4.2025
Hello everyone! Oh boy, I can’t believe it’s already April; Jade Spring is five months old (and 530 commits in). In March I put together a little tour video and set the Steam store page live, in addition to completing the game’s little tutorial story and adding a bunch of features (like “jumping puzzle mode,” which toggles gravity for your Jade Bot, and a “ping” feature that allows you to find weeds and bugs hiding nearby).
Shhh… Nobody will ever know that the text on this book’s cover was upside down when this capture was taken.
A bunch of work has been done to improve how the game runs, especially on older computers and GPUs. Anti-aliasing can be changed in the settings menu, and I’m finding that disabling it on those older machines can seriously increase performance. I’ve also added some graphics presets to make picking suitable settings easier! Because it’s a small and casual fan-game I want to keep it quite lean – the package size is under 130MB at the moment. And my thinking in general is that Jade Spring should be able to run on any PC that can run GW2.
I’ve just gotten access to Steam key distribution, so I’m gonna start a broader private test of this tiny game in the next couple of days. I’m really keen to have other people try it out as soon as possible, so I’m thinking of publically releasing the beta in May, if this month’s testing and additions go well! The version of the game would be a completable version of Jade Spring, just without some core decorations. The main thing I’d be hoping to get back from a beta release are a lot of suggestions and bug reports which I can use to make the game as polished as I can. It’s spicy because while I want to release it in its neatest and tidiest state, I also happen to be an absolute newbie; and there are some things I can only learn and apply by seeing them happen in action!1 So I’m trying to find a good balance between the two, and I’m so lucky to have such cool and understanding folks around.
This is the debugging world that I use to test systems and visuals in Jade Spring! It resets every time I enter it, so I can check progression points in the story and things like that.
If everything went well, the plan would be to take the beta tag off between June and July, and release the game with an additional set of decorations, “Xunlai Neon”. This is an idea I’m super excited about: a collection of cyberpunk-style Kaineng noodle stands, neon signs, air vents, and substation components! In general, I love the idea of being able to release small expansions to the game every now and then.
As always, thank you so much for following Jade Spring’s progress. I started working on it as a way to learn game development, and to understand what I enjoy about my time in Guild Wars 2 so deeply. (Actually, a wonderful interview with their art director Aaron Coberly was published recently, which accompanys my feelings quite well.) Seeing interest build in the game has been unfathomable, and I’m determined to put something out there that will be fun, relaxing, and filled with details.
Note: these dates are indications and could definitely change! Hey, I’m just a little guy! But I’ll do my best to stick to ’em.
| March 31st | I get access to distributing beta Steam keys! |
| April | Final core gameplay additions and internal testing. |
| Early May |
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| June − July |
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1 For example, setting up all of the Steamworks integrations (the pipeline which gets your game files on Steam, as well as configuring statistics and achievements) was quite daunting to work out! I used this video as a basis and it was super-useful. I also recently learnt how to resolve merge conflicts in the version control system, ’cause I’d worked on two different machines with two different versions (the laptop was offline at a café, heh). Going through the same-file conflicts in VSCode was cool, and I was blown away to see it all work out just fine. I’m yapping on a bit, but yeah – nerd stuff!
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