I tried playing the Demo (Steamdeck)

[The_Outsider]

It looks like a great game and I love games with Robots however sentences are very pixelated and tiny.

Additionally, When my robot is told to leave, I can't actually move anywhere.

Hopefully this changes as it really does look like a good game.

[Strategic Sage]

I'm not sure exactly what you're referring to with the second sentence - what is going on when you can't move anywhere? What do you mean by 'told to leave'?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

The default steam deck controls are not set properly, so the game is unplayable on the deck at the moment. That is something that's on my list to fix. I play the game on my own deck, but the default control scheme for the game is harder to set in steam than I would have expected.

Visually it should run great on the deck, unless you have manually enabled half-rate shading, which will break the text.

[Stevo]

There should be a community profile up for the steam deck.

[jokesmanhd]

Hello, Chris! The game looks great, waiting to play it on my Steam deck. When are you planning to add controller support / Steam deck support?

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Steam Deck support is there now! It's not full controller support, and has a few things that prevent it from being marked Verified, but it plays quite well on the Deck. You can read a review from SteamDeckHQ here: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/heart-of-the-machine-early-access/

Broadly, I've already done a ton of optimization to the game to get it running so well on the Deck and other lower-end hardware. There is a CPU bottleneck on the Deck that I can't quite find yet, and I'll have to look into that at some point to get it up to a consistent 60fps rather than a less-stable 60 or a stable 40. But those optimizations will probably make the battery life worse, not better, if I had to guess.

The things that Valve pointed out that have made it Playable rather than Verified are some text size things, and some key bindings things. I think that both of those are mild enough that it could still be considered Verified, but that's my own opinion and obviously Valve disagrees, and I have a huge bias.

My personal complaints for the game are not something that Valve even brings up, which is that I'd like to be able to access the hotbar more effectively on the Deck. This is something I will tackle for my own sake if nothing else, just because I do basically all my gaming on the Deck, but I have to balance that out with the things that serve the majority of players. So that's probably a few months off at least.

As a general set of expectations, I would say to expect that the current state of the demo and launch state of the game is the experience you should expect on the Deck for a few months at least. I might shift that up, but as a baseline that is where my head is at right now. The remaining things that I want to do for the Deck are time-intensive to do, and it's just me working on the game at all, and those benefit a comparably small group of people, as well as being in the nice-to-have territory rather than blockers, from my point of view.

That said, if there are specific cases where something is just obviously wrong and needs a fix for Deck (like text size somewhere or something), then those are quick and I can do those faster. But the things that Valve flagged are things that... I have complex feelings about, and require more thought. Compared to similar games I've played on the Deck, the size didn't jump out at me as being to small on what they mentioned, but it's also possible I'm missing something.

Anyway, this is perhaps way more information than you were looking for, but that's where I'm at right now.

Cheers!

[jokesmanhd]

Originally posted by x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park):

Steam Deck support is there now! It's not full controller support, and has a few things that prevent it from being marked Verified, but it plays quite well on the Deck. You can read a review from SteamDeckHQ here: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/heart-of-the-machine-early-access/

Broadly, I've already done a ton of optimization to the game to get it running so well on the Deck and other lower-end hardware. There is a CPU bottleneck on the Deck that I can't quite find yet, and I'll have to look into that at some point to get it up to a consistent 60fps rather than a less-stable 60 or a stable 40. But those optimizations will probably make the battery life worse, not better, if I had to guess.

The things that Valve pointed out that have made it Playable rather than Verified are some text size things, and some key bindings things. I think that both of those are mild enough that it could still be considered Verified, but that's my own opinion and obviously Valve disagrees, and I have a huge bias.

My personal complaints for the game are not something that Valve even brings up, which is that I'd like to be able to access the hotbar more effectively on the Deck. This is something I will tackle for my own sake if nothing else, just because I do basically all my gaming on the Deck, but I have to balance that out with the things that serve the majority of players. So that's probably a few months off at least.

As a general set of expectations, I would say to expect that the current state of the demo and launch state of the game is the experience you should expect on the Deck for a few months at least. I might shift that up, but as a baseline that is where my head is at right now. The remaining things that I want to do for the Deck are time-intensive to do, and it's just me working on the game at all, and those benefit a comparably small group of people, as well as being in the nice-to-have territory rather than blockers, from my point of view.

That said, if there are specific cases where something is just obviously wrong and needs a fix for Deck (like text size somewhere or something), then those are quick and I can do those faster. But the things that Valve flagged are things that... I have complex feelings about, and require more thought. Compared to similar games I've played on the Deck, the size didn't jump out at me as being to small on what they mentioned, but it's also possible I'm missing something.

Anyway, this is perhaps way more information than you were looking for, but that's where I'm at right now.

Cheers!

Thank you so much for the informative feedback, Chris! I wish you success in finishing and polishing the game) and planning to support you by buying the game. Hope you will make it out of Early Access, as I already have a few games that didn't, not the best experience, so I'm a little skeptical about EA)

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

Thank you very much!

I've been around for 16 years on Steam, and always made good on my promises to players, so I don't intend to break that habit now. I appreciate the trust that EA implies, for sure, and I don't take it lightly.

There was one case in 2016 where I released a game into EA way too early, and it was clear the game was DOA. So in that case I made the game free, stopped working on it, and refunded everyone their full amounts. That was a really extreme case, and I made that decision within the first week, as it was just so clearly dead.

The only other EA title I've done, out of my 13 projects on Steam, was AI War 2. That was a six year journey (one year only in EA, the rest on post-launch stuff and three large DLCs). I pushed that way beyond what I should have, and took a massive financial loss in doing so, because I believe in making things right to players.

At this point, things are already off to a great start, but I also have the backing of a very excellent publisher. I don't plan on wrecking their reputation or mine by suddenly dodging out on responsibilities. That would be very unwise for me. Plus I love this game and working on it, and there is zero incentive for me to do that. This is my dream job, and this is my favorite game I've ever worked on out of all the ones I've done.