Hi HN,

I am the solo developer behind this.

The Pitch: It is a card-based resource management game (inspired by Reigns) where you work IT support for a corporation taken over by eldritch horrors. You have to balance ticket resolution, budget, and entropy while dealing with printers that violate causality.

The Architecture: The entire game is built in React/JavaScript. Under the hood, it is basically a giant state machine. I chose this stack because it allowed me to iterate quickly on the UI and text-heavy elements, which are 90% of the gameplay. I've published other games that were more run of the mill and made in Godot, but I'm a full stack developer by day and most of my day-to-day is in nextJS. I just... I just missed easy state work, ok? Don't shoot me. I was half afraid that building executables/binaries for Steam would be a nightmare but it turned out (after a bit of futzing about with Tauri for linux) to be not too bad.

The Build Pipeline (Tauri vs Electron): Packaging a web app for Steam Deck was the biggest hurdle.

Windows: I use Tauri. It is lighter and creates a much smaller binary since it uses the OS webview.

Steam Deck / Linux: I had to use Electron. SteamOS does not have a reliable pre-installed webview for Tauri to hook into out of the box.

The Rig: I build everything using a Docker setup on a Windows machine to handle the Linux cross-compilation.

The Data & Feedback Loop: The web build has seen 10,000+ plays on itch in the last 2 months with a 4.9/5 rating. An additional 3000 players have picked up the demo on Steam since February 1st. To gather player feedback efficiently at the edge where the player is, I built a custom system directly into the demo:

The game client has write-only access to a Supabase project. An ingame (thematically fitting) feedback form allows the user to fill in purchase intent (0-10), pricing data, and friction points.

This pipes directly into a Discord webhook via edge functions and it's broadcasted live to the game's discord server for everyone to see. The idea is to let the community decide, by popular vote, what the actual price of the full game will be. Right now price seems to be converging around the 12-13$ price mark.

The link above is to the free web build (Itch). I also just released a downloadable demo on Steam today if you prefer a standalone version: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4225400/IT_Never_Ends/

Happy to answer any questions about the React state management or the Steam Deck build issues.

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