tool for rapid prototyping and small projects without heavy coding. However, since the shift to a subscription model, it has become prohibitively expensive for hobbyist use. Open source is preferred. Godot is the direction !
Bonus track : “sa puer la merde” (“it smelled like shit”)
About ten years ago, I wrote a super lightweight PHP script that let you upload your music online without relying on a corporate-owned platform. You don’t need a database either. I called it BondeCampe (I hope you get the joke).
It does, of course, require that you have a server.
Personally, my low-cost provider shut down my machine three times in ten years, and I had to reinstall everything each time, but that also proved that installation only takes ten minutes. Now I’ve switched to OVH, it feels much safer, and I hope I won’t have to reinstall anything for the next ten years. But to be honest, you’re always relying on a tech company at some level … unless you run your own server.
How does it work? You just create a folder with properly ordered MP3 files and a JPG for the cover. Upload it, and voilà, your album is online with a music player that lets anyone download it.
Default album view of BandeCampe
Maybe the one feature Bandcamp doesn’t have is that you can fully script your album pages, so if you want animations, this is a good way to do it.
JS Animation played on BandCamp, track from my album “Désir & Pulsion”, released on Da! Heard It records
All that to say that my personal music repository is back online. I just drop my demos there, everything I’m not selling on Bandcamp. That’s good electronic music ! 🤡
Update on my “RTS” prototype and the work on pathfinding.
I previously tried having agents claim a tile at the end of the path, each their own. They follow the flow field to the target area (green circle), and then move to their claimed tile.
The problem was that it became very complicated to assign them relevant, compacted tiles when there were many agents, especially when they were coming from very different parts of the map.
Many crossing paths meant a pile-up was to be expected.
There are multiple ways to fix that, you just have to look at how good RTS games handle it. Check out Beyond All Reason and how they pack units around a point, Age of Empires IV, or even the relatively simple approach used in Starcraft 2.
But I’m aiming more for organic crowd management rather than precise RTS-style movement. Just to try it out, I completely ditched the tile-claiming system and let agents go to a single target tile, organizing themselves around it using steering forces like avoidance and wall repulsion, with a small timer adjusted based on group size.
And honestly, the result fits my system much better and is a lot simpler. So for now, I’ll stop overthinking it and keep it this way.
I might just add a simple local A* calculation for agents that need more precise movement, like workers going back and forth to a mine, to avoid having to compute a full flow field. But that’s probably all I’ll do.
Check it out in action with the explosion force I added too. It’s not perfect yet, agents in the center shouldn’t be thrown farther than the ones on the edges, but it’s getting there.
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.
