Development update June 2021

Welcome to the first monthly update on the development of “Virtueror: The Virtual Conqueror”, a Real Time Strategy game with 4x and RPG elements I am developing as a solo indie developer.

This month I had to spend a good amount of work on the new Steam page (which went live on the 9th of June) and the itchio page (which went live on the 14th of June), but I tried not to neglect development and these are the main updates.

Radar station

I introduced a new building, a radar station. Its main purpose is to make a big area of the map constantly visible.

It's not possible to build one yet, for now you can only conquer an existing one.
Then, as for the other structures, you have to connect it to your base to get it to work.

In the future it will also be possible to upgrade it and it will give you access to a mini-map.

Factions and new faction selection screen

I designed and implemented a first version of the screen to choose your faction when starting a new game.

That also allowed me to define and to reveal a few details about the 3 playable factions. You can find out more about them in the game page.

New main menu

I have been using a black screen with 2 gray buttons as main menu for the last 6 months. It was time to introduce something different.

As for everything else, this is a first version and things might change in the future.

I believe this is already not bad, but let me know what you think about it in comments.

Video dev log

If you want to see the latest changes in action check out the dev log video of this month:

Bug of the month

This month I don't have any special bug from the development, but I have one from my Steam page launch.

I did a live stream on Steam when I launched the game page of Virtueror, but for some obscure reason OBS decided to not capture my audio when I started. Because of that I spoke to myself for about 25 minutes before realizing what was going on.

People tried to warn me of what was happening, but (obviously) my Steam chat crashed and I closed Discord to not get disturbed during the stream, so I didn't realize what was going on until I stopped to try to get the chat working again.

Murphy's law, right?

What's next?

During the month of July I will focus on getting everything ready for the closed alpha testing.
That's mostly going to be fixing bugs and improving existing features.

If you want to get access to it you will need to join the official Discord server of Virtueror. There you will also take part in the open development, which means you'll be able to vote for features, to influence the development roadmap and to suggest ideas and improvements.

In the next few days I will also need to decide if it's better to give people access to the current version of the game as soon as possible or if instead I should take the whole month to develop some new features and some kind of basic AI before starting with the alpha testing.

Let me know what you would prefer in comments or join the Discord server to vote in the poll that I will post there.

Support this game, add and follow!

If you enjoyed this update and if you want to support Virtueror I would really appreciate if you could spread the word, but also add it to your collections and follow me on itchio to stay up to date with all the upcoming news and updates.