Frame of Mind developer ended up coding the game on Steam Deck for a year

Here's a fun one for you. What do you do when you're a game developer and your laptop dies? Use your Steam Deck to continue developing of course.

While the Steam Deck is a great device for gaming, it's also a full Linux-powered PC too, with a complete desktop mode powered by KDE Plasma. This means it can be used for both work and play, and it's always fun to see how people are using it.

In the case of the upcoming game Frame of Mind - A game of thoughts. (Steam), the developer ended up actually doing a years worth of work on the game using the Steam Deck. As they said in an announcement post on Steam:

Last Spring, I was very excited as I finally got my SteamDeck in the mail. The big day came aaaand ... my Laptop died.

This is how the Steam Deck unironically became my main mobile workstation for about a year, and while I admittedly would not go back to it, it was a lot more usable than you might suspect.

This is why i am also proud to announce: My Game will have FULL Steam Deck Support.

As of now, without much optimization, the game is already running well above the 40FPS target for running games smoothly at the lower display refresh rate and I am pretty sure I will be able to hit the 60FPS mark, hopefully even without any 3D render scaling. But as this is a cozy walking sim, you will likely not notice small stutters anyway.

The game furthermore has full controller support and plays a lot better on the Steam Deck, as especially the touch screen will get a lot of utilization.

Font rendering is being considered, as my game has a lot of text and I put a lot of emphasis on accessibility. This is an area that right now needs more development.

I will also look into using the joypads and the accelerator for input, but do not want to promise anything right now.

I'm not surprised they don't wish to go back to using the Steam Deck like this though, unless you have a proper dock setup or something like the Elecrow CrowView Note, the small screen space isn't great for work. But it just shows how versatile the system is.

The game is made with the free and open source Godot Engine, which has some of the best Linux support available of any game engine.