A Bit Like the Lord of the Swamp Castle

The Lord of Swamp Castle, from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, is a landowner who famously built three castles in a swamp, all of which sank or burned down. His fourth attempt, however, finally “stayed up.”

In my previous devlog, I mentioned wanting to release a demo of my new project, so that I could obtain feedback.

In April 2025, I did publish the demo of Dragon Riddler, and in less than 3 months it became painfully apparent that people aren’t interested at all in the game. Which is very unfortunate. I had some great ideas for the dragon breeds, and I also planned to replace the “Journey act” where the adventurer is looking for the dragon’s lair, with something more interesting. But I cannot afford the luxury to spend more effort on a project that’s so stillborn. Dragon Riddler is now on hold indefinitely. I still hope to make the planned changes, add the features omitted from the demo and release this game eventually, but because of financial reasons I must focus on more promising projects for the time being.

Thus I went back and resumed working on 2 other game ideas. This time, none of them are word puzzle adventures. I think I’ve learned my lesson not to insist on a genre that’s very unpopular and by nature cannot be translated to other languages. I should also admit that word puzzles are a much better fit for mobile devices, but that platform has been hopelessly overstatured for many years now, and I cannot hope to be able to make my games discoverable. The most likely outcome is that malicious hackers would steal and republish my games, leaving me powerless to protect my work. As a result, mobile is completely out of the question.

I’m now literally working in parallel on both projects, switching weekly between them. They are very different from each other, but I’m using Godot 4 with C# for both. My previous games were made with GDScript because at that time Godot’s C# support was very experimental and incomplete. Now I think Godot 4 with C# is a fairly pleasant technical stack. Compared to Unity 6, the speed of development is staggeringly fast. While Unity takes several seconds after every code change, the same thing happens practically immediately with Godot, so switching between Rider (my choice for a C# IDE) and the editor is nearly instantaneous.

This time, I only wish to reach a “grayboxed MVP”-level milestone for both projects. The games will have temporary visuals everywhere, but the core gameplay should be present and playable. Obviously, I will not be able to publish these as public Steam demos, but I’m hoping I can still find some game developer colleagues willing to check these prototypes out and give some feedback. I really must discover if any of these ideas are viable as a commercial game, as I’m rapidly running out of my savings, partly because the entire world has decided to go insane and as a consequence, prices have been inflating everywhere. Getting a “normal” job seems to be even harder now, because the entire IT industry (not just game development companies) have been and still are on a firing spree. In a darkly ironic way, this makes my situation easier, as I don’t really have any other option but to press on and try not to think of what I’ll do when I literally won’t have money left.