Heyplay Mid-2023: State of Play & Coming Soon

Let’s see how Heyplay is doing these days and, most importantly, what’s next around the corner. Spoiler alert: exciting times are coming!

Heyplay is an indie effort and it’s always a struggle to make the current status on such project transparent, without the whole department of talented writers dedicated to keeping users updated. But since I like transparency, and Heyplay now has a blog, my goal in this entry is to give you a high-level look at the current state of affairs as well as at the upcoming future.

Recap on the past

Heyplay was born in late 2021 when the most intense, initial development happened. This is when it got all the initial core pieces:

• Lua runtime to run arbitrary games
• IO game toolkit powered by Rust
• code editor backed by Monaco
• visual editor backed by Blockly
• actual ability to run games on hosted instances
• renderer to make the game look nice, process input, show minimap etc etc
• courses, guides, docs and help pages for newjoiners
• two stock games ready to be played by anyone

After some very productive weeks I’ve let the project be for some time during which I’ve focused on other responsibilities. In other words, the cruel reality of indie efforts has caught up with it. But let’s not lose hope!

Precious early birds

So while I’ve let the project be for a while, Heyplay got some attention from initial users. They all were very excited about the idea and some of them were able to create their own simple blobby games (join Heyplay on Discord to see some very cool discussions).

This has meant a world to me during the “retreat phase” — clearly it’s not only me that’s super-fuelled by the vision to make multiplayer game development simpler than ever. It also proves that Heyplay — by allowing to create and run the first game in a few clicks + by providing polished crash course and documentation right in the editor — was prepared & easy enough to get first users onboarded. Which was the whole point, so yay!

At the same time I’ve gathered some precious feedback that indicated what Heyplay should improve next:

• more control over how games look: apparently, my design skills are not universally appreciated (who knew? 😂) OR the spacey, glowing appearance doesn’t fit all games (who knew? 🤯)
• a wider variety of input options: some games may want to get more or less further away from the IO control scheme or just do it their own way since choice is the spice of life, or so they tell me
• different object shapes: because circles, while fantastic, are not the be-all-end-all of IO game existence (and they definitely don’t make too great walls for games that, well, need walls better than these: 🟢🟢🟢)
• client-side prediction: which sounded like something waaay out of Heyplay’s league & scope to me at first but has shown how much potential in taking it further others saw 🔥

This can be summarized as more power, more control, more flexibility.

I agree on usefulness of all these features - heck, I’ve suffered from them myself when trying to invent new games. At the same time, these are all requests way beyond the initial Heyplay V1 functionality, which relied on a very limited set of IO game building blocks and completely hardcoded client/renderer/UI side of affairs. This was for two reasons:

• to make it realistic for one developer to deliver
• to accomplish the core goal of simplicity

…both of which are constraints that are still in place. What can a guy do then in order to push Heyplay up from a (quite successful) PoC to a more serious game creation tool that provides for the above needs? Sounds like a challenge, so…

Time to regroup!

While I couldn’t commit myself fully at the time, I’ve still spent some time on the project, with following activities:

• using it myself: since I’m within the target audience for Heyplay, I was trying to create new games myself and while on it taking notes on what may be missing, what’s the next most needed feature etc
• researching & planning: I’ve spent some quality time researching the market, trends future possibilities and opportunities
• maintenance: I’ve invested the minimal time needed to keep the platform going and ensure it’s there for new users
• waiting, waiting, waiting: the hardest part when it comes to passion-driven indie endeavours is looking forward to have some time to really push the project forward and unleash my next ideas

Well guess what, the time is now! In a couple of next weeks I plan to take Heyplay to the next level in a 2nd focused development phase, first since the initial one in late 2021. I’ve gathered some game-changing ideas, I’ve came up with some mind-blowing solutions and I’ve reserved myself some time to get it done.

What will it be about? I’ll tackle that in upcoming posts, but generally I do plan to gradually chase all the Heyplay limitations mentioned above as well as many many others via some really cool & bold developments.

Buckle up, things may get really exciting really soon. 🚀