A few words on iteration + Progress Report March 2026

There's this meme currently being shown pretty often in dev circles. It's just showing the start of a project with the tag line 'make it exist first' and then a more polished screenshot with the tagline 'you can make it good later'.

I like that one, because for the last two years (since I started making games) game development has been largely about iteration for me. You make something, and then your learn how to make it better and chisel away at it. I think the important thing is to be able to enjoy the process for itself, otherwise you'll go mad thinking about spending so much time on something that has a very good chance of being a financial loss to you and be played by only a handful of people.

I have been thinking about this a bit more than usual, because I have spent the last 4 months mostly creating enemy animations. At the start of development, my enemies were made in MS paint as placeholders. Later on I bought some cheap assets. Finally, I found an artist I could commission to create the enemies specifically for my game. And they looked great, but they were still static of course. So I used a tool to at least make them bounce around a bit. These last few months I have learned how to use a proper skeletal animation tool (Spine 2D) and started rigging and animating all the enemies that I have in the game so far. It took quite a lot of time (and time is a resource that has been getting more scarce recently), but it was very rewarding seeing the animations in the game. And I know this is something that many players who already like the game won't care that much about (or at least I think not), but having a more polished game, especially visually, is pretty much key to getting players in the first place.

So anyways, I am finally done with this step, and I have made some other improvements to the game along the way as well. Next up in roadmap is adding more content (I'm especially low on events) and polishing the sound effects department. Also, I have one more system that I need to add (a shop similar to Slay the Spire's vendor).

I also had to refactor quite a bit of code to make everything work, so I'm afraid there will be probably bugs in this version, but I hope I at least caught most of the game breaking ones.

Demo (non-steam) update:

As before, you can play the demo here:

• GX.games (play in your browser): https://gx.games/de/games/80txcq/life-altered/

• Itch.io (download to play): https://pychogames.itch.io/life-altered

I hope to be able to release a proper Steam demo sometime this year.

Here are the release notes for version 0.2.1:

• New animations for all enemies

• Added animations for player characters

• New visuals for events

• New simplified color scheme for text emphasis

• Added arrows to indicate attack direction of enemies

• New event: Tropical flower in Siberia

• New UI themes that change with the game's stage

• Added turn change indicator to better separate turns

• New music