The Development

Early Prototype (2023-2024)

This was the first basic prototype built in 2023. It contained the very basics and used ripped online programmer art from a civilization 2 mod pack. Getting the basics working piqued Gunther’s interest and once he started working on the art: Things started to get real.

I started filling out the UI with placeholders to get a feel of what we needed to make later while Gunther concentrated on terrain. Since we wanted both the look and feel of older 4X games we made some critical decisions here. Finalizing decisions like the game using a square grid instead of the modern hexagonal grids in most games today. And keeping an isometric 2.5D look to our terrain and eventually unit models.

We spent a lot of time making the map look good. Adding forest density and variation to make more natural looking forests. Later we added the same variations to mountain peaks.

We just kept adding and it just kept working. Additions of tile improvements such as farms, roads, hunting camps and fishing boats. As well as trade goods starting to appear on the map. Standard modern 4X features like cultural borders are also now present.

The High Definition Rework (2024-2025)

While this was starting to look like our vision; We had two major visual problems. First, we found that the pixelation and colors caused us eye strain after extended periods of time; and secondly our 3D unit models didn’t look like they belonged in our pixelated world. We tried a lot of shader tricks to make this work. But in the end; it didn’t even matter.

We regrettably concluded that the map needed a resolution upgrade; Unfortunately for Gunther; he had to start over and redraw all our tiles.🙁

So Gunther thanklessly went back to the drawing board and redrew our entire world map. But it paid off. The unit model/terrain mismatch faded away and it’s starting to look and feel more like the game we remembered from our childhood.

Gunther tore through the map assets, blending his painterly style in with higher resolutions and less saturated colors helped match the visual style of the 3D assets. The changes significantly reduced our eye strain and dramatically increased the visual clarity. Notice the size difference on the river tiles; which in this screenshot have not yet been updated to the new HD tileset.

Map generation of trade good tiles, mountain ranges, and frozen map edges. We also made sure our rivers were wide enough to be navigable by naval units. Added road improvements and bridges for crossing rivers and continued iterating on the UI and UX.

It’s at this time that I get bogged with fixing the game’s underlying performance issues and tech debt that we’ve accumulated since building the initial prototype in 2023. Meanwhile Gunther turns his attention to Leaders.

It was hard to choose only a handful of leaders to represent for the demo; Eventually we settled on 13 “must haves”. Gunther is currently revisiting our leader list with some redraws of existing portraits we’ve grown to not like and new leaders for civs we haven’t included yet.

We started going hard on the battle system as well. Building a battle arena for the units to combat in, fixing the animation issues and adding terrain background and defensive bonuses. We also added a battle simulator to test unit compositions, battle abilities, and combat stat balancing between them.

One of our favorite features from CtP was visible trade routes. We wanted our version to expand this into a “factorio-lite” experience where base-map resources like Tin and Copper are combined to make Bronze to unlock more powerful Bronze-based units.

Here we see trade resources travelling across caravan routes to destination cities. One of them is a manufactured good (Bronze) that unlocks more powerful units.

Hiking Up The Multiplayer Mountain (2025-Early 2026)

Our game was coming together but it had a critical design flaw. Gunther and I always played CtP together. Sometimes we’d team up; but most of the time we’d have a fun little cold war with each other. The self-imposed problem for us was that without multiplayer; We didn’t want to actually playtest the game. We knew there were critical balancing, UX issues, and game flow problems that were lurking just under the surface if you tried to actually play this version of the game. Something had to change; We wanted multiplayer from day one, so it was time to make it work.

Here’s a screenshot of our first connection to a local network lobby. I was pretty excited about this but the real hard part was yet to come. Handling and fixing multiplayer desyncs is a whole post on its own but in short; we solved this by building a local multiplayer testing harness that simulates human button clicks. As we playtest, any desync we find is first used to improve the harness so it will catch it; then used to verify it’s fixed.

The Last 10%… (Early 2026 - Present)

Is 90% of the work! Furious network playtesting began. Myself, Gunther and a few close friends who live in our discord and who watched this project from day 1 started digging into it. We logged and recorded 100s of issues. From little annoyances like missing a keyboard shortcut or needing to click X many times to do Y to massive game breaking problems like end game performance, very exploitable AI behavior, to straight up missing features you’d expect to have.

Things like a scoreboard:

Or a map editor with a prebuilt “Earth” map and an option to use historical starting locations (oh right; and a globe view to help navigate the map at high zoom levels).

Here you see a mid-game empire with its “Show All Routes” option enabled. It’s a bit overwhelming to see them all at once but very satisfying to look at! The UI keeps adapting and we’re never quite happy with it. At this point the UI is very hodge podge and needs a fair amount of interaction to be intuitive, easy to understand and discover options, and not fight with how the player wants to play the game.

One by one we’ve addressed each of these issues and the nature of our internal playtests changed. Instead of having to quit early due to a network desync or talking about bugs/problems we play for 3+ hours until our bodies give out and we need to sleep.

Private Playtest (Today)

This project has been 4+ years in the making and is a passion project near and dear to both myself and Gunther. We set out to make a game that we’d rather play instead of Civilization 4, and at least for us; we’re already there. But we are heavily biased so we need your help.

It’s finally ready for the eyes of strangers to give us some feedback before we launch our demo. We’re aiming to have a public demo available in the February 2027 Next Fest on Steam. With a full 1.0 release targeting December 2027. We’re looking for veteran 4X gamers as our primary audience but we’re also very interested in hearing from players new to the genre about how well our basic gameplay tutorial is working for them.

If you’re interested in joining our private playtest you can sign up here. If you like what you see and want to help us out, please wishlist our game!