- Devlog #18 - Going full time, roadmap and updates - 17 August 2026
Hello and welcome to the 18th devlog.Going full timeAs some of you might know, this project is something we've been working on in our spare time as we both have jobs. This is part of the reason the game has been in development for 6 years. The reality is that after 8 hours of work at a day job that's just as intensive as working on the game, plus all the little life admin, there's very little time and energy left.I'm pleased to say that I have resigned from my job and will be working on the game full time starting in October. We're in a very fortunate position where we can afford to do this without starving, and the timing just feels right. I'll be the only one to do this, at least for now, but most of the time the bottleneck has been programming and game design, not art.This is something we're very excited about because it means more focused work on the game and a bit of personal life…
- Devlog #17 - Demo available now + new update - 10 August 2026
First things first: The demo is available now on Steam. If you've been following these devlogs, you'll know this has been a long time coming. We've said "soon" more times than we'd like to admit, so it feels good to finally just say: go play it. And there's no better time to jump in, because it launches alongside a new update that adds a whole new layer of complexity to the game.Medical UpdateIf you've followed along, you'll know that food items in the game have different nutrients: protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and vitamins. While plants showed this information clearly, the simulation didn't really cover much when it came to digestion, deficiencies, effect on toilet needs, etc.The first thing that had to be implemented here was a new system for "Conditions". These are temporary or permanent issues that have an effect on health. They range from simple bruises and cuts to nutrient d…
- Devlog #16 - The dangers of overexpansion - 31 May 2026
Before we get to the main topic, I have a little announcement: Due to a mix-up in the Steam page review process, which is needed for the demo page, we won't be able to launch the demo tomorrow as planned. Meanwhile, we've released the Demo on Itch as well for anyone who would really like to try it out as soon as possible. This is available right now. I'm not sure if I'm allowed to link it here but the simplest web search will get you there. As for the Steam release, because of some upcoming gaming events, we'll have to delay for another 3 weeks or so. On the bright side, this will give us some more time to work on the next update. I'll post more about this in the next devlog so watch out for that one too.Now, onwards to the main topic.The machine must growYou've landed on the red planet, set up your living quarters, got a modest amount of planting going on and you've started mining and…
- Devlog #15 - Your first day in Red Dust Colony - 26 May 2026
Before we get to the main topic, we have some exciting news: The demo will become public on the 1st of June! It's been a lot of work and we couldn't have done it without the help of our community for which we're very grateful. Shoutout to you guys, you rock! (or do you regolith?)Now, with the demo being less than a week away, I thought I'd go over the first day in RDC and set you up for success.TouchdownOnce the lander settled and everyone got up from their seats, it's time to make some room and at the same time get some extra resources. Since we're not going to be leaving Mars anytime soon, both the rocket engines and the landing seats can and should be deconstructed.At the same time we need to place down a Stockpile for storing the bulky resources like Hull pieces, Iron Plates and soon, Regolith and Ores.The initial lander is pretty small and won't fit that much, but luckily, it's mad…
- Devlog #14 - Life, Death, and a Public Demo - 29 March 2026
Hello and welcome to the 14th devlog for Red Dust Colony. This one's a big one: the public demo is almost here.New versionAfter around 4 months of development, we've made the new version available privately for playtesting and the reception has been pretty good so far. We're now on the third patch, having ironed out most reported issues with nothing too alarming popping up. This means the demo will very soon go public and everyone will be able to try it out. All we're really missing is a new trailer, as the current one is over 2 years old, and that's exactly what we're planning to take care of next week.A few features have been added since last time, tying up loose ends:New colonist arrivalsTo grow the colony, more hands are needed and for that colonists need a way to arrive. Once a rocket pad is built, new arrivals are made possible and the existing crew will be happy to greet newcomer…
- DevLog #13 - Colonist AI, QoL features and Demo news - 8 February 2026
Hello and welcome to the 13th devlog for Red Dust Colony.Between a wave of new playtesters and a major colonist AI overhaul, it's been a busy couple of months. Let's get into it:Colonist behaviour overhaulPreviously, attributes, traits and even some skills were just placeholders. We knew that these are things we want in the game, so adding them in the UI early saved us from having to redesign the UI again to fit all the new information. This did come with a lot of questions from playtesters about what the various things do, as there were no tooltips either. These have now all been implemented.There's over 50 traits now, all with different mechanics, like Suit Junkie which will get a mood boost from doing EVA actions, Snoring which will wake up nearby colonists and Destructive which will tend to damage equipment when stressed out.As the colonists go about their day, the environment, othe…
- DevLog #12 - New Tutorial, Localization, The Future. - 26 October 2025
Hello and welcome to the 12th devlog for Red Dust Colony.Plenty of things happened since the last post here, so let's get on to it:Dust StormIt still took a decent amount of work to get this feature running well but now it's integrated and working. Below are some screenshots taken by one of our amazingly helpful play testers:Wide Aspect RatioWe've had reports that the game wasn't looking great on wide screens. Normally all UI is designed to adjust itself to the aspect ratio of the screen but this being a more extreme case, it didn't work out of the box. Luckily, fixing this didn't take too much time.New Guide SystemOver the last year, we've had a steady stream of playtesting and it's been immensely helpful in discovering problems and having a clue in how people play and understand the game. Depending on players' gaming backgrounds, there was some confusion around how the game works and…
- DevLog #11 - The Dust Storm - 22 June 2025
Hello and welcome to the 11th devlog for Red Dust ColonyIt's been a while since the last post. The reason for taking so long is simply that we've been busy working on the game. Based on feedback we made some changes to the early content which have been proven to work well, we've overhauled some of the menus, we've added an ingame roadmap and most of the time has been spent working on the next big feature: the Dust Storm.Concrete production pipelineBefore, colonists would just mine the terrain and rocks and use the resulting regolith blocks along with some water to create concrete at the crafting table. This was good enough initially but it didn't have a good feeling. All the production was inside the base and these are processes that are big and messy. As a result, we've moved the production completely outside, saving up some of that precious indoor spaceNew menusAs we've worked on the…
- DevLog #10 - Polishing and addressing feedback - 9 March 2025
Hello and welcome to the 10th devlog for Red Dust Colony. Since I last wrote, we've been as busy as ever, working on new features, polishing up existing ones and doing balancing work. We've made progress on the liquid system and made many improvements based on feedback. We've also completely reworked the tutorial system. Polishing up the game When laying out the buildings, it wasn't always clear how much they would cost so now the UI makes it easier to understand It wasn't always easy to keep an eye on the colonists, so now there's a list in the UI that allows for easy selection and some quick information. We've also added hand drawn portraits for all colonists. The information in the selection window was purely text before, so we've updated it for everything that can be selected. This is how it looks for storage containers We've added graphics for all items in the game as we were previ…
- DevLog #9 - The food system - 16 December 2024
Hello, We're as busy as ever, trying to get everything ready for the public demo. Currently, we're working on the liquid system and taking care of particles and other VFX, but more on these at a later time. Today, we're talking about cooking and the food system. Food system In most colony sim games, cooking is a work type or profession that characters perform. This often ends up with one character preparing meals for a significant amount of time, and we wanted to try something different. Instead of one colonist taking care of cooking for everyone, now everyone will be responsible for it. When mealtime arrives, colonists will check what they can eat, preferring to cook with raw ingredients. They'll go to the fridge, pick up the required items, go to the cooking table, prepare food and then sit down to eat it. Each food type contains carbohydrates, protein, fat, vitamins and fiber. Coloni…
- DevLog #8 - The map generation system - 27 October 2024
Hello, and welcome to the 8th devlog for Red Dust Colony. Last time we were in the middle of bugfixing following the private release of a demo on our Discord server. I'm happy to say that the game is much more stable now, with the last build receiving no crash or bug reports. With the base of the game stabilized we can move forward, add more content, polish what we have and improve the overall gameplay. Procedural map generation One of the first things that we wanted to rework was the way maps are generated. We'd like to provide multiple types of maps each with their own styles and intricacies and what we had until now wasn't powerful enough to handle everything. The current system was something developed early on as a temporary solution and while it has served us well until now, some of the issues were starting to surface. Let's go over the basics of map generation first and then see h…
- DevLog #7 - Nerding out on testing - 15 September 2024
A fair bit has happened since the last development log. We've released a private demo for our Discord users and we've received all sorts of feedback and bug reports, ranging from nasty crashes to small UI issues. While writing this, we're in the process of releasing the 4th build already, fixing issues as fast as we can. The game is going to likely remain in this limited access state until everything is working as well as it should be. This experience has only strengthened our belief that automated testing is the key to verifying that everything is working and that all corner cases are being handled correctly. In this devlog, I'll explain a bit about how the system works and why this particular genre can benefit immensely from it. The anatomy of a bug Bugs can range from the game crashing or freezing to UI getting stuck to the screen, or colonists getting stuck doing weird animations. A…
- DevLog #6 - Navigation tech dive - 5 August 2024
Welcome to our sixth devlog for Red Dust Colony! This month has been quite eventful for us. A recent move consumed much of our spare time with packing, unpacking, furniture hunting, endless hardware store trips, and painting. Most of our development work focused on bug fixing, resolving colonist AI edge cases, updating older UI elements to match the current style, and adding UI and overlay to the priority tool: While these tasks were crucial, they don't make for the most exciting devlog material. So today, instead of our usual "what we've been up to" format, I'll take you on a deep dive into our navigation system, which required significant iteration and technical design to get right. The Challenge Colonists need to efficiently find and perform work, including using crafting tables, picking up and delivering items, locating the nearest toilet, finding suitable beds, and choosing to spen…
- DevLog #5 - Tutorial, Priority system, Socialising and more - 30 June 2024
Hello and welcome to our fifth devlog for Red Dust Colony! Normally, I try to write at least one of these per month, but this one took a bit longer. We traveled for a wedding out of the country, and with 2 dogs, this tends to not be as straightforward. While we were there, we also took the time to just go out and visit some places and acquaintances. Another thing is that a lot of what we've been doing was bugfixing and polishing. Things like colonists not picking up some items to transport to storage or adding some indicators to signal a building is awaiting deconstruction. While there are certainly plenty of tiny things to talk about, I'd rather not expose every bit of detail about the game. Guiding system and Tutorial It's important for people to understand how to play the game. We're hoping for fans of the genre to pick it up naturally with little to no guidance, but at the same time…
- DevLog #4 - Crafting, Processing, Liquids, Decay and Lighting updates - 25 May 2024
Hello and welcome to our fourth devlog for Red Dust Colony. A fair number of things happened since I last wrote. Crafting, cooking, and processing have been finalized, the storage system has been expanded to allow liquids and items can now decay over time. Colonists use food trays when eating and prefer to find a place to sit if possible. The build menu has been overhauled and plants now have had the last mechanics implemented. Art is also ready for a few new buildings. These are all just surface-level changes, with a lot of technical improvements underneath. Today, I'll go over these changes and walk you through them. Crafting, Cooking, Processing Crafting stations have been one of the few things that were implemented in the game early on. Colonists have been able to turn items into other items since before they even had models and were mere capsules moving around. This however, also m…
- DevLog #3 - Botany, Light system, Carbon extraction - 23 April 2024
Hello and welcome to our third devlog for Red Dust Colony Last time I wrote, I spoke about our plans for the game and the playable demo. We realized that to be an engaging game, more content is needed. To address this, the entire content was redesigned and we set a comprehensive plan in place. Since then, things have been going smoothly and we've been tackling the required changes one by one. There's still a fair bit to do before we can release anything, but until then, I'd like to walk you through what we've worked on. First, all the data had to be moved from paper, or in our case Figma and Google Sheets, to the game engine. For the buildings, build menu items, research entries, and categories, there's no other way but to manually go over each and set up everything. It's a tedious task, but it will only have to be done once. For some of the balancing data, however, the preferred editin…
- DevLog #2 - We need more game - 28 March 2024
Hello and welcome to our second devlog, third if you include the introduction one. During the last development log of Red Dust Colony we were still knee deep in trailer footage, ideas, and a rush to make things as presentable as we could. A few features like the meteor strike weren't ready so we still had to do some work before moving on. We've since released it; If you haven't watched it yet, we encourage you to do so here, and let us know what you think. With the trailer out of the way, first we had to fix a number of issues that we found while recording it but which were either not visible, or not of a high enough priority. It was important to make sure everything is fixed because our next milestone is having a demo that shows what Red Dust Colony is about. What should a demo even contain? With other types of games, figuring out the answer to this question would be easier, but in the…
- DevLog #1 - The road to a proper trailer - 4 March 2024
Some of you might remember that the first trailer we had wasn't exactly great. It was something created over 6 months ago, meant as a teaser; however, compared to the game, it has not aged well. We realized that in order for the game to get some traction we'd need to create something better. Fun fact about the old one, after we've removed it from Steam, the game seems to have done better in terms of impressions and wishlists so it's clear it was actually doing us a disservice. Since neither of us had done any marketing before this, we were learning as we went, encountering a learning curve with some aspects. I don't believe I've ever considered what makes a trailer good before but pondering about it for a while, I realized that it first needs to captivate the audience and then inform them about the game's features, progression, and general gameplay. So we sat down and came up with a scr…
- DevLog #0 - Overview - 13 February 2024
Hello and welcome to our very first development log for Red Dust Colony. Meet the crew Currently there are 2 developers working on RDC, myself (Lorin) and Cristina. I'm responsible for programming, game design, sound and tooling. I've been experimenting with game programming ever since I was a child and have been working in the industry for the past 14 years. When not coding, I enjoy technical games such as colony simulators or factory automation games. Cristina is responsible for the artistic side of the game, handling, modelling, texturing, animations, ui/ux. Having spent a significant chunk of her life with a paint brush in her hand she's a natural when it comes to esthetics and can adapt to any style and work. When not contributing to the game she works as a Product designer. There are 2 other members of our team, Rocky and Maya and their primary roles are creative chewpervisors, an…
