2024 is more than started, January is already gone and we entering february so this blog is coming a little bit late, but better late than never right?

As new year starts, people draw their new year resolution and even though I am not the biggest fan of such thing, I’ve also set at least one resolution: have at least one game published on Steam by the end of the year.

But before I dig into the game that I plan on publishing this year, let take you a little bit in the past, around 3 months ago.

If you follow CherryBit, you might remember that I have been working on this game called Treelings, where you would manage a village on top of tree, attending to your settlers and managing resources.

I started working on that game around November 2023, when I decided to join the 8 Bits to infinity jam of that month (by the way, if you are a game developer be sure to check that community out, they are awesome). The Jam theme was indirect control, with the additional mix of “branches”, and that is why I got that idea of a game which you built a village in a tree, as you didn’t directly controlled your settlers, but rather grew the tree and influence them on doing the work.

The development of that game was going actually well, but as usual, the scope of it was a bit bigger than anticipated, the biggest issue here was that it took a long time for me to get enough of a gameplay, due to many systems that I had to have in place, and well, long story short, I got frustrated and lost the will of working on it.

But as we reached the end of December, I decided to join the Mini Jam that was happening on that week, seeking that as an opportunity to regain my excitement with game development.

That Game Jam theme were connections, and I had this idea of making a resource management game which you have to build railways which would connect resource extractors to resource processors in order gather and craft resources to reach a goal.

In just one day I was able to get the basic mechanics of the game up and running and I feel this productivity was due two main factors:

• Lessons learned from Treelings. I was able to use a lot of the ideas that I had implemented in my previous project which saved me a ton of time.
• Simpler mechanics! This game consists in a simpler mechanic, I finally was able to choose and design mechanic that has a good small scope.

With my excitement regained, I decided to move forward with this new project, which I called Stardustry! I might come back to Treelings some day, but for now, Stardustry will be my main project which will hopefully fulfil my goal of having a released game on steam by the end of the year!

For the past weeks I worked hard on getting the game in a state which I can demo it to people, and I am super close to it. So stay tuned!

In the mean time, I have prepared the game page on Steam! So, if you want to learn more about it, check it here (and be sure to wishlist if the game calls your attention :D)!