Dev Log #1 - I deleted my game to build a planet

Only a few weeks ago I was visiting family up in Boston. None of us are actually from there, but my mom lives not too far away now, and my sister happened to have a business trip in the city. It was a pretty spontaneous thing. We all just decided to meet up for a little holiday. Needless to say, I was excited. Boston had always been one of those cities I'd wanted to visit but never gotten around to, until now.

It wasn't the Italian food that drew me there, even though it was really good. I had a chicken parm sandwich in the North End that I will genuinely never forget. It wasn't the Red Sox or Fenway either. It was the Freedom Trail. Boston is one of the oldest cities in the original thirteen colonies, and I've always been a huge history buff. I spend a lot of my free time reading about history, and I'm not picky about the era. Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the modern age that's still being written while we live in it, I'm into all of it.

I'll be honest, I'm no expert. I haven't read the big, serious books cover to cover. But I've put in more than my fair share of time sitting on the toilet reading Wikipedia articles about God knows what. What I can tell you is that those articles are almost always about history or geopolitics. I know Wikipedia isn't exactly a peer reviewed source, but it reads really well on a 6.3 inch phone screen. Most of how I take in history these days is digital anyway. YouTube is the main diet. Kings and Generals, Invicta, Warfronts, channels like that, and then the Wikipedia rabbit holes fill in the gaps. The point is, I love this stuff.

So why open a game devlog with a family trip to Boston? Because that's where a big chunk of Epoch actually came together. While everyone was hanging out back at the Airbnb, I'd quietly have my laptop open in the corner, chipping away at the code. And when we were out, walking the Freedom Trail or just wandering around the city, I was sometimes off in my own head, daydreaming about this thing. There's something about walking through a city that old, standing on the same streets where one of the original thirteen colonies got its start, that made a game about the entire arc of a civilization suddenly feel like something I really needed to go and build.

I'd already been kicking the idea around for a while before the trip. OpenFront.io had popped up in my YouTube feed out of nowhere, and I remember just thinking, huh, that's cool. People fighting over real world locations with these amoeba like borders that swell and retreat as territory changes hands. I found it genuinely fascinating. So fascinating that it's pretty much where the seed for Epoch came from.

At first the plan was simple. A 2D top down game like OpenFront, but with more depth, and spanning the entire planet instead of one region. I had a working prototype up and running in about a week and a half. City founding, territory expansion, border wars, the constant push and pull of two evenly matched sides grinding over the same ground. The game was there. It ran. But something about it didn't feel right.

I'd look at it and think, yeah, I'd play this for maybe ten minutes and then get bored. I couldn't picture how it would actually be fun as just a top down 2D map, without basically being OpenFront.io remade in Unity. And then it hit me. I have a full time job. I'm not depending on this game to ship in a few months, or even a few years. This is a passion project. A side hobby. I have the freedom to build the game I actually think is cool. The one where, if I saw it drop on Steam today, I'd buy it without thinking twice.

That's when I sat down and started outlining everything I loved about strategy games. I knew right away it had to be a 4X. I love a good RTS and always will, but 4X scratches a very specific itch. That ambitious warlord one, the kind that just can't be fulfilled in the 21st century. At least, not yet. ;P

So I started making the list. I love the way games like Civilization and Humankind let you carry a single people all the way through history, watching them grow from a handful of settlers into something that reshapes the whole map. I love the sheer depth of the Paradox and Stellaris side of things, where systems stack on top of systems until the empire stops feeling like a game board and starts feeling like a living thing that can actually surprise you. I love the raw territorial tension of Risk and OpenFront, where a border is a living front line instead of a static color. And under all of it, I love the idea of a world that feels real. A place with its own geography, its own weather, its own history, one that was alive long before you ever showed up to conquer it.

I wrote all of that down. And somewhere in that list was the game I actually wanted to make.

And then I deleted the 2D prototype I made.

Not the ideas. Those are coming back. But the game itself, the 2D top down one I mentioned above? Yea, I deleted it. I decided I was going to start over. This devlog is about why, because that decision is the reason Epoch looks the way it does today.

What Epoch Is

What I want Epoch to be is a 4X strategy game about the whole span of a civilization. You advance from the Bronze Age all the way up through the modern world. Epoch owes its roots to a bunch of games I love. The board game Risk, and the era progression of Civ, Humankind, and Stellaris. Combat and advancement like Hearts of Iron. Really, if you've ever played a Paradox game, you're going to see a lot of their fingerprints in here. Great studio. Amazing games, in my opinion. And then there's some Total War influence stirred in there too. I hope you catch these as you follow along with the dev blog. Anyways, you found cities, you grow, you press against the people next to you, and you carry a society forward through the ages while the world tries to knock it down.

That last part is the key. While the world tries to knock it down. That's the whole thing right there. I didn't want a map. I wanted a world. A world with real geography, real climate, weather that actually comes from somewhere, rivers that genuinely play a role, and disasters that aren't just a dice roll on a menu. A place that's already alive before a single city ever exists on it.

Aaaand that ambition is exactly what killed my first version.

The week I had a game

The first prototype lived on a flat, colored tilemap. Honestly, that was the sensible place to start, and it worked. I got the core loop up and running fast. Territory that spreads across tiles like an amoeba, spheres of influence, trade lanes hugging the coast, and front line combat that actually flows instead of waiting around for turns. I even got era progression in there, with a collapse event just to prove the whole timeline could bend and break.

It was a real game. It just happened to be sitting on top of a world that was completely fake.

Why "fake world" wasn't good enough

Here's what I couldn't shake. If the whole pitch is a living world 4X, meaning the world itself is basically a character in the story, then it can't just be a lookup table of tile colors. A desert should be dry because the wind and the mountains made it that way. A river should matter because an army can't cross it but cargo can float right down it. A coastline should be worth fighting over because of what the sea actually does there.

So the world had to be real first, and then the game had to grow out of it. It was a call that still feels a little reckless if I'm honest, but it also feels right. So I stopped building the game, and I went and built the planet instead.

What "build the planet" turned into

So I pulled in real Earth data. Elevation, coastlines, water, all of it, and stitched a whole planet together. Then I started making it actually behave like one.

• Climate and terrain driven by real data instead of biomes I hand painted, so wherever it's green, arid, or frozen, that all comes from actual latitude and geography.
• Winds that follow the real circulation of the atmosphere. I later blended in real world wind data so the jet stream meanders the way it actually does.
• Weather. Volumetric clouds that drift along with those winds, and rain that falls where the world says it should.
• Disasters that come out of the sim instead of a menu. Volcanoes, including the kind of supervolcano whose ash wraps the whole planet and dims it for years. Earthquakes. Tsunami that roll out from wherever the seabed just moved.

And then there were the rivers. If you ever want to feel truly humbled as a developer, go try to make a river look and behave right. There's a whole stretch of my git history where I turned rivers into water, then into paint, then into a carved channel, and then finally into a ribbon that traces the actual drainage the sim flows through. Over and over, across a single weekend. Not sure if I am even still particularly pleased with how they look. To be determined what happens with rivers.

The unglamorous part I'm proudest of

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped and spent two full days on something with absolutely nothing to show for it. I made the simulation deterministic. Same starting seed, same world, every single time, no matter how fast or slow the game happens to be running.

It's completely invisible. There's no cool screenshot for it. But it's the thing that separates a toy from something you can actually build a real game on top of. Reproducible bugs, AI that plays fair, a world I can trust to behave itself. While I was in there, I also ripped out about 1,600 lines of dead code left over from the first prototype. Sometimes you just have to clean the workshop before the real work starts.

Where things are now

So the game has quietly started back up again. This time on top of a world that's actually alive. Cities can be founded on the real planet, claim their sphere of influence, and grow. And I finally built the thing I'd wanted since the very beginning. You can be sitting there looking at the whole planet, pick a spot, and dive straight down through the clouds into a continent scale view of the ground where the actual game gets played.

What I'm not telling you yet

There's one layer of Epoch I'm deliberately keeping in my pocket for now. It's the part about who lives in your empire, and what it really means to hold a people instead of just their land. It's honestly the piece I'm most excited about, and it's the whole reason I think Epoch can be more than just another map you paint. But it deserves its own devlog, once it's real enough to actually show instead of just talk about.

So that's the plan from here. Build the civilization on top of the living world, and start bringing back everything that first prototype proved could work. Only this time, there's a real planet underneath it that earns its place in the story.

More soon.

— Dylan