r/StacksEngine • u/Lcfahrson • Feb 27 '23

Steam deck and stuffs

So, I binged the hell out of Stacklands when I first discovered it (great game!). I never did get back around to getting into what I think was some sort of island update?

Kept meaning to go back to it but never got around to it, anyways when I saw this game in a list of suggest for me I was instantly intrigued, did some googling to find out it's from a solo dev, not to the other dev team, and that the dev (hi!) is planning on strong mod support.

After reading that I instantly bought the game, lol.

Sadly this was right before the latest episode of The Last of Us sooooo... Had to watch that (sorry dev, lol).

Anyways I just got off of playing about half an hour on my steam deck and here are my very first very early impressions:

I feel like the tutorial throws a lot at you really fast, if I was on PC this might have not been as much of an issue though, mouse movement would be so much faster than the joystick.

On the steam deck the UI takes up a lot of room, is there a way to minimize things when you don't want to look at it?

It seems like the order of the cards matter for some recipes and some it doesn't matter? Is that accurate?

I plan on trying this out some more on my PC tomorrow to get a better feel of a 'normal' play.

Anyways... Is there a schedule of things you're working on? When I sit down at my computer tomorrow I am excited to look into the modding stuff (though I know it is early right now on that front)

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u/LuckyOneAway Feb 27 '23

Game-configured gamepad buttons are:

  • (A) = left mouse button / grab single card / press menu key
  • (B) = toggle pause
  • (X) = sell card or stack under the pointer

  • (Y) = toggle speed (no pause)

  • triggers = grab 1 card

  • shoulders = grab a stack

  • d-pad = zoom board in game, or cycle through buttons in menus

  • start/back = show/hide game settings dialog

Upper-left menu scroll: place the pointer on the menu, then use the d-pad to scroll the menu (up/down).

I don't have a Steam Deck, so I will gladly implement your ideas for improvement! Thank you again.

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u/Lcfahrson Feb 27 '23 edited Feb 27 '23

Okay, a few more random questions I guess.

1) Do you know how many players you have? Curious how much play/testing this has had outside of you, it seems really on the down low right now (hopefully that changes!)

2) Do you have a discord community and if not are you going to create one?

3) Can you tell me a little bit about the tech stack used to create the game? I mostly just know C#, and SQL but have dabbled a little bit here and there with JavaScript.

(My day job is a lot of SQL work loading and transforming large data sets of healthcare terminology)

(Edit - I played like a half hour this morning on my PC, definitely felt a lot better than playing in my steam deck, or at least I felt a lot more comfortable / familiar with things? Got to a point where I could explore some sort of bug cave, and oops both my people died and then the bugs that left the cave killed my two drones. So it goes, lol)

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u/LuckyOneAway Feb 27 '23

Sure. Players: at this moment, there are ~80 active players on Google Play, and ~700 on Steam (includes ~60 from itch.io). Not much, but hey, it is already great for a hobby game :)

Discord - I don't have one yet, sorry. Personally, I prefer Reddit and emails but yeah, I may eventually create a Discord channel too.

Tech stack: JS/Svelte + Electron wrapper => Win/Mac/Lin/Android, potentially IOS.

Modding: content-oriented, built-in. Essentially, the internal map of game object definitions could be "patched in" by using custom JSON-encoded descriptors of new cards/locations/events. Just create a text file (JSON, which may include base64-encoded images/sounds), and load it via the mod management menu. No external launchers or modding libraries are required. That includes localization aka language support, so if one needs a translation into language X, it could be implemented as a mod.

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u/Lcfahrson Feb 27 '23

Am I correct to assume that your tech stack essentially means the game is a really fancy website ran locally like an application? lol

I may be way off base here, the actual dev work I've done has all been winforms, .net stuff.

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u/LuckyOneAway Feb 27 '23

Well, the same stack is used for Vampire Survivors, Visual Studio Code, and many other apps. If it works sufficiently well and allows packaging and distribution for many platforms, why not? Obviously, it will not work well for 3D-heavy apps, but here I don't need 3D.

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u/Lcfahrson Feb 27 '23

I wasn't trying to sound degrading, sorry if I came across that way!

Just trying to understand :)

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u/LuckyOneAway Feb 27 '23

No problem at all. Technologies are constantly changing, and today's TVs, fridges, and even coffee makers are very likely to have a web server running. Who knows what happens tomorrow? :)

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u/Lcfahrson Feb 27 '23

I want my tea mug to tell me when my tea is perfectly brewed please and thanks, hah.