Land of Strangers is a classical Roguelike with a Western-inspired theme; in the works, it saw it's first release in 2013. LoSt was originally announced as a failed 7DRL entry with card based action mechanics. You walked around in an endless, random desert with scorpions and "sunfaced goons" and "moonfaced goons" as enemies.

Since then, the game has evolved in various directions, always developed strictly as a hobby project (in the early days I reported to a discussion thread on the Roguelike Temple forums; about a year in, I switched to a blog). This summer I made the twelfth release of the game, and decided to open a page for the project here at itch.io

If you're interested to see what the game is about, the best way is probably just to try it out ;) Here, instead, I'll write a bit about the two releases I made to itch.io the last month.

Land of Strangers #12: "Night Errands"

Release #12 of the game, entitled "Night Errands", came in August 2018 and marks the first itch.io release. The full release annouce at the game's blog is here.

It was a quite experimental one. On the tactical side, LoSt has always been more inspired by games like Hoplite and PrincessRL, that favor almost board game-like mechanics over the D&D inspired "bump-to-kill" one often sees in the canonized classics of the genre (for the record, I adore Rogue, ADOM, et al). Over the years, I've tried out some different rules for wounds, time, and such, but never found a system I was quite content with. After the release of LoSt #11 ("Mercury Bubblegum"), I again decided to make some big changes. I tinkered with the project on and off for a year until I had what I believe is a passable system and engine, which should scale to my long term plans without too much hassle along the way. If the forces that be will it so ;) Anyway, I packed the archives and proudly released #12, and made the itch.io page, as I had been thinking about doing. It was fun making a promotional, animated gif to attract y'all here, like so many like flies to my droppings. Visual design is not my strongest suit, but if you think the gif is bad, just wait till I start adding music (if ever).

Post-Release Joys and Woes

I got the feeling that LoSt received a warm enough welcome on itch.io, considering it's quite an obscure project. The first week, it got two dozen downloads and had a (as I can gather) decent click-through rate at around 3%. If you don't know what a click-through rate is, dear reader, as I did not when I started this, it's the rate at which people who see a link to your project on itch.io actually click it and visit your game's page. Developers here are offered some functions like that, which are certainly interesting to see. The "official" downloads of the game are just some Dropbox links :) so I hadn't before seen stuff like the ratio between Linux users and Windows users.

Speaking of that, I use Linux myself to develop LoSt, which is written in the Python programming language. To build the executable for Windows users, I use some Linux wine tricks that magically compile an *.exe file (really a compiled version of Python and the components I use, along with the game's scripts in compressed form). I used to have a netbook that dual booted to Windows, but it's almost become too old and slow for testing these days.

A few days after the release, I got a comment from my faithful blog commentator Anon, who noted that the game crashed in Windows under certain circumstances. Not good. I at least managed to reproduce the bugs with the Linux wine tricks. Then, another old player reported he couldn't get the game to work at all. At this point, I was beginning to think: Maybe I shouldn't have released that binary without testing it on an actual Windows PC. So I went to the deepest dives of my cupboards to fetch my Windows 7 netbook, scrubbed some gunk off the casing before turning it on and going to put the kettle on as it proceeded to boot. Long story short, the game was a crashing mess on my old machine. From a developer's perspective, that's really good news. Bug squashy times ensued.

Land of Strangers #13: "One Crawled out of the Foxhole"

13 is my lucky number, or so I hope. LoSt #13 (release notes) was done quickly, after I discovered that #12 was not working for potentially many users. As so often, the bugs I tracked down from the reports I got, were mostly typos and small oversights. After the updated version was released, I'm still anticipating any reports on whether it's working – no doubt in due time ;) I have always held that time is not of the essence; it is the essence which is of time :P

In hindsight, I should probably have sat a bit on the #12 release before publishing it here. At other places where I've announced the game over the years, I won't lose much from the occasional false step, as long as the project is steadily moving forwards. On the other hand, entering a new context by stumbling in head first can leave a poor first impression. There were 19 people who downloaded the original dysfunctional Windows binary. Let's hope they weren't the potential spearhead that would have propelled this project to prosperous glory, but turned away from the game in unending disgust as it crashed on them.

Be that as it may, I'll keep trudging ahead. Once I get a feel that the current version is working, I'll get going on the next release, which will probably focus on factions and encounters, including some more content, places to see and things to do, which is what the game world probably needs at this point. And then…

As always,
Minotauros