Idle Research

Hey everyone! I'm back with the largest set of developer standup blogs so far. Since the last post, I have finally graduated from college with a bachelors in Computer Science, and transitioned to full-time software development. I've done a pretty good job balancing work, life, and this game, and I'm very excited to see where this goes! You will again see a lot of small changes throughout the next 26 posts. Enjoy!This is probably the longest steam announcement ever, sorry if it lagsEpisode 3 - Posts XV-L5/20/25-12/14/25 Dev Standup 25.0: UI Refactoring from Polling to Reactive (Epic UI Optimization)5/20/25 - III.XVI spent the last few weeks celebrating my recent graduation and working on some IR2 refactoring... again! Visually, I only have this screenshot to show you of some Library UI tweaks. I am in a position where customizing UI is getting easier by the day, and I have complete control over when things like text need to be updated. For instance, if I gain some KWL, it should change the value and the text. I use a pretty complicated system that involves chaining the game data and the text. Technicals if you're interested:There is a notification producer and a notification consumer that handles this behavior. The producer: emits a notification if the value it holds changes. The consumer: receives a notification from a producer or another consumer. Also emits a notification if a change was made and it passes it onto other consumers.KWL would be a producer, and the text would be a consumer because it relies on KWL to change via gameplay. KWL gets updated every game tick. At the start, this text updates once every 10 seconds. No need for text to check every frame. It is possible for other consumers to check if the text changed, for whatever reason....What this means moving forward:With more control over the UI, the better the UX and more interesting the UI can look. I want to find clever ways of displaying important data without invasive elements.Major reduction in ba...

Hey everyone! I'm back with another set of developer standup blogs from my discord. Posts have been less frequent because of College. I'm about 2 weeks away from graduating! Anyways, I present you the last 14 episodes! *Looking at the earlier posts now... wow, do I love to change shit all the time haha. Just let me cook :) Episode 2 - Posts XI-XIV1/30/25-4/29/25 Dev Standup 11.0: Boring Day - Water Pipeline Map Validation & New Water FeaturesNothing super exciting to show off... But I am writing unit tests in game development for the first time ever! Basically I have it set up to check for mistakes in the maps I make. In this case, I'm missing 3 drains that spawn on the map by default. Additionally, I have set up basic configurations for the new 12-13 water features, that's quite a bit :o Demo still not approved, not looking too good. On the bright side, I'm already on making the start of the game 10x better TLDR; Dev Standup 12.0: Water Inventories & New Water CurrenciesWater is now entirely managed by Water Pipelines... So all of the previous features will be accessed on this map (I haven't made that yet). Each block will have a water inventory with all of the above currencies. Debuff ones are bad, bad news! Dev Standup 13.0: Secret Map Dev Standup 14.0: Water Drains New LookMade the Water Drains prettier and matched the colors with the right water resource. On top of this, I will being implementing the new features, start with Water Filtration! Dev Standup 14.1: Renewed Feature, Water FilteringPreviously Hydro-Pollution Analysis, this feature converts Polluted to Filtered Water. All the different processes will have a unique look to them. Dev Standup 15.0: Ugh... (The Paradigm Shift Post) Basics Slowly upgrading current codebase to an even cleaner codebase, which will make it easier and more fun for me to work on Idle Research 2. It will make creating new features so much easier too! Center is the Distilled Water Drain. Left is what the setup was before the clean...

Starting today, I will be reposting 10 days of developer standup blogs that I write on my discord server. These will be delayed but highly detailed posts about what I have been working on for Idle Research 2. You will also see the progression of changes over time, so some things may come and go. Obviously, there still isn't a demo out... I missed the deadline for the Steam Idler Fest because of a failed Steam review and I decided to completely rework the entry feature. You will see the initial idea in Standup 10.0. Also I have been moving to a new apartment, so the past few weeks have been unproductive. Anyways, here are the first posts! The earlier ones are a bit rusty Episode 1 - Posts I-X 1/18/25-1/29/25 Dev Standup 1.0: First Me from the past few days... Building rule logic implemented (valid/invalid tile highlighting soon), Blocking building counts, QoL, and build confirmations (delete confirmations soon). The new dialog component will make creating necessary pop ups super simple. Making it absolutely sucked tho lol When I finish all of the above, I will connect the existing drains feature to the pipeline, then build out Water Purifier feature {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45372407/ac07982364e388f6f4d59fcfdd1aa5c5431d99b4.png Here's the validation {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45372407/839d7dadafd78bf4594f0b96237b2846bdc5a3c8.png Dev Standup 2.0: Water Drains in Water Pipelines Today I will be moving the existing water drains to the pipelines feature. Attached are concepts of the new UI After this, I will move on to getting pipelines attached to Research as part of the unlockable feature chain, then on to Water Pipeline skill upgrades {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45372407/be75c790d8f62b4c7ec7165f7f62b2fa5aa01bb2.png {STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/45372407/1daf5da05c973bea55443ec6132e0c35b47f0aa7.png Dev Standup 3.0: Building Out the Gameplay for Exploration Hey everyone! Here is my standup for today: Yesterday I started to work on hooking up the Water Exploration pipeline block to the Exploration feature...