July 24, 2026
Devlog #1
Barnburners is made by one person - me. So one thing I think is cool is actually putting my actual numbers on the internet, live, for anyone to see.
There is a new page on this site called The Numbers. It reads straight from the game every time you open it, and it shows the real state of the playtest from those who have opted in to sharing data. It shows how many people have installed it, how many matches have been played, how many goals and hits, and how many of the people who left a rating liked what they played. All anonymous, all opt-in, and no cherry-picking.
The part I care about most is the feedback. After a game, it'll sometimes prompt you to leave a thumbs up or down and a note, and those notes have shaped a bunch of updates. A few things came up over and over: it felt too fast to follow at first, people wanted to control the goalie, and a lot of you want the skaters to slide and glide more like they are actually on ice. The page groups those into themes and marks what I have done about each one: shipped, in progress, or still on the list. When I ship something, the pill flips.
Behind that public page there is a messier one only I look at. Mainly the same telemetry, but the whole picture. Which GPUs and resolutions people run, how the frame rate holds up build to build, which modes people bounce off of, and the crashes. Building blind sucks, so this is how I decide what to fix and change instead of guessing.
That is the whole idea. I would rather show you the real thing, issues and feedback and all. The demo is coming soon, you can request access to the current playtest (which is just the demo right now in its finishing polish stage), and the game is on Steam to wishlist, and if you play it, tell me I got it wrong. That is the point!