Hey everyone, I just wanted to pop in with a little status report before I’m off on a family vacation for a bit over a week.

As I’ve mentioned before, the first main update to Iron Village is to give it a “soft ending”, tying up the (light) story of why you are building this village and signaling to players that there’s no more “content” beyond this point. For Iron Village, this takes the form of a City Establishment Ceremony. Monarch Faearn shows up in their Royal Train, conducts a ceremony, attends a feast, and then officially designates your town as a City. All of the preparation, as well as the train and the monarch themselves, have been implemented, the remaining work consists of having the ceremony actually occur, and figuring out what to do with the Monarch afterwards.

The Royal Ceremony isn’t the only thing in the 1.1 update though, there’s a few feature requests that made it in, as well as some features that didn’t quite make it into 1.0:

• Buildings can now be freely moved: no more demolishing and rebuilding.
  
• Production can now be paused: open a building’s info panel, and click pause (or resume) production.
  
• Autopurchase: automatically buy resources from trains as they come by. This can be really helpful to combat food and water shortages.
  
• Screenshot Mode: Hide all of the UI (apart from the little screenshot mode button) in order to take screenshots with just the pixel art.
  
• Added rotated versions of farms & big houses. They are different buildings, you can’t actually rotate one into another, but that should give you more flexibility in building your towns.
  
• When a building tries to store the resources at the end of a production cycle, it will wait until it can store something, but then discard the rest and move on. This should help with the Deep Mine, where before it would stop producing anything if even one storage was full – usually this made it really difficult to actually get gems.

No promises on what else will make it into 1.1, but the bigger features that are planned include:

• Allow demolition even when there is insufficient storage for the resulting resources – as long as the game warns you first.
  
• Make necessary changes to the UI to ensure the Android version works well before release (which may be pushed to May).
  
• Zoom In and Out: Actually zoom in or out in the game, without also changing the UI scale.
  
• Villager working animations: the way clothes are implemented might make this annoying to implement, but I have some animations for the villagers to actually mine, and I can probably pull something together for farming.

Also coming up in the beginning of May is the Boston GodotCon and PAX East – I’ll be at both! Just as an attendee though, I’m not shelling out for a PAX table, haha.

It turns out, $3681.54 USD.

That is quite a bit of money! And it doesn't even include my own labor! Although, it’s also a very low budget, depending on how you look at things. I’ll note that technically, none of these expenses are strictly mandatory. You can absolutely make a game for cheaper, if not free. This diary is not presented as advice, but rather a retelling of the development process from the point of view of dollars and cents. (and Euros!)

This definitely feels like one of the more personal dev diary entries. Like, even though we’re talking about something relatively boring like a budget, it is also exposing my privilege: I’ve been lucky enough to be able to scrape this money together over the course of a year and a half. Still though, as someone who believes in pay transparency, it’s time to put the money where my mouth is. My hope is that this will be helpful for anyone else who wants to attempt solo game development, and you can piece together what you really need. At the very least though, I hope some of you find it interesting.

I’ve broken this down by category, so it doesn’t correspond with when the expenses occurred. For the most part, these occurred over about a year and a half from September 2023 through March 2025.

This is the category for paying the gatekeepers. This is probably the most necessary expense of the bunch, but Itch.io is free, so you could still distribute a game without any of these.

• $100 Steam Direct Product Submission Fee: Technically, this will count as $0 once the first check comes out, since they return this if your game makes at least $1000 USD in revenue. (Iron Village has done so, I’ll talk more about that in a future dev diary.) However, I haven’t seen it in the company account yet, so it counts as an expense.
  
• $25 Google Play Developer Fee: This is a one-time payment, so any future Lunar Chippy releases on Android would be covered as well.
  
• $99 Apple Developer Program: There’s a longer story to tell about this annual fee, but I signed up for two reasons: App Notarization for MacOS, and potential iOS development. App Notarization avoids the app getting blocked by the OS from running, which is user-overridable, but only if they make the effort to go into security settings and allow it. However, my account randomly got caught in some sort of automated spam or fraud detector algorithm after a few months, and Apple shut it down with no reason given. The support person was like, sorry, I can’t tell you anything, maybe try making a new account? If the Android version does really well, maybe I’ll try it again, but I’m not really in the habit of throwing away $100 for nothing.

This is mostly the $520 for establishing an LLC (Limited Liability Company) as a separate legal entity, rather than just publishing as myself. Mobile games tend to be less restrictive towards companies (i.e. less rigid testing policies), whereas I don’t know much about what the difference is on Steam. Mainly though, this gets you legal protection in case you somehow get involved in legal issues – worst case scenario, the company is held responsible, not you.* Either way, my partner’s side of the family has multiple lawyers, so I couldn’t get away without doing this. The $520 is for establishing in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, most US states are lower as far as I’m aware. Outside of the US, I have no idea what the costs would be.

There’s also a $250 fee for filing a trademark claim with the US Patent and Trademark Office for “Iron Village”, though this process is ongoing.

To be sure, this is not the cost of just what I actually used in Iron Village – a solid chunk of this was bundles of everything a creator made during seasonal sales on Itch.io. Those assets may or may not show up in later projects. Either way, it turns out I’m a sucker for pixel art.

In addition, some assets were obtained through Patreon memberships, which totaled $176.29 over the course of development.

This is the most expensive category, but also one that can act as a significant multiplier to letting people around the world play. Some places are fine playing games in English, even when it isn’t their first language: the most extreme example is probably the Netherlands, which is one of the best selling countries per capita for Iron Village, despite there being no Dutch translation. On the flip side, players definitely notice well done localizations, and there are many players who you otherwise wouldn’t reach without translating into their language.

• $0 for Brazilian Portuguese: I was contacted by Thiago Mania pretty soon after the store page went up, who volunteered to do this translation.
  
• $0 for Spanish: This was a combo of 4 years of high school Spanish classes, looking things up with Google Translate, and cross checking with the Brazilian Portuguese translations. Each of those three things by themselves is not enough: my Spanish is hella rusty, relying on Google Translate is a great way to get yourself into una situación embarasada**, and Portuguese is a totally different language, just with similar-sounding words.
  
• $761.87 for French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese: I worked with WeMavin Languages for these.
  
• $50 for two international wire fees for those translations: turns out wiring money internationally can be expensive!

Capsule Art is the images you see that represent each game, usually some form of title and artwork. It’s the digital equivalent of box art. For Iron Village this was done by NicoSquare, a French artist, hence the payment in euros.

This was mostly related to attending BostonFIG, but includes other physical supplies.

• $38.95 for the shiny Lunar Chippy Games stickers
  
• $118.75 for a bunch of train sticker sheets I was going to hand out at BostonFIG, but didn’t arrive in time.
  
• $368.06 for the BostonFIG Indie Sponsorship
  
• $157.36 for a a ton of business cards, the posterboard, and stand
  
• $55.95 for a Target run to get other supplies (mouse, headphones, tablecloth, etc.) for BostonFIG

In hindsight, this was an area that could’ve done with more investment, largely on time. I did end up doing one paid short video (I forget how much it was, maybe $20?), and talked with a couple of PR companies, but those didn’t really go anywhere. Thanks to everything else going on in my life, there wasn’t really time to make a PR push myself, so I was left to a bit of social media and hoping that the Steam algorithm would look kindly upon me. I think it did, but I’m calling this out as an area that could have used more love.

The flip side of this, of course, is income. That is going to get its own dev diary, once the checks start coming and I can see exactly how much Steam is taking for itself. (Steam pays out by the end of the month for all the sales that occurred the previous month, so that’s the end of April for Iron Village.)

*Technically you can be held liable if you do something so far outside of the scope of your business that it’s your fault personally, but as I understand it that’s a much higher bar. I am not a lawyer, do not listen to me for legal advice.
**The joke here is that embarasada does not, in fact, mean embarrassed. It actually means pregnant.

So I was feeling proud, thanks to my efforts, all of your efforts as players of the demo, as well as Bea’s efforts in bug hunting, the 1.0.01 release went off without any major game-breaking errors. I managed to mess that up with 1.0.06 and those doors nobody asked for 😅. It’s possible that plenty of you never actually noticed the bug, but here’s what happens:

1. A villager is heading towards home. Before 1.0.06, they just knew the game coordinates where they were going, and that they were going to rest. However, in order to get them to open doors just before arriving, I added a variable to store the building they were going to.
   
2. You upgrade the house that they live in. (Demolishing it might cause the same problem.) This technically destroys their old house and builds a new one in the same location, except your original gold payment gets credited to the new building.
   
3. They get really close to their destination and try to open the door on a building that no longer exists. (The same things happens if you demolish it while they’re sleeping: they finish sleeping, then try to open that door.)
   
4. In many cases, Godot’s error handling deals with it decently well, and apart from a missing door sound & animation, the villager moves on with their life.
   
5. However, the old building and door may have already gone through garbage collection. To oversimplify a technical concept, the garbage truck has already come by to take the trash out of the dumpster. So Iron Village crashes.

Since there’s a possibility of crashes, and the error handling can have side effects in how the simulation runs, I’m pushing out another build, 1.0.09. As an added bonus, you get a new piece of UI and a couple of tweaks I was working on for 1.1. (Some other incomplete features have been disabled.) Here’s the full list:

• Fixed coal and iron hoppers to carry their loads 1 pixel higher.
  
• Added “Meals” to the Level 4 Permit Document

• Autosale Notifications! I meant to get these into 1.0.06, but didn’t quite find the time. Anyway, now when an autosale gets made, you’ll see a summary of the gold you made, plus the goods that were sold.

First of all, thanks so much everyone for playing Iron Village! It's been great to see how well received the game has been, and I'm looking forward to building onto it some more!

Some stats if you're curious:

• Over 500 sales
  
• Over 3600 outstanding wishlists (I see you all waiting for the summer sale 😂)
  
• 391 unique users
  
• Median time played of 53 minutes
  
• 17 reviews, 88% positive

It looks like we haven't had any critical errors (although you may have noticed the release version was 1.0.01, not .00 🙃), so this release is more full of minor goodies and tweaks rather than major fixes. Here's what's coming out:

• In 1.0.00, there was an issue with loading saves with Royal Palace construction sites. Basically, it was expecting a progress bar to be present, but there wasn't one, so the game wouldn't finish loading. Both parts of that have been fixed now: the progress bar is there, and loading games won't freak out over a missing progress bar.
  
• The next bit was an upgrade to Godot 4.4, the main feature of which was typed dictionaries! This is a technical detail, but basically pre-4.4 the lists of resources for building costs were actually two separate lists: one with resource types (an enum), and one with resource counts. I've finally been able to refactor that into one list with both, and in the process I found a couple of typos in costs, so that should all be fixed.
  
• Fixed an issue in the late game where placing buildings, roads, and demolitions would cause a noticeable lag. This was because the game recalculates the navigation mesh whenever a new building changes how villagers move around, and the way I was calling it would force the game to wait for those calculations to finish. That doesn't happen anymore, so the game can continue running smoothly.

• Invented the modern technology of doors. Villagers will now open and shut doors when entering/leaving buildings, complete with sound.
  
• Fixed an issue where the incorrect minimum approval rating would show - basically, the game was showing the minimum approval for the level you're on, rather than the next level.
  
• Slightly decreased electrical demand of trains. Electricity can be difficult to produce quickly enough for the new locomotives, so hopefully this helps ease perpetual shortages.
  
• Made double-wide roads render better. Technically, making roads two tiles wide doesn't really widen them, they still act as two parallel roads, but I've rewritten the road tiling logic in a way that at least makes it look like one big road, rather than some sort of net.

Anyway, I've got things sketched out for the first big update, 1.1. Unless this update breaks something horribly, then 1.1 will be the next update. However, I have plenty of things I want to talk about in dev diaries later, so stay tuned!

There’s still 1 day until Iron Village is out, but the 1.0 version of the demo is available now! Here is the list of changes since 0.8.04 came out:

• Fixed an issue with the Log Cabin not having correct upgrades.
  
• Lowered population caps to 20, 40, 60, 80, and 120.
  
• A bunch of things for level 5. (No Spoilers!)

• Added an autosale feature, unlocked at level 3. This allows you to automatically sell resources, leaving a specified minimum stock if you choose.
  
• Added logic to handle game controllers becoming disconnected, pausing the game and displaying a popup.
  
• Pause the game when the Steam Overlay is up.
  
• Adjusted coal tenders to show as full with 4 coal. (Was previously 8, but trains never needed this much coal.)
  
• Enable demolition to be cancelled.

• Added a Logistics Office, built in level 3, which allows for autosale (described above) and job prioritization (described below).
  
• Finally fixed an issue that sometimes prevented quarries from being demolished.
  
• Added additional tutorials for features in levels 3-5.
  
• Adjusted the starting camera position, and now persist the camera position in save files.
  
• Building buttons widen themselves if the title or description is too long. (Surprisingly, Spanish was the biggest offender, not German.)

• Updated the farm fields in the main menu to be 2×1, the same as in game.
  
• Added villagers to the main menu.
  
• Fixed CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) font to use another pixel font as backup, removing instances of mismatched “ransom note” font appearance in certain words.
  
• Adjusted window header size for CJK fonts.
  
• Included the actual approval rating in the next level requirements.
  
• Added an option in the settings to play zoomed out – note that this is not a game feature (yet) per se, but an option to make things look better on large screens. It also will not allow a pixel ratio under 2, so it will not zoom out at the game’s default resolution.
  
• Added flower bushes to the windmill.
  
• Added a bit of dirt around the well.
  
• Steam Achievements!
  
• Added a “Miscellaneous” category of buildings.

• Added player-customizable job priorities: rather than rely on their algorithms, you can make certain resources “+1” or “-1” priority, which makes them consider resources producing those types earlier or later in their job hunt.
  
• Added building thumbnails to the Info Box, so when you select a building it shows a little icon of it.
  
• Added a little status icon for buildings with missing storage.
  
• Fixed an issue with customizing the railway logo mid-game (i.e. it didn’t work).
  
• Added a progress bar to construction projects to get a glance of their progress outside of the info box.
  
• Educated villagers on the need to look both ways before crossing the tracks.
  
• Added a button in the custom railway logo window to clear all of the pixels.
  
• Edited the credits to better handle “日本語, 中国人, 中國人”
  
• Added Bea McCullagh as QA
  
• Fixed some issues with controllers and the UI.
  
• Fixed an issue where demolishing a storage building would reduce the remaining storage by double. (This would be fixed on reloading the game.)
  
• Animals now spawn at different points in their animation, so they’re not all mirroring each other.
  
• Adjusted the focus texture to be (barely) noticeable on selected buttons.
  
• Fixed the sounds to actually play based on position, shrunk the audible radii, and made the loudest sounds quieter. (The sounds were doing this theoretically, but all from the top left corner of the map, audible within 2000 in-game pixels. This is just about everywhere.)
  
• Fixed an issue with animal z layering, a.k.a. why are there cows on the roof?
  
• Added more grass, so that users with comically large screens are less likely to see the endless grey void.
  
• More game balance changes, I’m sure things will need additional balance.

(As of March 20th, 2025 there are 4 days to go until Iron Village releases!)

Iron Village releases on Steam in 3 days – March 24th at 9:00 EDT (GMT-4)! I’ll have some release notes for the final build later, but for now I wanted to take an opportunity to talk about what’s going on now. I want to capture a snapshot before the actual release, and take a bit of a look back at how things got here. It’ll be interesting to compare to how everything goes after the release, and how that potentially changes my views of things, but this will more accurately capture my thoughts before further hindsight comes in to mess things up.

To start, why have March 24th as a release date? Well, back in September I signed up for Steam’s City Builder & Colony Sim Fest – basically a special sale page on Steam that shows games that fit the genre, including demos. The festival starts on… March 24th. Given that games on sale get the most prominent position on the page, the best way to take advantage of the opportunity would (IMO) be to launch with a release sale: a built-in Steam feature that allows you to set a sale of 10 or 15% off for 7 to 14 days upon initial release.

Setting a hard deadline is fairly scary, but also it was far enough away that I figured it wouldn’t be an issue at all – but of course, I originally thought this was only going to take a couple of months. So eventually, the desire to make things as well as I could meant that I only actually finished the end game content a couple of weeks ago. This is very much not ideal, since it interferes with the time needed to thoroughly test and balance the game, as well as getting a complete product to YouTubers and Twitch streamers. The net result is that while I think Iron Village is still a good (and most importantly, fun) game, the balance may be a little off, and marketing efforts definitely suffered. The hard deadline also meant annoying the translators a little – instead of being able to request translations in bulk, I ended up making some last minute requests along the lines of “these are the last two strings, I swear”, only to be wrong a couple days later.

(A screenshot of my current town, showing some of the late game content that only squeezed in last minute.)

There is a little bit of polish (for instance, villager working animations) that is not getting done due to the hard time limit, and some last minute changes aren’t getting tutorial text on launch due to the need to get them translated. I’m listing all these negative aspects of setting a hard date, so what are the positives? Well, part of the hard deadline is a motivational factor to actually get this game finished. I don’t really get the option of indefinitely postponing the release, since I would lose out on the visibility the festival offers. While I can’t tell the future, I can make some rough guesses based on Next Fest last month. Getting that spotlight in the Steam store was enough to take Iron Village from 1025 active* wishlists on February 23rd to 1897 on March 3rd. (As of March 20th, we’re at 2309 active wishlists.)

*As in, wishlists that haven’t since been deleted or converted into sales. For transparency, there have been 205 wishlist removals as of March 20th, and 1 conversion: Thiago Mania, who has been translating Iron Village into Brazilian Portuguese. ↩︎
Will the visibility of the City Builder festival be worth all of those negatives? I think so, but only time will tell. I can say that I’m not planning on doing that again, the stress of having a side project with a hard deadline and a full time job, plus actually making time for my family, is too much to do all over again. If I can turn game development into a full time job, then sure, there might be a situation when setting such a deadline so far out makes sense. But otherwise, this is a one time thing.

To wrap up this dev diary, I’ll talk a bit about what I’m planning on doing post-launch. Some of this definitely depends on how the launch actually goes: if reviews turn out to be quite negative, or there’s lots of issues that I’ve managed to miss, then it’s all subject to change. However, the rough plan of releases is as follows:

• Initial Bugfixes. Depending on how many of those are needed, and how urgent they may be, this could be anything from a same day/next day emergency patch to an update a week or two later with quality-of-life tweaks.
  
• Android Release. In order to focus on the Steam launch, I pushed the Android release out to an ETA of April. Most of the work there comes down to two things: UI improvements (it’s a small touch screen, so while everything works, it can be better.) and Google Play Games integration (mainly for the achievements).
  
• The First Big Update (1.1). I’ll talk more about this later, but the plan is to get:
  
• a. Some more quality-of-life changes that didn’t end up in the first patch(es).
  
• b. Improvements that require translated text, such as improved tutorials.
  
• c. New Buildings: A few more variations of existing buildings, as well as a couple of projects that have been conceptualized but did not end up in the main release.
  
• d. A “Soft Ending”: Right now, there is no well defined end to the game – you build everything, get a decently efficient economy running, and then just run out of things to do. It would be nice to tie things into the backstory and add some sort of final project/event, even though you will still be able to play beyond this ending.
  
• Two themed updates (1.2 and 1.3). I have some ideas for larger thematic updates, kind of like free DLC.
  
• I’m not planning on working on Iron Village forever (I’ve got too many other game ideas bouncing around in my head for that), but I figure there’s still plenty of room for it to grow.

If you’re reading this, I’m assuming you’ve already added Iron Village to your wishlist – but if not, go ahead and do it so you can be reminded to buy it when it releases. Alternatively, you can just set an alarm for 9 in the morning EDT (13:00 UTC) on March 24th, but then I don’t get to see the wishlist line go up on the Steam charts 😥.

Big milestone here – Iron Village has been updated just in time for Steam Next Fest! The biggest changes in this version are five (5) new languages: French, German, Japanese, and Chinese in both Simplified & Traditional forms.

(Hopefully you don’t need Potato Storage translated, because I totally forgot to put that string in the translation table. Oops.)

I didn’t post Diary #39 – 0.7.39 Release Notes[lunarchippy.games] to all of the usual platforms, so some changes since the last release notes will be there, but otherwise here’s what’s changed/been fixed:

• Fixed more issues with certain sounds not being affected by the volume slider.
  
• Finished electrification (level 4+)
  
• Implemented the ability to cancel demolition/tree chopping. (Currently disabled due to lack of translated strings, will be enabled in the next version.)
  
• Buildings can now be upgraded from within the info panel.
  
• Added support for French, German, Japanese, and Chinese (Simplified & Traditional).
  
• Fixed an issue on Steam Deck where controller hints would flicker while pressing and dragging out a road.
  
• Made the on screen keyboard automatically come up when the text box is selected in the Steam Cloud save window.

Bon voyage !

So the huge downside to setting a release date is now I have to hurry up and finish the rest of the game content. Normally I would’ve waited longer, but with the Steam City Builder Fest coming up at the end of March, the dice have already been cast.

Thankfully, level 4 is actually pretty close to being done (apart from kitchens and electrification), and level 5 is definitely underway. Will the game be released somewhat unfinished? It depends on what you mean – there’ll definitely be room for balancing, but the core of the game has been pretty well refined by now. This at least means I won’t chicken out. 😊

So, what even is in the end game? I’m not going to post too much in the way of spoilers, but I’ll give a bit of a preview: Level 4 is the Heavy Industrial Permit, and Level 5 is City Status.


The Heavy Industrial Permit unlocks all of the other industries that weren’t already unlocked. The most prominent one is the steel industry: build iron ore mines to dig up shiny rocks, forge steel from iron ore and coal in the Steel Foundry, and then use that steel to build valuable tools.

This permit also includes a tailor to turn wool into clothes, and your very own Chippy! Now you can finally produce the advanced Belgian technology of french fries!

There’s one other feature that I’ll tease here – the Artificer’s Guild has some plans to improve the propulsion of the trains, but they’ll need a decent haul of resources to implement them.


The ultimate symbol of your town’s accomplishment is City Status, bestowed by the monarch themselves. By this point you will have already unlocked all of the normal buildings, but there are a few landmark buildings and projects you can build. For instance, there’s two locations on the edge of the map that allow the construction of a deep mine. The cost is steep, but the reward is faster extraction of minerals, and some newer rare materials as well!

Most of this you’re just going to have to discover for yourself though 🙂

Anyway, that’s the summary of the late game – I’m also dropping 0.7.39 shortly (if I haven’t done so already) to get things tidied up for Next Fest at the end of the month! Release notes to follow soon.

Hey everyone, there’s another release coming your way right now! I’m going to be ramping up on marketing/PR ahead of Next Fest & the full release, so I wanted to get in another round of bug fixes and improvements before showing it off. Of course, I’m sure there’ll be some other embarrassing bug that’ll surface, but oh well.

Anyway, here’s the list of changes:

• Prevented players from demolishing trees in an area of the map that isn’t unlocked yet.
  
• Lots more content for progression level 4.
  
• Adjusted the position of the building footprint icons.
  
• Fixed trains to use the correct sound channel, allowing them to finally be muted.
  
• Pause train sounds when the game is paused.
  
• Added a tooltip over the Continue button to show which save is being loaded.
  
• Fixed the number of decimal points for approval ratings in the Railway Status window, for real this time.
  
• Spacebar no longer counts as a button press the way Enter and left clicks do. (It will still pause the game.)
  
• Buildings can now have multiple locations for villagers to go to – for instance, they can use multiple doors, or work in different parts of the quarry.
  
• Fix an issue where the game would try to find a cloud save locally.
  
• Adjusted the estimated arrival times of trains.
  
• Added wood costs to certain stone buildings – not as much as the stone cost, but non-zero.
  
• Prevent demolition of a storage building if there won’t be enough room to store its contents.
  
• Fixed an issue with the train floors not showing when doors open.