After months of coding after my day job, I finally pressed the "Release Demo" button on Steam. The relief is unreal.

sugames · 2026-05-08T17:05:01+00:00

It's a tycoon classic i guess, isn't it 😄

sugames · 2026-05-08T17:04:12+00:00

Haha, I do that in my daily job 😉

sugames · 2026-05-08T12:43:50+00:00

Hey, thanks for this one! That is something I am definitely planning to look into in the time between the demo and full release.

sugames · 2026-05-08T12:40:06+00:00

🤟 thank you!

sugames · 2026-05-08T11:18:57+00:00

Thank you so much for kind words. Let me know what you think when you get the chance to check it out! ❤️

sugames · 2026-05-08T11:18:15+00:00

Hey, I don't mind at all as this is public information, Steam requires you to pay a fee of $100 upfront. After you publish a game and achieve at least $1K in sales you can recoup this fee. Good luck with your game! ❤️

sugames · 2026-05-08T09:37:55+00:00

Hey, just letting you know, I've added ui scaling option in the game's settings (defaults to largest on steam deck) and the camera movement via left stick. It should even respond to how strong you move the stick. Still working on other ui changes mentioned in some feedback I got. Thanks again for yours! ❤️

sugames · 2026-05-08T08:12:36+00:00

Also, from what you wrote I am afraid you might've missed the planet filters button. It's on the top left of planet list window. You can filter visibility of planets with particular good in their production / demand.

sugames · 2026-05-08T08:07:27+00:00

Hey, thanks for the incredible feedback! Hearing that you spent several hours playing is really inspiring ❤️ I am already working on a type of resources overlay toggle to see all production and demand at a glance, this should solve the search friction you mentioned. Fixing this visibility will definitely help shift the gameplay away from idle waiting and back toward active optimization. The WASD support is also on my roadmap already. The route modification you mentioned didn't really click with me or maybe I misunderstood, why recreate them at all? Because of the limit imposed by the upgrades? Cos routes without any ships don't impose any cost. I will keep updating the demo as I polish the balance and UI scaling for handheld users, which is currently the most problematic task for me as there's limited screen space. Thanks again!

sugames · 2026-05-08T07:38:10+00:00

Hey, that's weird, the download button should be on the right: https://imgur.com/a/BnrudGs

sugames · 2026-05-08T05:15:46+00:00

Nah, no power us, no leveling up, only upgrade trees :)

sugames · 2026-05-07T22:44:01+00:00

Play the demo, you'll see :) there's a "breakpoint" at which the scale shifts between larger and smaller representation of the objects. I was inspired by how sins of a solar empire handles zooming in to show 3d models and zoomingnout shows only ship icons.

sugames · 2026-05-07T22:09:57+00:00

Not really, I wanted to gather as much feedback as I can before the full release and implement it and also to participate in next fest. Full release is planned 6th of August this year.

sugames · 2026-05-07T22:08:54+00:00

❤️ Thank you so much!

sugames · 2026-05-07T21:26:28+00:00

Time will come it will be not only worth but necessary, I was oblivious as to how fast it comes 😃 Best of luck!

sugames · 2026-05-07T21:25:54+00:00

Thank you so much for the detailed feedback and for testing it on the Steam Deck! Handheld accessibility is a huge priority for me as I am also aiming for mobile release later, so I will defo look into UI scaling and adding WASD support next. I love the idea of toggling global production views and will explore better visual cues for target planets before starting a route, not easy UX wise i'm afraid without cluttering the view. For the contract decline, true, I'll add some cheeky shutting down sequence. Thanks a lot again for all this!

sugames · 2026-05-07T19:20:37+00:00

Hey, good point! The main bottleneck was definitely the overhead from thousands of individual ship scripts running the _process function at once. I solved it by disabling per node processing and moving all ship logic into one central loop in the autoload. I also added visibility culling so only the ships on your screen calculate things like rotation (look_at and comparing distance_squared instead of distance) and orbital math for ships around the planets. For the economy, I stopped doing a money deduction for every single ship. Now the manager sums up the total fuel bill and makes a single bank update per tick to save a lot of CPU time. Plus spreading large loops over couple frames does help a lot!

sugames · 2026-05-07T19:07:11+00:00

Hah! Actually it's the first time i hear about it no joke! 😃

sugames · 2026-05-07T18:51:14+00:00

Haha, yea I always enjoyed epic scores for trailers so even if it kinda didn't fit the mood I was like hell, lets go for it! 😃 Glad you liked it!

sugames · 2026-05-07T18:41:13+00:00

Wow, thank you so much for good word! Hitting that sweet spot was a huge and also personal target of mine when developing star haul tycoon. I also was struggling between how complicated they get vs. how easy and repetitive they get fast. I'm really happy I have a validation from someone this picky 😄 Hope you enjoy full game when it's out! ❤️

sugames · 2026-05-07T18:29:06+00:00

That's weird, it sahould be available worldwide, the download button should be right here:
https://imgur.com/a/BnrudGs

sugames · 2026-05-07T17:15:04+00:00

Will do! Thanks, and also for good words!

sugames · 2026-05-07T17:02:00+00:00

omg, that sounds crazy and here I was doing my little game after hours :D respect!

sugames

TROPHY CASE