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.
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!
