As I'm working hard on the next Blêktre expansion, I had a sad surprise yesterday morning. Scaleway — Blêktre’s server host — had a hard drive failure, and I had to move the game to a new machine. This wasn’t too worrying since I have daily backups (a similar incident happened three months ago), and this time, nothing was lost except a day of work—and a bit of faith. I’ve switched to an OVH server since hardware failures seem frequent with Scaleway. We’ll see if this other low-cost provider does better. At least now Blêktre have more RAM and bandwidth! Unfortunately, I wasn’t as careful with the blog, so I’ve lost all my posts, which is a real bummer. From now on, I’ll simply write my devlog on Blogger. It's not flashy or indie, but it’s safer—and I just don’t have the mental space to worry about those details anymore. So, here we go again. I can’t wait to share more about the upcoming Blêktre expansion. I probably should have released Blêktre 2081 in early access, but what’s ...
The first Blêktre Blêktre 2081 is the second game in the Blêktre series. The first Blêktre (which I call Blêktre 1) was developed in 2015, initially during my working hours as a web developer in a t-shirt printing company, but it quickly spilled over into my free time. It was my very first game, developed in PHP and illustrated in Flash, with code that was really quite shaky. Under a vaguely “visual novel” appearance clearly inspired by “choose your own adventure” books, it was actually an adventure game whose particularity was that it was asynchronous multiplayer — other players would soon take on the roles of the various characters in the story through a “roles” system. You played as a huge loser , a drug addict who quickly became unemployed, and your biggest goal was to seduce Josiane, a capricious woman courted by all the players since everyone was in the same instance, putting everyone in direct competition. For a free, ugly, poorly coded game available only in French, its s...
Here I am, standing at the final step of the long journey that was the development of Blêktre 2081 . It all lasted about three years — from the first prototype in 2022, the funding in 2023, the release in early 2025, up to the “deluxe” version now being published. That’s quite a few lines of code and pixels laid down. Blêktre doesn’t look like much, with its “lo-fi” aesthetic, but there’s real work under the hood. It’s not my first experience as a developer — far from it — but it’s the first game I’ve truly taken to a commercial release. Since I put in the effort, I had a few ambitions in terms of sales! But let’s be honest: it wasn’t the heist of the century. After six months on the market, I haven’t had much media coverage (JV le Mag, a few e-zines). Despite my efforts (launch event, participation in Stunfest), the small hundred copies sold so far make it clear I haven’t broken into the circle of “cool” indie games. And yet, it’s impossible to be disappointed. The few dedicated play...
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