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A puzzle game of logic and intuition. As an extra-terrestrial Cloudbuster, save the planet earth from its self imposed isolation.

click this link, log into steam, wishlist game, come back when demo is out next week, get hyped, do it now. store.steampowered.com/app/5114470/...

store.steampowered.com

Cloudbusters on Steam

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#indiedev sure does require a lot of non-game development work. trailers, paper work, store pages, marketing, etc. On the run up to release is when you feel the absence of collaborators the most. anyway here's the first draft for the new Cloudbusters trailer #gamedev #solodev

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the design school types did us all a favour by calling it "juice", so we know not to take them seriously. Its a perfect metaphor, as just like actual juice, "juice" is for children. Adults drink water, we should aim to make our games cool, clear, and refreshing.

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A puzzle game of logic and intuition. As an extra-terrestrial Cloudbuster, save the planet earth from its self imposed isolation.

demo coming (hopefully) next week, click this link, sign into your steam account, wishlist the game, do it now store.steampowered.com/app/5114470/...

store.steampowered.com

Cloudbusters on Steam

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cloudbusters demo has been submitted for review. Only missed my deadline by a day. I plan to release is as soon as its approved after that I think I should be able to finish the full game within a month, as its mostly done already. probably gonna be $5

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I swear if I ever sell enough games that I don't have to worry about money I'm going to release all my games as linux exclusives. p.s. fuck macOS too

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after booting up for the first time there were all these fucking confusing popups about installing some kind of device and then I had to use Edge, and it actually tried to stop me from downloading firefox becasue it "might hurt your computer" or some shit.

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got windows installed to test my game and I have never been more glad I switched to linux ~8 years ago. I had to unplug my router to install without making a microsoft account becasue I made the mistake of connecting thinking the installer maybe wanted to update or something.

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

ok, I got all the features I wanted done for the Cloudbusters demo... so, for the next 4 days I'll be polishing, bugfixing, and testing out steam builds. The part I'm looking forward to the least is installing windows... haven't used it for ~8 years, but I've got to test the windows build.

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what if you could defuse a mine after its already been triggered but you only have five seconds and it costs 3 giga-litres of 3D printer ink? #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiegame #puzzle #minesweeper

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

This gives a week to make sure the demo build is approved by steam should be up by the time the next fest press preview starts on the 9th

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I wanted to get the demo for Cloudbusters done on last Sunday, but failed, so I'm going to aim for this sunday now, not for actually releasing the demo, just a freeze in adding new features. Then I'll set another deadline, maybe oct. 1st, by which time I will stop working on it altogether.

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 19/09/2026

updated the custom puzzle menu, can now enable/disable items. Also did some more visual polish. #cloudbusters almost finished with the demo, just need to do a bit of work on sound and animation #screenshotsaturday #gamedev #indiegame #ebitengine #puzzle #puzzlegame

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

I may be an idiot... obviously clouds can be dark during the day, although... would a dark rain cloud look like this from space? All the pictures I've seen they always look white from above. I assume they are dark from the ground because they are dense and sunlight can't get thru? idk

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 18/09/2026

logically, it doesn't make sense to have dark nighttime clouds over an obviously daytime scene, but aesthetically... i think it works #cloudbusters #gamedev #indiegames #indiedev #puzzle

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

finished scaling up the art and it only took about 4-5hrs. downside is I don't think I can call this #pixelart anymore... #gamedev #indiedev

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

going to aim to have a demo finished for Cloudbusters by the end of the week. also just decided to double the resolution of every sprite in the game to 128x128. I've been wanting to do another pass on the art anyway so I think it will be worth it. Anyway there's not that many sprites.

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problem is wiki articles are often poorly written, and its difficult to make a page from a Victorian novel seem relevant to the world I'm making... I think I'll stick with only instructions, and very important context about the world, and neither will be as rewards for completing puzzles.

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I think I'm going to replace the lore dumps as rewards in Cloudbusters with some kind of scoring system. At first I was going to write all the lore, but I just didn't enjoy doing it so I thought I'd write some and supplement with snippets from public domain books and Wikipedia articles.

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p.s. while I'm starting to like kdenlive's workflow... the render speed is stll painful. Adding a single zoom effect made the render take 20x longer.

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I'm liking the feel of this chapter select... I want this game to feel a bit like a book, where you can easily flip back and forth from one chapter to another. #gamedev #indiedev #indiegames #puzzle

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should be working on the demo... instead I added a bunch of different traps to the mid/late game. The idea is the player can often deduce their location, but can either avoid them, or trigger them intentionally, if, for example, they are stuck. #screenshotsaturday #puzzle #indiedev #gamedev

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 08/09/2026

added UI scaling so people who own hi-res or small monitors can actually tell whats going on in the UI... still a few edge cases but its already more functional than UI scaling in my desktop environment lol. #gamedev #indiedev #indiegame #puzzle #ui #gui

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

p.s) obviously the graphical changes aren't very easy to see here becasue of kdenlive's horrible export quality and blueskies compression lol

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

worked on the visuals, added outlines around everything. Makes it "pop". Accidentally recorded this with music playing in the background, that's just how I play strategy games. I ALWAYS mute the game's music, which is why this game will not have any music whatsoever. #screenshotsaturday #gamedev

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

never assume stupidity always assume malice

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on second thought... theres no way this would work cause players could cheat too easily (by clicking random squares to figure out where all the mines are).

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Hopefully I'm not biting off more than I can chew here cause I still intend to have a demo out by the end of the month...

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I feel like many puzzle game players aren't really interested in random puzzles, and for those who are, I will lose nothing by adding designed ones. Would also allow players to design their own levels (or even entire campaigns). (maybe even steam workshop support)

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

adding a level editor to my game so I can more easily make a tutorial and it has me thinking... I might change the puzzles in the main campaign to be entirely hand made, and only do random generation in endless mode (maybe daily challenges?).

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too many games these days are coolslop

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I'm probably overthinking this. People in 2030 will almost certainly be able to run the windows version through wine anyway.

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VICTUAL WORLDS @arkanar.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

I just considered that because I can't assume backwards compatabilty from glibc, that is is possible that these builds may still fail on future linux installs... and that using a more recent steam runtime to build would give at least a couple more years of compatibility... ugh, I hate this

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obviously its not the most cutting edge game in terms of graphics, still... before I optimized it it only got like 15 fps on this laptop

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how I figured out my game's system requirements #solodev #indiedev #thinkpad

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to be fair this isn't really valve's fault, its the fault of the maintainers of glibc, who insist on breaking compatibility for some reason. Its genuinely absurd that linux machines often can't run a program compiled 5 years earlier (or later), yet we can run windows programs from 1999.

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i'm sure it probably still works if you launch through steam, but I'm also distributing on itch and I don't want to maintain a ton of different builds. It ran fine when compiled in the steam runtime 3 environment (even when not run through steam).

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updated my build system to use Steam Linux Runtime 4 (as per Valve's recommendation) and guess what? It doesn't work on my minimum spec testing computer anymore! Good work valve!

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added a practice mode to #cloudbusters so players can get a better idea of how all the items work/interact with each other. #puzzle #solodev #indiedev #gamedev #indiegames #minesweeper

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