PRIDE IS THE FALL Devlog 000: The First 235 Days

I’ve been building a game. Time to show my work. All 235 days of it.

It’s my world. I’ve had this dream since I was four years old, and I’m finally building it.

No game-dev background here. I’m a lifetime gamer: Command & Conquer since 1997. When I started PRIDE I had zero experience in C++ or game engines.

It’s called PRIDE IS THE FALL. A top-down sandbox in Unreal Engine 5 where the world is the main character. You? You’re not special. The pitch I wrote before a single line of code:

Imagine a medieval sandbox where the world doesn’t give a damn about you. Eight AI factions fight for territory while you start as a nobody with nothing. There are no quests. No quest markers. No main story.

That was the pitch in February. The game has kept changing since.

The name is the thesis. In the original design every faction fell because of pride, and you would build, recruit, conquer, and slowly become the thing that wrecked the world before you. Pride is the fall. That’s still the whole damn point.

A town seen from above on a brown checkered ground, with plain houses, a broken stone pillar and many tiny people walking between the buildings. — Sep 20. A town going about its day around a broken pillar. Nobody here is waiting on the player.

Sound like Kenshi? Good. Kenshi is why this exists, and yes, the squad finally got it running in co-op.

Dark low-poly trees running toward snowy hills under a heavy cloudy sky, with no one in sight. — Sep 5. The Ironweld skyline: trees, snow and nobody in sight. This is a world that does not wait for you.

The five rules, as of October 2026

Right now every feature has to serve one of these or it gets cut:

The world doesn’t wait. Factions move whether you’re logged in or not.
No scripted story. A drought causes a famine causes a war. Nobody wrote that.
Players are factions. The sim treats you exactly like the kingdom next door.
Power is built. Skills level up with use, but real power is what you build around you: walls, supply lines, and the people who follow you.
Death sticks. No respawn. Your successor picks up the banner.

And one I wrote down in July that sat right next to them:

“there are no heros or named vs unnamed characters, all characters can become legendary, all can become heros, all can become villians, thats the purpose of this game, to be whoever you want, there are no special people, only some with higher skills and more influence at any particular time, understand?”

A village seen from above, with grey-roofed houses on both sides of a dirt road, small figures between them and a label reading House, Vaelmyst. — Sep 13. Vaelmyst, the capital, from above, houses along one road and people moving between them. Power here gets built one house at a time.

The world, as of October 2026

PRIDE IS THE FALL is set in Sinthora, a 50 by 50 kilometer continent ringed by a sea nobody sails. Right now eight regions and eight peoples are being built, and all of it is still changing. The people are being remade this month, so anything you read about them in the chapters below is a snapshot of its moment, not a promise.

Rolling snowfields leading up to white peaks, with a bright blue lake edged by a few dark pines under a grey sky. — Oct 11. Up in the Ironweld, the mountain country: snowfields, white peaks, and a cold blue lake.

A town of pale block buildings seen from above on light sand beside a darker plain, with bare trees around it and tiny figures gathered at its edge. — Aug 25. The largest settlement on the map at that point, a block town on the sand.

Start with the chapters below to see how it got here.

How I build it

I make the calls: the world, the rules, the look, what goes in, and what gets cut. AI tools are my build crew. They help me write the code and build the art, under my direction. I look at everything with my own eyes before it’s approved, and when a picture and a number disagree, the picture wins.

In August I started an archive of the best captures, for one reason. They’re the ones “worthy of revising 20 years from now when our game is a smash global hit.” That’s who these devlogs are for, too. Me in twenty years, and anyone who wants to see how it was really made, failures and all.

Season 0, chapter by chapter

First commit: February 4, 2026, 2:43 AM. Latest: September 27, 3:11 AM. In between, 5,206 commits on 152 different days. Every chapter goes deep on its stretch: what got built, why, what broke, and what I learned.

A tilted camera over bare, pale hills, the horizon running corner to corner across a blue sky with white clouds. — Feb 16, 11:46 AM. The first world had existed for less than an hour. The camera was not level.

001: code-complete four days in (it was not). February. The first commit, 23 systems in one morning, a “code-complete” stamp that lasted 23 minutes, and a world that kept finding new ways to starve itself.

002: they got bodies, then they got souls. March. Eight races learn to walk, 31 towns spawn underwater, every person gets a soul, and on the last day 99% of those souls turn out to be dead.

003: the quiet stretch. April to June. Two packed weeks, 55 days of silence, then three days that tore the world down and rebuilt it.

004: a real build, and a cast that walks. July. The game runs outside the editor for the first time, gets sound, gets its rules about death and kings and special people, and the dead start coming back to life.

Dark creature silhouettes hanging in the air above a dense low-poly forest, each inside an outlined box. — Aug 1, 2:10 AM. The first beasts had been in the engine for 25 minutes. Not all of them found the ground.

005: beasts, battles, and a real food web. August. 29 beasts, battles where people finally die, the Old Law, and the week I almost walked away.

006: take all that away. September 1 to 21. The ink-wash comes off, the base look goes on, the world turns ancient Greek, and the game moves to Unreal 5.8.

007: did we make the assets yet? September 22 to 27. One hard question, an honest count, and the first frames of a whole new world.

Every chapter, in order, lives on The Forge.

The side stories from each month run as their own series, From the Forge archive.