- Diary #73 – Don’t Worry, I’m Still Around - 9 July 2026
Hi all, so it's been awhile since the last dev diary... I've still been working on Project OY, but there's been a bunch of personal & family things going on over here so there hasn't been time to communicate much about the project. (That'll likely be the case for the next month too, FYI.)(An in-engine shot of something being worked on.)I did make a start on one dev diary, which was going to be a structured rant about how I hate "AI", but there's just so many reasons that it became a bit of a mess. It was either going to become a disorganized manifesto, its own project that sucked up all the negative free time I had, or both. In lieu of actually writing that whole thing, here are the headlines for each section (most of which have not been filled in):What is "AI", Actually?False/Misleading AdvertisingEven the Cases Where it Works Are ProblematicSucking Away Investment & ResourcesEnvironme…
- Diary #72 – 1.3.02 Release Notes - 24 March 2026
To celebrate a whole year of Iron Village being available to the public, the 1.3 update is releasing today! (March 24th, 2026) The biggest feature is tree planting: once you get the Full Agricultural Permit, you can start planting your own trees. I haven’t personally run into a situation where I’ve completely run out of trees, but if you want to replant some of your deforested regions, you now have the power to do so. They do take awhile to grow though, so be prepared to wait.The other big part of this update is a fix for the Android Demo. As I’ve mentioned before, there are 16 different builds I make per release of Iron Village. For minor updates, I don’t test every one of the 16 builds, but make sure I’ve checked every flavor: make sure it works on Android, MacOS, Linux (usually just by testing the Steam Deck), and Windows; make sure it works without Steam, and make sure the demo work…
- Diary #71 - Yet More Games I've Played (Part 3) - 20 March 2026
In this dev diary I’ll be wrapping up my 2025 games played review. But first, a quick announcement – Iron Village 1.3 will be releasing on March 24th, the one year anniversary of 1.0’s release! It’s not a huge update, just some bug fixes and a small tree feature I’ll go into detail about next time, but it’s still something! Iron Village is currently on sale for 35% off, so if you don’t have it already go ahead and snag it now. Anyway, now for your scheduled programming:The Wandering Village The Wandering Village is a city builder with a twist: you’re building on top of a giant wandering creature called an Onbu. On top of handling the needs of your people, you also need to handle the needs of your Onbu, sometimes balancing between the two of them when their desires conflict (although usually it’s a symbiotic relationship). The Onbu also helps drive the overarching narrative, where you ex…
- Diary #70 - More Games I've Played (Part 2) - 24 February 2026
Project OY development continues (I'll have another update on Patreon soon), and there's an Iron Village update in the works (!), but for now, we're going to continue with my 2025 games recap.Paradise KillerI barely know how to describe Paradise Killer. To put it dryly, you play "Lady Love Dies", summoned from exile to investigate the murder of the island's council. You go around and gather evidence to provide in trial at the end of the game.Describing it like that would do the game a huge injustice though. It's a completely surreal experience, from the setting (a regenerating island meant to eventually resurrect fallen deities, but gets corrupted by demons every time - except this time it was supposed to be perfect) to the characters (all with interesting stories and relationships... and possible motives). I don't know how else to explain it apart from it being a unique experience, in…
- Diary #69 - Some Nice Games I Played (Part 1) - 30 January 2026
With Project OY development fully underway (and still unannounced), there's not really so much actual game development for me to talk about in these dev diaries. After the Steam Replay for 2025, I did think of an idea: why not write a little bit about it and make that a dev diary post?So, why post this almost a month after 2025 is done? Well, (1) I was busy during the holiday season, including everyone getting sick, (2) there's something about leaving out 2 weeks of data in December that really bugs me, and (3) the start of this year has been... a lot.I'll be going through my own Steam Replay semi-chronologically and giving a few of my thoughts. I'm skipping over a fair number of games - either my play time was miniscule, or I just didn't like the game. I'm not here to put down other people's games, every game below gets my personal recommendation. (None of these are ads, and I guess th…
- Diary #68 - 1.2.14 Release Notes - 13 January 2026
Surprise, it's another update for Iron Village! Iron Village got a big bump in sales recently, which initially looked like an end-of-sale spike, but turned out to be driven by this video by the Geek Cupboard:It's awesome to see Iron Village popping up still, but of course more players means more opportunities for bug reports! There were two bugs reported last week:On Android, the foundation for the Magick Transformer was missing, so the player couldn't build it.On the Steam Deck (but also PC), the controller would stop responding when going back to the menu, even though the menu was in focus.I'm still not 100% sure what happened for #1, especially since I couldn't reproduce it, but it did highlight the difficulty of debugging on someone else's Android device. Actually accessing saves isn't possible right now (each app's storage is kept secure from any other app accessing it, but that ap…
- Diary #67 – A Look Back on 2025 - 31 December 2025
I know, I know, you’re looking at that title and thinking, why on earth would I want to look back on this year?! And yes, the world is uh, not doing so well, but we’re at least going to take a look back at the year from the perspective of Lunar Chippy Games.But first, if you’re reading this and haven’t bought Iron Village yet – it’s 30% off for the rest of the year!Iron Village at BostonFIG back in December 2024The biggest date of course was March 24th, but I’ll backtrack a little bit first. Iron Village was at BostonFIG on December 15th, so after that and holiday shenanigans, the year started off with implementing the crazy amount of feedback from then. (Not all of it of course, feedback is super useful but not 100% correct.) Levels 4 & 5 hadn’t even been fully implemented yet, so there was still a big chunk of work to cram into two and a half months.Somehow I pulled it off, all while…
- Diary #66 – 1.2.09 Release Notes - 4 December 2025
So thanks to a bug report on some missing achievements, we have a new release of Iron Village coming your way! There are two main fixes here:#1: Achievement Synchronization: When you load a save file, the game will manually check everything and unlock achievements as appropriate. For some reason somebody’s game didn’t unlock the Artificer’s Guild and Deep Mine achievements when they built them, and prior to 1.2.09 the game would never go back and try to unlock them again. This fixes that problem by adding a redundant layer to catch these sorts of missing achievements on a regular basis. (In fact, this logic was already in use for a few achievements, I’ve just expanded it to cover nearly all of them. The only one that isn’t covered is the “all resources” achievement, but that checks the conditions every time your resource counts change, so it’ll generally update within a few seconds.#2:…
- Diary #65 – 1.2.08 Release Notes - 22 November 2025
Hi all, so our big “Puritans & Capitalism” sale started yesterday, which I would’ve announced beforehand, but rather fittingly I came down with a fever and was barely able to flip the switch on the associated 1.2.08 update, let alone post anything coherently.Anyway, I’m starting to do a lot better now, so, let’s get in to the massive list of new features:Replaced the Wishlist button with a button linking to Patreon (a.k.a. a “give me more money please” button).Did a bunch of code cleanup and hopefully didn’t break anything.…and that was it for this update. I actually thought there was at least one more related to localization, but it must’ve been fixing a typo I recently made, since there’s no sign of it in the git history.Hope you all have a nice Thanksgiving if you celebrate, and if not, I hope you have a peaceful week without as many Americans to deal with! (And sorry Canada for miss…
- Diary #64 – Patreon - 7 November 2025
An expanded version of the teaser shot I posted earlier. Note the beautiful default UI.Well, it’s finally here: the Lunar Chippy Games Patreon has launched! I kept procrastinating it because I’m still really bad at self promotion, asking for money, and generally dealing with self doubt, but I’ve finally pushed the button! If you want to go ahead and support our development, as well as get sneak peaks at the development of “Project OY”, then go ahead and jump aboard!The player, shown inside with the walls cut away. They’ve forgotten their clothes. 🙃$4/month gets you access to regular screenshots and the occasional early dev diary, while $8/month will get an additional video plus a Steam key for Iron Village!A shot of the train from the opposite platform.Anyway, your support is much appreciated! Whether you join or not, you’ve got these new screenshots to further tease the game!The train…
- Diary #63 - Semi-Automation - 27 October 2025
One thing that comes up a lot in any sort of software engineering is the concept of automation: how can we take repetitive, error-prone tasks and automate them? This is where you get things like automated testing and automated build systems. It's also part of why the LLM nonsense known as "AI" has taken over billionaires' brains: the idea of replacing their "entitled workers" with slop is just too enticing, apparently. There's also the idea that in a lot of projects, especially programming and game development, that the last 20% of the work takes 80% of the time. (Sometimes it's 80 out of 100, sometimes it's an additional 80%, but either way it's a lot.) So combining these two ideas: what if we could get away with just doing that first 80% of the work? Or to put it another way, can we get away with half-assing automation? I would argue, yes. Especially in "solo" development, there are s…
- Steam Deck Compatibility Info - 26 October 2025
Hi all, for whatever reason Steam says that posting an "event" is the best way to document Steam Deck compatibility, so I figured I'd make this post so that it's properly documented. (Sorry, nothing new in this "announcement", but there'll be another dev diary soon!)As of the 26th of October, 2025, Iron Village is still listed as "Unknown" Steam Deck compatibility. This is just because there haven't been quite enough sales to get it on Valve's review queue. However, I can assure all of you:Iron Village has been designed from (nearly) the beginning to work well on the Steam Deck, and we regularly confirm that it works as part of the update release process.If you run into any issues on the Steam Deck, then that is something we want to fix, please contact us on the website or on Discord.That's the TL;DR, but I'll go over the details below:Iron Village is built to run natively on Linux, so…
- Diary #62 - 1.2.06 Release Notes - 17 October 2025
Surprise, another update has landed! Just a couple of days after submitting 1.2.01 to Google Play, a new deadline popped up: Submit a version that supports 16kb memory page sizes by the end of October, or else! Luckily around the exact same time, Godot 4.5 was released, which had the necessary support for the memory page size update. Since I needed to make an update anyway, I squeezed a couple of bug fixes in as well:Fix an issue where you sometimes couldn’t move a building to a position that overlaps its prior position, even though the cursor correctly rendered in blue. (Thanks to a bug in the code, you could only do so if moving the building right, not left. Ooops.)Fixed/Hacked around an issue where the Railway Status Window would get unnecessarily long and put the title off screen, making it difficult to close and impossible to move. (I still don’t know why this happens, apart from s…
- Diary #61 – Sale Retrospectives - 3 October 2025
Yes, the Autumn Sale isn’t actually over yet, but I was looking for something to talk about in this dev diary, and thought it might be interesting. First though, a huge thank you to everyone: Iron Village has now surpassed 50 reviews (54 as of time of writing!), making it “Very Positive” in Steam’s eyes. I literally couldn’t have done it without you all – I mean, I didn’t write any of the reviews, so *I* didn’t actually do any of it.So as you may or may not know, discounted sales are a huge chunk of total sales. Outside of the initial launch, they are the vast majority of sales. If you look at the graph below of net sales over time, you can see a few distinct phases:The initial launch spike.A mini plateau and another spike. (This and the previous phase will be the subject of another future dev diary.)A shallow climb from Mid-May through Mid-June.A big jump coinciding with 20% off and th…
- Diary #60 – 1.2 Launch & The Future - 26 September 2025
So it looks like the Iron Village 1.2 launch has gone pretty smoothly! Apart from the bug that caused 1.2.03, there haven’t been any significant issues, and the launch sale has gone well so far. (As long as you say it’s “25% off” instead of “$2 USD off”, it sounds like a decent discount, haha.)\ Side note: if you’ haven’t ‘ve bought Iron Village, but haven’t left a review, please take the time to do so! Iron Village only needs two more reviews to reach the magic 50, which puts the word “Very” in front of “Positive”. I’m not entirely sure if it has a direct algorithmic impact, but it definitely has an impact on people when viewing the store page, and the resulting purchases and wishlists do have algorithmic impacts!So what now? Well, serious work began on the new project (nicknamed Project OY for now) at the start of September, and it’s been basically full time for the last week and chan…
- Diary #59 - 1.2.03 Release Notes - 19 September 2025
As is tradition, we have another post-release patch! Nothing game-breaking this time, but a couple of issues were reported, and I uncovered a separate minor bug along the way.Fixed an issue where the tutorial bubble informing you of the HQ's upgradability would not disappear after actually building it. (Additional code has also been added to fix it in old saves.)Fixed the Grand Headquarters achievement to actually unlock upon building it. (Additional code has also been added to unlock it in old saves.)Fixed an issue where villagers entering the HQ (base level) would disappear at the cliff rather than taking the time to actually walk up the stairs.That's all for now!
- Diary #58 - 1.2.02 Release Notes - 18 September 2025
Iron Village 1.2 is now out! Here's a full list of features, changes, fixes, etc:Show an icon over a building when it is being demolished/chopped down.Add charts for current and maximum production rates of resources, unlockable via levels of the Railway Headquarters.Created new icons for farm fields that are rotated from their base option.Stopped minecart animations from automatically playing, regardless of whether or not workers are present.Target SDK on Android has now been set to 35 to comply with Play Store requirements.Some resource piles now have upgraded graphics.The City Status Permit now contains a line referring to the palace that is required for the ceremony.Added new icons for job priorities, maximum production, and current production.Added a Railway Headquarters building that can be further upgraded. This building also supplies housing.Stop villagers from being evicted when…
- Diary #57 – Iron Village 1.2 Features - 5 September 2025
It’s been almost 3 months since the last major update, and it’s time to give a full preview of what’s coming in the update. The plan is to release the 1.2 update on Thursday, September 18th – all of the major features are done, it’s mostly just some minor bugfixes I’m trying to squeeze in, plus some more thorough testing, so I don’t see a reason why the date will change. Here’s what you can expect in this update:UI UpdatesThe lower right corner of the user interface with the new graphics applied.Probably one of the first things you’ll notice. I’ve implemented the updated Minifantasy UI (with some modifications), giving the panel textures a more crisp look that contrasts them better against the background. I think this brings it more in line with rest of the game’s aesthetic as well.A tree waiting to be chopped down.There’s also new bubbles that pop up on buildings & trees that you are d…
- Diary #56 – The Iron Village Cinematic Universe - 27 August 2025
When I stopped working at my corpo tech job, I assumed that I would magically get the time to put out some sort of dev diary every week. Maybe that’ll still happen, especially if I do start a Patreon, but that has definitely not been the case recently. Instead, it’s been the two weeks between my two oldest kids going to summer camp, and them going to school. Some highlights include:Trying to get my oldest to not spend all of his time on the computer without being a hypocrite.A reintroduction to Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, this time in my youngest kid.Moderating interpersonal conflicts between the three of them. (Yes, it is frustrating dealing with a toddler in their terrible twos. No, you don’t get to scream whenever they touch you.)Somehow in the midst of all of this, I did get some work done on Iron Village: Steam Input API integration. It’s a best practice for Steam Deck integrati…
- Diary #55 – Turning Points - 11 August 2025
Disclaimer: Not in game footage. No curved tracks are planned for Iron Village, sorry.\\So things are changing over here, and I’m going to potentially overshare personal life things that are relevant to Iron Village & Lunar Chippy Games as a whole.First off, the job at the global megacorp, or whatever I called it back at the start of these dev diaries, is coming to an end. There was a “voluntary exit program” with severance pay offered, and I figured it was time to make the jump. I’m not going to go into all of the details (personal privacy reasons mainly; everything I’m talking about is discussing working conditions and is therefore protected activity in the US – at least as long as the NLRB exists 🙃), but the gist of it is:Growing disillusionment with the company, its direction, and especially its leadershipOther parts of the company allegedly profiting off of genocide (according to…
