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coastwide.systems
James | CWS 🇨🇦
@coastwide.systems
1.7K followers 2.6K following 810 posts
Game development studio building games for Linux (and other OS's too) using the bevy engine and Rust language.

#linux #rustlang #bevy #bevyengine

#gamedev #indiedev #solodev

https://coastwidesystems.com/

https://discord.gg/Rg8MBJAvu4
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coastwide.systems
Set up our very first #gaming LAN party with the kids today! All #foss with a combination of Fedora & Bazzite #Linux on the laptops. Played some SuperTuxKart and a little Rigs of Rods afterward 😄
Three laptops arranged around a dinongnroom table connected to a switch in the center. Visible on the nearest screen is SuperTuxKart, with a dark red DualSense controller set beside it. In the background is a container of maple syrup, because Canada
February 8, 2026 at 7:33 PM
coastwide.systems
Quickly whipped up an alternate engine compartment (and fixed a few bad lines elsewhere), thinking the darker/less detail works a bit better but going to need to think on it a while. Should probably get it in engine to see for sure though, so back to coding for now

#pixelart #gamedev #indiedev
A pixel art station wagon, slightly angled and with the hood open revealing the engine. This is one of three vehicle types in Heat Retreat and is intended to be part of the vehicle status check/maintenance view, thus is higher resolution than the usual vehicle assets
February 6, 2026 at 9:41 PM
coastwide.systems
Oh, and here's more of my #NoAI reference images - when the view/angle I'm looking for doesn't exist, make a really shitty mockup in Gimp 😆
A screenshot of Gimp on the left with a butchered mockup of an 80's station wagon, attempting to represent what it looks like with the hood open at a specific angle. On the right are a selection of image search results showing various other angles of the vehicle
February 6, 2026 at 7:12 PM
coastwide.systems
For any #gamedev out there - especially the ones that say Linux is too hard - here's how easy it can be to support Linux, MacOS and Win when you plan ahead: a section of Heat Retreat's Makefile (for #bevy and #rustlang here)

To make a release build, I run 1 command and it's done 😎
A screenshot of Heat Retreat's Makefile, full text exceeds character limits but the key sections contain: linux: @echo "Building Linux executable..." @mkdir -p ./target/release @if command -v podman >/dev/null 2>&1; then \ podman pull quay.io/cws/steam-linux-builder:latest; \ podman run -v .:/src:z -v ./target/release:/output:z -t quay.io/cws/steam-linux-builder:latest release; \ else \ $(CARGO) build --release; \ fi @echo "✓ Linux executable built" win: @echo "Building Windows executable..." @$(CARGO) build --target=x86_64-pc-windows-msvc --release @echo "✓ Windows executable built" mac: @echo "Building macOS universal binary..." @CC=o64-clang CXX=o64-clang++ LIBZ_SYS_STATIC=1 $(CARGO) build --target=aarch64-apple-darwin --release @CC=o64-clang CXX=o64-clang++ LIBZ_SYS_STATIC=1 $(CARGO) build --target=x86_64-apple-darwin --release @echo "✓ macOS executables built"
February 6, 2026 at 6:52 PM
coastwide.systems
Took a while but here we are on the station wagon "maintenance" texture for Heat Retreat! Not super happy with the engine, will probably iterate on that; looks "noisy" to me compared to the rest of the vehicle but there's lots of stuff going on there so tough to get right 🤔

#pixelart #indiegamedev
February 6, 2026 at 6:27 PM
coastwide.systems
Not done yet, but I haven't been posting much lately (cold/flu season hit us hard this year & been focused on #gamedev #indiedev over socials stuff). This one I'm thinking is too big and will probably need to redo it, but also here's a look at my #NoAI bashed together "reference" image 😂

#pixelart
A screenshot showing my workspace for an in-progress station wagon art asset for Heat Retreat. On the left is the program Aseprite with an 80's era, classic wood panelled station wagon, and on the right is one of my reference images of said station wagon in a Firefox browser window. The desktop environment is "Sway" on Fedora Linux. A screenshot showing the original reference image (also seen in the previous screenshot) on the right in my Firefox browser window as well as another tab with Gimp open and my very poorly bashed together reference image to help me get an idea of how to draw the engine relative to the rest of the vehicle.
January 27, 2026 at 7:01 PM
coastwide.systems
Got up for a coffee refill & this is what I come back to

Getting a strong "I think we need to talk about your performance lately" vibe 😅

#indiedev #gamedev #solodev
A photo of my border collie lying on the couch in front of my laptop giving a judgmental side look
January 14, 2026 at 8:59 PM
coastwide.systems
Alright, at a point where I have some new-ish stuff to show (still WIP though): supply management UI! Not the most exciting thing but needed. And finally getting some visuals in for "upgrade" class items, like a backpack (which I'm told looks like wood 😅 - may need to fix)

#indiegamedev #pixelart
January 14, 2026 at 5:14 PM
coastwide.systems
Been working a lot on under-the-hood stuff lately (gamepads fully work now!), but started on improving the party supply management view for Heat Retreat! Very early stage work in progress still but can show the side by side changes so far for #screenshotsaturday

#indiegamedev #bevy #pixelart
A screenshot showing the updated, very work in progress party supply management view. Pictured is a tab style navigation bar to the left listing "Homestead", "Party", "Vehicle", Supplies" and "Leave". In the main view is the player wallet at the top showing $800, the blue hatchback vehicle with its trunk open and a full load of supplies: antibiotics, first aid, fresh (perishable) food, canned food, rifle/shotgun/pistol ammunition, water, duct tape (repair material), wiper blades, fuel and tires. To the right of the vehicle is some background art including an orange tent and camp fire. Not yet implemented are the remaining "upgrade" class of items, which will occupy the empty space. A screenshot showing the old simply text based party supply management view. Pictured is a tab style navigation bar to the left listing "Roadside", "Party", "Vehicle", Supplies" and "Leave". In the main view is the player wallet at the bottom of the list showing $800 and a listing of supplies: antibiotics, first aid, fresh (perishable) food, canned food, rifle/shotgun/pistol ammunition, water, duct tape (repair material), wiper blades, fuel and tires. To the right is a text pane showing "upgrade" class of items, which are not yet implemented in the new view but include "Rifle" and "Small Backpack" in the listing. At the top is a text heading "Caravan Supplies" with a dev flag indicating localization text has not been found & fall back is in use.
December 20, 2025 at 7:02 PM
coastwide.systems
Well, here's a boring picture of the updated colour selector. Not quite "final" yet, but switched it over to use the game palette instead of the engine's definitions, and increased the number of colours from ~12 before to 32 (palette has 64, but that was too crowded & hard to read)
A screenshot of Heat Retreat's "Game Settings" menu, showing a section of the "Appearance" category containing toggles for Parallax, Lightning Flash, and Health/Fatigue/Hydration/UI colour selectors. At the bottom of the screen are "Back" and "Reset to Defaults" buttons.
December 17, 2025 at 4:51 PM
coastwide.systems
Thanks to my amazing wife I have a new phone that I immediately switched over to GrapheneOS, and am now 99% de-Googled 🎉

Appreciate all the work that goes into the OS @grapheneos.org - aiming to one day be a contributor when my financial situation is a bit more stable 😅
A photo of a brand new Pixel 9a booting GrapheneOS for the first time, showing the GrapheneOS logo and title against a black background for the boot splash screen.
December 11, 2025 at 9:03 PM
coastwide.systems
Just discovered a feature in duckduckgo to block sites from search results!

I am so fed up with #AIslop articles polluting search results that I'm now outright blocking entire domain names when I see this crap. "Share feedback" also has an option specifically to report AI generated search results
A screenshot of a duckduckgo search result snippet showing the three dot menu with the new option to block a particular site from search results: "Block this site from all results [NEW]"
December 8, 2025 at 9:19 PM
coastwide.systems
Taking a slight departure from posting about gamedev stuff to share some #mushroom #fungi pictures from recent autumn adventures; the stuff that I get my ideas & art direction inspiration from when working on Heat Retreat
December 6, 2025 at 8:45 PM
coastwide.systems
Forgot to post this before but borrwed a #SteamDeck for some testing recently. Found lots of bugs (mostly gamepad/input stuff that I'm actively working on), but Heat Retreat was looking pretty good on handheld (runtime v3 here)

#gamedev #indiedev #gaming #LinuxGaming #Steam #SteamOS #bevy #rustlang
A poorly lit photo showing the Heat Retreat travel state running natively on a SteamDeck. In the scene is the red 50's era pickup truck and its stylized the dashboard UI showing fuel, outside temperature, date/time, speed, distance traveled (via the odometer), distance to next location and a simple high/med/low food representation using an ubiquitous yellow milk crate. The travel scenery depicts the truck driving down a small side road through a deciduous forest, with low distant mountains in the background and a sunny day with scattered clouds.
December 3, 2025 at 5:11 PM
coastwide.systems
My low tech #gamedev #indiedev bug tracker

I can see it at a glance, it's there guilting me all the time, quick to add new items/rearrange topics and it's satisfying crossing stuff off 😆
A photo of the bottom of my monitor with three orange post-it notes containing the topics "Travel", "Shopping" & "Settings". Each contains barely legible bullet point notes of bugs or pending features under each heading, with completed items roughly crossed out.
December 2, 2025 at 5:16 PM
coastwide.systems
Today marks 1 month exactly but Heat Retreat's shopping rework is complete* 🎉

Couple things I'll circle back to (eg, station wagon art I'm not super happy with) but it's all functional! Time to get back on that gamepad support....

#gamedev #indiedev #gaming #bevy #linux #pixelart
Heat Retreat's newly reworked shopping UI, showing the player's vehicle (a red retro style pickup truck here) on the left with sellable commodities arrayed (mostly) sensibly in/around the vehicle and a simple shop with a goods to buy displayed. Items all have a white outline to help show what can be interacted with, and focused items have a (configurable) coloured outline (red shown here). The shopkeeper uses a speech bubble to communicate to the player the item type & price per unit ("I'd consider $4/L for water" shown here). In the upper left region is the player's wallet ($658.00), the upper right corner has the pause/menu UI button shown as an ubiquitous double vertical bar pause icon, and the lower right has the back/leave UI button, shown as an arrow pointing right. Not shown here is the trade dialog box, where the player can see more detailed information about the commodity in focus & select how much to buy or sell. Heat Retreat's newly reworked shopping UI, showing the player's vehicle (a brown wood panelled retro station wagon here) on the left with sellable commodities arrayed (mostly) sensibly in/around the vehicle and a simple shop with a goods to buy displayed. Items all have a white outline to help show what can be interacted with, and focused items have a (configurable) coloured outline (none in focus here). The shopkeeper uses a speech bubble to communicate to the player the item type & price per unit, not shown in this screenshot since no item is currently in focus. In the upper left region is the player's wallet ($585.00), the upper right corner has the pause/menu UI button shown as an ubiquitous double vertical bar pause icon, and the lower right has the back/leave UI button, shown as an arrow pointing right. Not shown here is the trade dialog box, where the player can see more detailed information about the commodity in focus & select how much to buy or sell. Heat Retreat's newly reworked shopping UI, showing the player's vehicle (the light blue 90's era hatch back/compact show here) on the left with sellable commodities arrayed (mostly) sensibly in/around the vehicle and a simple shop with a goods to buy displayed. Items all have a white outline to help show what can be interacted with, and focused items have a (configurable) coloured outline (none in focus here). The shopkeeper uses a speech bubble to communicate to the player the item type & price per unit, not shown in this screenshot since no item is currently in focus. In the upper left region is the player's wallet ($620.00), the upper right corner has the pause/menu UI button shown as an ubiquitous double vertical bar pause icon, and the lower right has the back/leave UI button, shown as an arrow pointing right. Not shown here is the trade dialog box, where the player can see more detailed information about the commodity in focus & select how much to buy or sell.
November 27, 2025 at 9:40 PM
coastwide.systems
A lot of code work since the last update, but got a lot of the edge cases covered now. Finished up replacing the placeholder textures too, and worked at fixing up the fuel & water assets (tried a different approach with the water, still not 100% happy with it)

#indiegamedev #pixelart #bevy
A screenshot of the re-worked Heat Retreat shopping interface, with retro red pickup truck vehicle option shown on the left and shop consisting of a dark wood table, drab shopkeeper in a blue cap and brick wall in the background with a clothesline. In the truck bed are the player's sellable goods, showing water, fuel, first aid supplies, food (fresh and canned), and a variety of ammunition. For sale in the shop are tires, fuel, water, canned & fresh food, rifle/shotgun/pistol ammunition, and on the ground are duct tape and wiper blades (for vehicle repairs). In focus with a red highlight is the water sellable, with the shopkeeper speech bubble stating "The best I'll do is $4/L for water."
November 20, 2025 at 10:56 PM
coastwide.systems
Getting closer to "done" for Heat Retreat's shop rework, starting to dial in the UX & replacing debug text with proper localized stuff. Did the fuel/water assets yesterday but not happy with them, going to work at a few other assets then circle back to those two

#indiegamedev #pixelart #bevy
A screenshot of Heat Retreat's new shopping interface. In the foreground is the trade dialog UI box showing an example water purchase. The box is titled "Water $4/L", and contains the text "You currently have: 10.0 L", "How much do you want to trade?", a slider for selecting quantity, and below that is text showing the current selected quantity and sub-total: "3L | $12.00". At the bottom of the box are "Cancel" and "Buy" buttons for mouse/touch interactions. The background shows the red pickup truck vehicle option on the left, a shop with a red brick wall, dark wood table and slightly reclined shopkeeper wearing drab brown clothes and a blue cap. Arrayed in the truck bed are (mostly yellow/black placeholder) assets with white outlines representing the various items that can be sold & buyable shop goods across the shop space. The style is pixel art.
November 18, 2025 at 6:21 PM
coastwide.systems
Couple more WIP shots of Heat Retreat's shopping UI rework for #screenshotsaturday (it's still Saturday for me 😆).

Still got more to do on it but pretty happy with how it's coming along - think it's safe to start working on replacing the placeholder textures

#gamedev #indiedev #pixelart #bevy
A red pickup truck rear view showing the bed & shopping items laid out on the left, and the right side is occupied by the shop with a table, wall and shopkeeper and goods arrayed about. A text bubble shows the tire in focus with the text "Tire $180 DELETE ME" (debug stuff). A red pickup truck rear view showing the bed & shopping items laid out on the left, and the right side is occupied by the shop with a table, wall and shopkeeper and goods arrayed about. A text bubble shows fresh food in focus with the text "Fresh Food $12 DELETE ME" (debug stuff). A dialog box shows the trade UI with the text: "Fresh Food $12 / You currently have: 17.0kg / How much do you want to trade?", below that is a slider to select an amount to trade with 5kg selected, and in a row on the bottom are the buttons "Cancel" and "Buy"
November 16, 2025 at 1:58 AM
coastwide.systems
Here's a look at an old variant of the shopping UI, don't have a good screenshot of it but this is pretty close to what it used to look like (old shopping has been crashing to desktop so can't get a good screenshot without rolling the code back *really* far)
November 12, 2025 at 11:20 PM
coastwide.systems
Alright, think this is far enough along to show a little more publicly: the new (still WIP) shopping UI for Heat Retreat (complete rework of the old system). Big improvement in my opinion, just don't mind the horrible yellow/black placeholder textures 😆

#gamedev #indiedev #bevy #pixelart
A screenshot of the new work-in-progress shopping interface for Heat Retreat. On the left is a rear view of the pickup truck vehicle type with goods to sell arrayed in the truck bed. On the right half is the shop with goods to purchase arrayed around the shop environment. The shop itself is a simple pixel representation of a table, shopkeeper & brick wall background. In the center of the window is a dialog popup showing the trade interaction: "Fresh Food $12", "You currently have: 10.0 kg", "How much do you want to trade?" and a slider bar to select the quantity, with "cancel" and "buy" buttons underneath. Most item textures are using a placeholder yellow/black square, but fresh and canned food have proper textures closer to final art in place.
November 12, 2025 at 11:18 PM
coastwide.systems
After getting the scroll bar working, I've now got button (keyboard only at the moment) menu nav working! The code is horrific, but works 😅

One step closer to getting full gamepad (and Steam Deck) support working properly 🎉

#indiegamedev #bevy
October 15, 2025 at 6:10 PM
coastwide.systems
Finally got scrolling working! That was... painful. But it's one necessary step closer to getting button (ie, gamepad) menu navigation working properly. Here we have mouse scroll wheel, click & drag, click on the track plus drag, and WASD to navigate!

#indiegamedev #bevy
October 14, 2025 at 8:54 PM
coastwide.systems
Been stuck on getting menu navigation working for Heat Retreat but took a break to chip away at my art backlog - so got something new to show for #screenshotsaturday

And this particular state also has working menu navigation so WASD keys will let you cycle tabs/buttons!

#indiegamedev #bevy
October 11, 2025 at 4:23 PM
coastwide.systems
It's a thing of beauty when automation works; Steam just released a new version of the Linux SDK runtime & my auto updater successfully detected the release, updated & rebuilt my Rust compiler images then pushed them out to my repository! 100% hands off 🥳

quay.io/repository/c...
A screenshot showing the Coast Wide Systems quay.io repo with all the images fully updated by the automated updater.
September 30, 2025 at 10:18 PM