Dev Log — Slower Roads Ahead, But Still on the Path
Hey everyone,
Two things I want to talk about today: the pace of updates going forward, and why "new maps" — which I said was next — got quietly pushed down the list.
Updates will come slower from here
I don't have as many hours a week to put into the game as I used to. That's just the reality of my life right now, and I'd rather tell you that straight than have patches go quiet and let you wonder what happened. The game isn't stalled — it's just going to move at a slower, more sustainable pace than before.
Why maps got pushed back
I said maps were next. They're not — not yet — and here's why.
The more I planned it out, the more "new maps" turned out to be tangled up in a much bigger problem: the build-system itself. Right now the loop is basically: take a region → cover every slot with a building → take the next region → repeat. It works, but it's not particularly fun, and it doesn't hold up well as a foundation for new maps.
Part of the issue is that the current map wasn't actually designed around this loop — it kind of grew into it. That's why some starting regions feel odd, and why you can end up getting shot at from multiple enemy regions at once right out of the gate. Building more maps on that same foundation would just multiply the problem, not fix it.
So I've been spending my time designing instead of building — giving regions unique properties, thinking about how paths and access should actually be structured, and rethinking what makes taking territory feel meaningful instead of routine.
How I'm deciding what to actually build
I've got a lot of good ideas right now — that's not the problem. The problem is telling apart the ideas that are worth it from the ones that are just expensive daydreams. So I've been sorting everything with a simple rule:
Value of the idea ÷ time to build it.
A brilliant idea that takes 1000 hours might score lower than a decent idea that takes 20. With limited hours per week, that ratio matters more than how exciting an idea sounds on its own. It also means some genuinely good ideas are on hold simply because they only make sense *after* the new build-system or new maps exist — building them now would mean redoing them later.
What I'm actually working on right now
The current focus is the economy of the game and how enemies feel.
Right now, one of the most efficient strategies is to wake up as many enemy bases as you can handle, because more enemies simply means more income. That's backwards. A new enemy base should feel like a threat — something you're wary of taking on, to avoid losing control of a region. Instead, losing a region barely stings: rebuilding it costs a rounding error of your stored gold, so the worst case is a shrug and "guess I'll rebuild." I want that moment to actually hurt.
So I'm removing the gold reward for killing enemies (XP stays — you'll still grow from every fight). Money will instead come mainly from the buildings you build and hold, which means every enemy base you wake up is a real risk to your income, not a free bonus to it.
Enemies will also stop mindlessly beelining for your castle and ignoring everything else. They'll go after your remote bases too, and I'm also adding map events to threaten them further — so those guards just sitting in your remote outposts will finally earn their keep.
To give that gold somewhere to go, I'm adding a proper consumable shop — a place to spend money on one-off boosts and upgrades, instead of it just piling up.
One more thing
This game is over three years in the making now, and honestly, some days that weighs on me more than others. I set the bar high for this project, and getting to 1.0 — let alone anything beyond it — is still further out than I'd like. That's just true, and I'd rather say it than not.
What hasn't changed is the plan: I'm not stopping. Patches will just be further apart than they used to be, because that's what I can fit into my life right now. I'd rather ship something I'm proud of at a pace I can actually sustain than burn out chasing a schedule I can't keep.
But every patch is still one step closer to the game I set out to make, and I'm not giving that up.
As always, thanks for sticking around.
— Kim