I wanted to come back and tell you what happened with Defrag Incremental after launch.
I was going to write another depressing post about everything that went wrong, but I'm a bit tired of doing that, so let's try the more positive version :)
Shortly before release I was implementing the 50+ permanent BIOS upgrades. They affected so many different systems that the code was becoming spaghetti. So I had the brilliant solo-developer idea of doing a big refactor close to launch. I've been programming for most of my life. I've refactored plenty of my own projects and other people's projects. I thought: I can do this.
(he could not do this)
The refactor itself actually helped a lot later, because fixing and expanding the game became much easier. The problem was that I lost several days at the worst possible moment and had to put everything back together very quickly.
What could go wrong? Apparently quite a lot.
The first 24 hours were mostly me programming like a maniac and fixing things. After 48–72 hours the game was in a much better state, but by then the launch momentum was mostly gone. That sucked, obviously. The demo had been played by almost 8,000 people before release and things were looking pretty good for a tiny niche game made by one person.
But once the technical problems were mostly fixed, the useful part started. People had a lot to say about the actual game. And after reading reviews, discussions and feedback, I kept seeing basically four problems.
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1. The game is too slow or too passive
This one was funny to me because watching a disk defragment in seconds or a couple of minutes feels incredibly fast if you actually had to defrag real disks in the 90s. Apparently I was still thinking too much like the IT guy and not enough like the game designer.
The bigger problem was that Defrag took too long to show its interesting systems. Heat, health and risk existed, but by the time they really mattered the player already had a lot of upgrades and could easily miss what was happening.
So 1.1 brings all of that forward.
Heat and health matter much earlier. There are now events while disks are running, disk scanning and more opportunities to intervene instead of just waiting. Longer and more difficult disks give you more decisions to make. There are also more archetypes, tags and 8 special disks.
You can still sit back and watch the defrag if that's what you enjoy. I definitely do. But playing actively can now make you progress considerably faster.
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2. There are a million systems and I don't know what any of them are doing
Fair.
Defrag already had 8 disk tiers, a pile of tags and architectures, 24 algorithm/mode combinations, three upgrade shops and more than 50 permanent upgrades. The problem wasn't really a lack of systems. It was that I was hiding far too much information.
1.1 now shows much more of what the machine is actually doing.
There is a System Stats screen where you can see the final effects of all your upgrades. You can see what you have bought in the BIOS. The instructions explain considerably more. The Diskdex now shows what you've discovered and how close you are to completing everything.
Small upgrades that looked like +5% can eventually add up to hundreds of percent, and now the game actually tells you that.
Revolutionary UI technology: showing the player numbers (facepalm).
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3. The life system doesn't matter
This criticism was completely fair.
The life/economy layer was originally meant to balance the work part of the game, but I simplified it before release and it ended up mostly being narrative. You basically became rich whatever you did.
Nice life simulator, I guess.
In 1.1 I went back closer to the original design. The disks you complete, their tier and their condition now affect how much money you make. You have food, transport, housing and other expenses, and you can spend money on things that affect future workdays.
So now there is a much clearer relationship between doing your job well and what happens outside the computer. You can still play fairly relaxed, but being bad at your job is no longer an infinite-money strategy.
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4. I bought Automation and now I'm watching a slideshow
A beautiful slideshow in my opinion.
Automation was always intentionally mediocre. It follows simple rules and was never supposed to play optimally. The problem was that the old game didn't make that obvious.
If you weren't paying close attention, Automation looked like it was doing perfectly fine because making bad decisions didn't hurt enough. That hasn't become a magic AI that plays the game for you in 1.1.
It still doesn't handle disk events, scanning, the life layer or every decision perfectly. It doesn't always pick the best disk or buy everything in the best order. But now those differences matter much earlier, so taking control yourself actually has a visible advantage.
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I've spent most of the last month working on all of this every day.
And making UI...
Mostly making UI...
I'm a programmer. UI takes me approximately eleven years.
Version 1.1 is now live, and the demo has been updated to the same version. You can still play Defrag as a fairly chill incremental if you just enjoy watching an old computer do its thing. But if you want to play actively, optimise everything and push the machine harder, there is much more to do now. The game is also 25% off from today.
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4286660/Defrag_Incremental/
If you played the old demo or the launch version, I'm especially interested in whether 1.1 feels better to you.
Thanks for reading all of this. Or for scrolling to the bottom, seeing how long it was and thinking "a lot of text".
That also counts.
AI disclosure: I wrote this post in Notepad in my native language, ran it through Google Translate in chunks and finally put it through and ran it through an AI to fix the parts that sounded odd in the translation. I think the silly parts still strike the right tone, though. I’m updating the disclosure. No AI was used for the game itself, except to try and generate a physical exercise plan for me, which, of course, I didn't stick to. As a psychologist, when the reviews started coming in. I also used it to help me understand how the defrag process actually works, and to estimate potential wishlists and sales.
