Here are some new improvements on top of those previously announced in this post.
New Job: Tax Collector
This one works a bit like being a cop, but instead of chasing criminals, you go after big business bosses, especially those idling behind their counters, and take big cuts from their budgets!
This new job aims to rebalance capitalist ownership. If you want to make a fortune with your money, sleeping on it will not be as effective anymore, you will at least need to watch out for those damn leftists!
Also, robberies, formerly the only counterpower to big bosses’ monopolies, will be toned down a little, but most of the change will simply result in businesses being less wealthy overall.
Besides, a couple of graphical enhancements have landed and the map has been reworked a bit as well.
The update is expected to drop in a couple of months, and will plunge the game into a new beta testing phase of hell.
These are the 36 “ranks” you can reach based on your alignment. They’re determined by your actions and reflect the kind of person others see you as … They may judge you accordingly!
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”)
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:
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.
