Monthly Archives: August 2020

by

Fleshcult on Steam?

In the previous post I laid out how I’m gonna make a downloadable version of Fleshcult. The question is, how should I distribute it?

Putting it on Steam has a lot of interesting potential. It’d bring it to a new audience. If it does well, that might put restarting development into a new light. Modding support via Steam Workshop would be really cool. And Steam’s just really convenient to use.

On the other hand, Valve’s not in the business of being a file server for totally free or Patreon-supported games. F2P, yes – totally free, no. As I understand it, to pass store page review it has to cost money, or have in-app purchases, or have a plan to make money later. For example, Doki Doki Literature Club has a token item of DLC that acts as a tip jar. Actual DLC content would be cool, but the project doesn’t have enough momentum right now for me to commit to making anything significant – aside from the Infestation tome, which will go in the base game. I could just charge a buck, that would be simple.

I could also stick it on itch.io. They’ll happily host games in exchange for a cut of the tip jar. So, I’m thinking a buck for the Steam version, which will go towards modding support, and free/pay-what-you-want on Itch.

What do you think? Any other options I should be considering?

by

Downloadable Fleshcult: A Breakthrough

Remember how I was struggling to make a client-side version of Fleshcult? I’d settled on an approach, but it was still a significant amount of work. Now I’ve found a huge short cut.

There’s this thing called Python CEF and it lets me build a web browser engine into a Python program. I’ll get into the technical details below, but the end result is a totally self-contained version of Fleshcult that runs locally as an application. The downside is that it no longer runs on mobile, and making Mac and Linux versions will require some additional work.

I’ve been working on it for about a week and I’ve already made a lot of progress. I can play through encounters and recruit minions, but there are still of a lot of details to attend to. Hosting the server-side processing has been costing me about $60/month for the past 8 years, so I’m feeling pretty stoked to get that monkey off my back. It also opens up some interesting possibilities that I’ll get to in the next post.

Continue reading →