Airship Dragoon was released on Steam, 10 whole years ago today ... that's 20% of my whole life, and the percentage is probably higher for the average Steam user. It's even a third of what Albert Spier got in Spandau for crimes against humanity. ːareusureaboutthatː [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/d9ae1dc8d7a89d1284d19ff69db14a8cff0f5be0.jpg[/img] To celebrate this milestone of me still updating the game when Valve release a new Steamworks SDK update, Airship Dragoon is on discount to the tune of a whopping 94%! Mostly because I can't put it to 95% because Valve has to figure in the costs of payment processing ... so 94% was as low as I can go. Back in the heady days of Greenlight (which was a thing a long time ago in a galaxy quite close) I begged for over 10,000 upvotes to get on to Steam. Now anyone can pay 100 bucks and just beg Valve. This was back in the day when indie key bundles were ten-to-a-penny and a whopping 88.2% of Airship Dragoon key activation appear to come from them. Actual Steam sales coming in at ~2K. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/cab57abcadacc085616549314c50540beb71ff8c.jpg[/img] Unsurprisingly The US of A tops the sales/activation charts, with possibly slightly more surprisingly Soviet Russia coming second, but also the Far East does feature prominently with Korea, edging out China and Japan for 7th place. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/c9bb96c5921d271de59fed1c710e3499c22375c0.jpg[/img] The second spike was when I created "Airship Dragoonette" for the cover image. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/80fca96d464ef6d1f2adca3f506264ac3ce895e6.jpg[/img] In her original form, and the newer version, when I got a 21" tablet pen display, which makes drawing on a screen so much easier than blindly fumbling around with the cheapest tablet I could previously find. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/943ca38b2302086ee197c578873093087ebfaef1.jpg[/img] So what were the actual profits? A new gaming PC for development and a cheap(ish) XP-Pen Tablet Display for drawing and dev. Here is the a picture of the ancient mid-range Dell I developed Airship Dragoon on, a machine so weak I could not turn shadows on, though some nice dev in America actual mailed me a GTS250 GPU (remember them?) so I could get over 30 fps finally. Thanks Matt! ːhappychappyː And it's next to the new devbox I bought which has a 1070 GPU (which was pretty high spec when I got it). [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/6626762/e62112e8d2a6055199ec27f4c8e49b48fe85b727.jpg[/img] So with my brand new (but now like 8 years old) devbox, I set about updating Airship Dragoon, and making a number of concept demos for my next game. After a while I thought an Early Access release might help me get some feedback and bug hunting ... but I expect the market is awash with no-name indiedevs hoping for feedback and bug reports with their Early Access release. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1789310/Monsters_Loot_Swag/ Monsters Loot Swag didn't really get any traction, and alas the bug report forum contains no bug reports. Upgrading [url=https://github.com/TorqueGameEngines/Torque3D]Torque3D MIT[/url] - the open source game engine I use, however did bring a new suite of script compiler tools which really helped me hunt down and squash some game breaking bugs - most of which were caused by typos in local variables, whilst I learned about asset systems and Physical-Based Rendering (PBR) materials and reflections, bringing myself into the 21st Century of game development were DX9.0c is no longer a thing. Monsters Loot Swag is 90% complete in Early Access, and will finally ship in Spring 2025. Hopefully the game after that one won't take 8 years to complete ... though I said that before. ːnotsohappychappyː In the meantime, happy Dragooning across the Super-Continent of Pangea for the glory of Steampunk Imperialism!ːcorblimeyguvnorː