Judi-n-Lyle Devlog - 008

Hej hej mina vänner! It’s been a while. Lot’s of crazy horrible things going on in the world right now, especially in the US. While recovering from the doom-scrolling and depression the last month, I’ve been trying to give myself a break and put my physical health first. Of course though, I also had to get sick again (currently as of writing this). So while all of that has been going on, I have been careful to use game dev as an escape into creative freedom and not as an expectation of productivity. This mindset shift has made game dev overall more exciting and relaxing for me. I can now sit down and just play. Play around with new components. Play around with new layouts and new ideas. I no longer feel locked down or internal pressure to execute.

I feel free.

And that is something that I need right now. Trying to strike the balance between staying up on current events, getting more active in my community, and taking care of myself has been difficult. Especially as the doom-scroll phenomena has a succulent allure, it sometimes feels impossible to escape it’s grasp. But that is where Judi and Lyle has come in to save me, giving me that little slice of creative outlet that I so desperately crave right now.

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Onto some more exciting news -

I will be attending Indie Game Fest in Baltimore on June 7th. You can find the link here: https://calendar.prattlibrary.org/event/indie_game_fest_2025. If you’re around, come on by to the event and say hi! I’ll have a demo of Judi and Lyle for people to play at the event. It’s been really exciting to sign up for an event like this for my first time. I enjoy connecting with people, and this sort of event will be exciting to experience. I’m looking forward to having new people play my game and see their reactions in real time. And hopefully there will be some positive reactions to the demo. We shall see.

I also suddenly remembered the other day that I own a steam deck! I decided to investigate what it would take to port Judi and Lyle onto Steam Deck and to my surprise it was no effort at all.

1. Put the steam deck into desktop mode
2. Connect my keyboard to my Steam Deck
3. Prepare a linux build of Judi and Lyle
4. Install python and magic-wormhole on my Steam Deck
5. Zip the linux build and wormhole it over to the Steam Deck
6. Unzip and add the linux build to my local Steam Deck library
7. Go back to game mode and play the game!

There was a few other guides that I tried to follow online, but since the Steam Deck is just a linux box, I can do whatever I want! So that was a fun exploration into the Steam Deck and getting my games built and transferred over so I could playtest them. How exciting!

I also went to a couple of my local dev meetup groups to work some more on exploring art direction for Judi and Lyle. I explored a few different routes for parallax backgrounds in Godot and ended up settling on an effective mechanism for adding some depth to the scene. I’ve mostly been focusing on this time to setup how I want to design my levels to make it easier to iterate and create new levels in the future. You can checkout some more of the art direction below fit with fog, moon rays, and firefly particle effects.

I’ve been pleased with how things have been shaping up thusfar. The art work is coming together and the post processing effects are unifying. I have also been able to identify some key design points that are lacking after testing on Steam Deck. So I increased the text size and modified some API calls I was using in Godot that were reacting a little weird on the Steam Deck. Grateful I have the opportunity to test on that platform, and honestly it feels surreal to play my game on a mobile console. That’s something I never thought would happen. It all suddenly feels “official” and I am happy, really happy.

Okejjjjj, det var allt for idag. Thanks for stopping by and we’ll see you again soon! Hopefully less than a month this time, but we’ll have to see ;)

- Jacob Hans