When I stopped working at my corpo tech job, I assumed that I would magically get the time to put out some sort of dev diary every week. Maybe that’ll still happen, especially if I do start a Patreon, but that has definitely not been the case recently. Instead, it’s been the two weeks between my two oldest kids going to summer camp, and them going to school. Some highlights include:
Trying to get my oldest to not spend all of his time on the computer without being a hypocrite.
A reintroduction to Hand, Foot, and Mouth Disease, this time in my youngest kid.
Moderating interpersonal conflicts between the three of them. (Yes, it is frustrating dealing with a toddler in their terrible twos. No, you don’t get to scream whenever they touch you.)
Somehow in the midst of all of this, I did get some work done on Iron Village: Steam Input API integration. It’s a best practice for Steam Deck integration, and will finally let you rebind keys in the game. It’s also been a bit of a pain to get working properly, there’s a decent amount that just hasn’t been documented – so fun! 🙃
A topographic map of a continent, placeholder name “Amé”, in a window of Inkscape. Just to show the insane scope of what I’m talking about.
Instead of talking about that though, I want to talk about something related to both Iron Village and the unannounced next game: world building. A couple of years ago, I had the luck/misfortune of stumbling across Artifexian’s worldbuilding channel (and subsequently, Worldbuilding Pasta’s blog and Madeline James’s Worldbuilding blog & channel). There’s something really neat about designing a world using ridiculously unnecessary levels of detail, so of course I started that as a little side project. (Editor’s note: it was not little.)
In parallel though, I started doing a little bit of very basic background for Iron Village. Back around November/December 2024, some feedback I was getting pointed to my neglect of details for the setting – like, why are we building in terra null? Up until this point there was this vague idea of “urban fantasy” – there’s magic and fantastic themes, but they’re not the focus of everything. After this feedback came the first bit of setting: the mission to administer a new town in “the borderlands” (the excuse for why they’re empty) to facilitate trade with Nova Porthladd. This mission is assigned by a Monarch Faearn of the Kingdom you name at the start, otherwise known as the Iron Realm. There’s not a ton, but it’s enough to put across the feeling that you’re part of a larger world, even if you’re building everything in this part.
This is a Köppen Climate Map of the same area, to give you a sense of the info I’ve been tracking.
For the next game, I have the audacious plan of combining the two: using this much more developed world as the setting, and shoehorning the Iron Village “story” into it as well. Technically, this means I’m developing… the Iron Village Cinematic Universe! Don’t worry, it won’t actually be that insane, I am perfectly happy to retcon things as needed, but I thought it would be a neat way to tie the games together.
Some very rough sketching I did to try to vaguely map where the Iron Realm (cyan), Iron Village (purple), and Nova Porthladd (Maroon) would be. Note that Nova Porthladd is probably going to be a tiny bit south of that circle, at the mouth of the slightly larger river.
I’ll be talking more about this in the future, but at least wanted to introduce the concept now. Next up should be some more 1.2 info, hopefully including a release date! (I was thinking of doing something silly and releasing on the same day as Hollow Knight: Silksong – but that timing is definitely too soon.) Thanks for reading!