Once the UI skeleton was there and the game had its real content sitting inside actual widgets, the next obvious question was: alright then, what can the player do?
That is where developments, policies and actions properly entered the picture.Because cities - or nodes, as they’re internally called - have developments which the player can unlock and build up. Those developments unlock actions. A printing press allows the player to publish pamphlets. A public opera house might make the masses happy, but the elites won’t like rubbing their fancy silks against a commoner’s rough hide coat - as for the clergy, well, they never condoned that buffoonery from the start.So we started implementing developments first, then policies, then actions, along with all the usual lovely baggage: requirements, costs, outputs, modifiers, limits, effects, edge cases, and the eternal question of whether a system is genuinely interesting, or whether it only looks that way because it’s, well… yours.Naturally, this also meant another round of revisions. Because the moment these systems became clickable, every stubbornly lingering vague design assumption became a practical problem. Costs had to make sense, effects had to be traceable, dependencies had to behave, and the whole thing had to be readable enough that the player could tell what was going on. Of course, because we want the player to be comfortable, we just added detailed tooltips for every single thing you hover on… Ok, we’ll be honest: we did it so we can more easily spot bugs.This was also the point where the game loop began to show itself clearly enough that it started feeling like an actual strategy game.And, obviously, the moment that happened, everything became both more interesting and more difficult, because it quickly became obvious just how much balancing this game was going to need, especially since this particular design relies to a great extent merely on good ‘ol numbers.(April 2026)