Your Doodles Are Bugged! is coming to Steam!

WOHOO! - The headline says it all! :-)

This is probably not very important for anyone else, but for me, it is a very big thing. Steam simply is the downloadable PC game platform to be on, and I'm super happy that my little (buggy ;-) game was accepted by Valve.

You might have wondered why I've been so mum about YDAB! development news lately, both here on the blog and on Twitter. After all, my last blog post was last year, and that wasn't even YDAB! related.

It has driven me crazy not being able to write about all the exciting stuff that was happening (and there are still some things that I can't divulge yet, like the release date), but now everything has come far enough that I finally can talk about a few things. So let me give you a short history of how this unfolded.

Well, around the end of last year, when it looked like I had wrapped up all development for the YDAB! PC-version, we started looking into which game portals we wanted to approach about the YDAB! release. "We", that is the awesome people at Blitz 1UP, who are helping me with this. The portal of choice would of course be Valve's Steam, so that's where they pitched the game first. Only I couldn't talk about that, since at that point it was of course very uncertain how it would turn out.

And then, actually quite quickly and much sooner than I had thought, we got the green light from Valve! YDAB! would indeed be coming to Steam! You can imagine the victory dance I did when I got those news! :-)

Only of course I still couldn't talk about it, since everything was still in a much too early stage.

But behind the scenes I got busy... Remember my "The todo-list is now empty" tweet a while ago? - Ha! I should have know better than to twitter something like that! Suddenly I had a new set of tasks on the list: Integration with Steam, meaning the support for Steam achievements, leaderboards and cloud storage.

All very cool features that I absolutely wanted to have in my game, but it also meant learning how to use the Steam SDK (which, to complicate things, is in unmanaged C++, and YDAB! is XNA and thus in managed C#). And of course it also meant programming a lot of new stuff. Especially for the achievements, since of course I had to actually have some achievements first, before I could make them into Steam achievements.

And that's what I've been busy with lately (well, and creating a lot of assets and marketing material, of course). While I couldn't twitter about it while I worked on this stuff, I'm planning to do a few blog posts in the near feature. Coming soon!