The past week I decided to dedicate to stepping out of the shadows — making development more open, talking about progress and plans, and sharing different ideas.
I really want to find like-minded people. Those who would find this idea and game concept interesting too — people who’d enjoy following the creation process and sharing their thoughts. People for whom I’d want to make the game, not just for myself.
Yes, like-minded people are amazing! I always get this burst of enthusiasm when someone shows even the slightest interest in what I’m doing. Random people who inadvertently ask me what I do can’t shut me up afterwards. And if real like-minded folks appear… oh boy, hard to imagine what will happen then.
Itch and the wall I ran into
It’s been almost two months since I made a small attempt to show the prototype to the world through Itch.
I set up the game page and tried to present it — Itch - Awaken Protocol - but ran into an unexpected problem: the published game was invisible to everyone. It didn’t appear in any catalog, and it couldn’t be found via search at all.
After waiting a week, I wrote to support, got a support ticket number, and kept waiting for the page to go live.
Meanwhile, I got deep into developing the mission system, and the Itch issue faded into the background.
Every week or so I’d open the dashboard, look at the zero views on my “published” game, sigh, and return to coding.
When I finally finished the mission prototype, I decided to revisit the Itch question — this time I posted on the support forum. They said they’d notify the admins, so I waited again.
Years passed… okay, not years — just a week and a half. But still, no response from support, and the game was as invisible as ever. After another ping on the forum, I decided to put the whole Itch story aside and focus on other platforms. But hey, I’m not losing hope just yet.
Devblog
I actually wanted to start a devblog back when I first created the Itch page — even had a few posts prepared. But now I’d like to post more often, not just when hitting big milestones.
I decided to publish the devblog directly on the game’s website. First, it’s simply convenient — everything in one place for anyone who stumbles upon the site and wants to see what the game’s about. And if someone gets interested, they can instantly see what’s in progress. I’ll probably cross-post to Itch too, once it finally starts working.
By the way, to run a devblog comfortably you need at least some minimal CMS system. The first thing I did was look at what’s available for Phoenix. Turns out, not much — only Beacon more or less fit my simple needs. I tried integrating it but wasn’t happy with how it worked (separate endpoint and proxy, separate layouts, potential style problem, and the project itself seems close to be abandoned).
Then I checked out headless CMS options — more choices there, but honestly… building a small CMS from scratch with an AI assistant turned out to be way easier than learning someone else’s integration. A CMS is a very simple, well-documented problem, so the AI literally handled it in one request. A bit of polishing — and it was done.
A bit of DevOps behind-the-scenes work
Adding a CMS meant adding a database. So I decided to move the game server DB into a separate independent service. Now it can be used by multiple consumers, and architecturally it makes much more sense — easier maintenance, scaling, and deployment.
So what’s next on the agenda?
Keep stepping out of the shadows and searching for like-minded people — that’s the main goal for now in this area (but game development on first place anyway).
I’ll poke Itch a bit more, look at other platforms — maybe IndieDB, Reddit, or Discord communities.
P.S.
All this is in order to find like-minded people. If you’ve ever built games solo or love sandbox MMOs, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to poke me :)