July 2026 has been a hectic month for Virtualord! These are the 3 main news from this past month:
On the 6th of July I released version 0.6.7, which features the second tutorial mission and a lot of new features and fixes. You can read more about it in my previous dev-log post or you can watch the following dev log video:
If you want to try this latest version, you can join us on Discord, where you will find a Windows and a Linux build.
On the 13th of July I officially announced Virtualord to the world. That basically means that I started to contact the press and to post on more online communities about it.
For this special occasion I also published a first trailer which you can find on the Steam page of Virtualord or on YouTube:
On the 30th of July, the Steam page of Virtualord passed 1.000 wishlists, hopefully the first of many milestones.
I wrote a post to celebrate this first achievement, you can read it here on Steam.
Despite a lot of work went into the game announcement and trailer, I kept working on the game every day of the month as usual. These are the main features I worked on during the month of July.
Most of the development effort this month went into implementing a key feature that was originally planned for next major version (0.7.0). I decided to anticipate it because completing the tutorial is starting to take time and it's not realistic to ask people to start every time from the beginning.
Things are simplified at the moment as there's only one save slot and it's not possible to save during the tutorial yet, but it's a start and more features will be completed for the demo.
Despite the missing features, loading and saving is already pretty solid and it is super fast, on average it takes only 1ms for both actions.
In the current version of Virtualord, your game is automatically saved when you enter a new screen, but you can also save while playing, even if with a twist...
Unlike most games, you can't save from a pause menu, but saving is an actual action of your control center. Also, saving is not free, it costs resources and the more frequently you want to save the more expensive it gets. That's to stop people to save before every turn basically.
Selected units and structures will no longer have that semi-transparent overlay on top, as you can see in every single screenshot posted in previous updates.
Now when an object is selected you will see an health and energy bar on top of it and the cells where it stands will be enclosed in 4 isometric corners.
As a bonus feature, now all structures that can be selected show the new UI, whereas in the past some (like walls) were missing the selection overlay.
Another related feature is that when selecting an object which is part of a group (like mini-units), all elements of the group will be selected, but the one you clicked on will be highlighted differently.
This is to differentiate single-effect actions like destroying the selected object, from group actions, like moving mini-units to a target destination.
Some other changes worth a mention are:
focus areas in the tutorial are now animated to catch attention more effectively.
also a few other fixes and changes that you will find in the full changelog accessible from the main menu of the next upcoming release.
The goal for the month of August is to complete the third tutorial mission, which will also complete most of the game demo.
It's unlikely I will be able to release next version (0.6.9) by the end of this month, but I am pretty confident you can expect that by the second week of September and hopefully a first public demo release by the end of that month.
support and follow the development of Virtualord by adding it to your wishlist on Steam.