I hit play on March 1 and nobody moved. Ten thousand people were supposed to live in the world, and they stood there like furniture. February had given me capsules. March gave them bodies, then something to lose.
This was a huge month. 659 commits, something on 29 of 31 days, and eleven version bumps, from v0.02 Pre-Alpha to v0.12 Living World Alpha. Seven of those landed in the last five days alone. By the end, PRIDE IS THE FALL had a world, a cast that could walk, and the system the whole game is named after. It also had a month’s worth of bugs that only showed up because so much was finally connected.
This is the map of the month: what got built, what went wrong, and what I decided along the way.
A bad first night, and a benchmark
The month started at 2:52 in the morning, and I was already comparing the game to the one I want to measure it against. I typed “dude kenshi had a whole world nav mesh, why cant we?” A minute later I wrote the line under it: “Kenshi is our benchmark and we feel so far away from it makes me worried and feel like giving up”
Kenshi is the game where every person in the world is a real person with a real routine. That is what I was building toward, and on March 1 I could see exactly how far away it was. I didn’t stop. That evening I was back with a list of problems: towns floating in the air, people spawning in from the heavens, factions with no patrols or farmers.
What got built
A world that lived on its own
On Mar 4 the tavern became the Hearthhouse. In March the default way to hang out there became the Telling: people sat around the hearth fire and told stories, and those stories spread rumors and lifted moods. Drinking stayed in the game, as a choice, not the whole social life.
On Mar 5 the world started living. Guards walked to real posts. Workers worked. Caravans actually traveled their routes. Battles showed up when your camera got close and faded back into the simulation when you left. Travelers wandered the roads: refugees, pilgrims, traders. And 10,000 people got seeded across the world, a little over half in towns, the rest split between soldiers, travelers, the wilderness and wildlife.
Real ground
Mar 5 and 6 the land got real drama. The height range doubled. The tallest peak, the Anvil Throne, went from 717 meters to 1,500. Six rivers got carved. Then 56 named landmarks went in, each one modeled on a real wonder of the world: a canyon like the Grand Canyon, a caldera like Crater Lake, salt flats like Uyuni, a waterfall like Angel Falls. The whole land got painted in an ink-wash look, and 209,175 things got scattered across eight regions: grass, trees, rocks, ruins, and a field of 561 broken shields.
Systems everywhere
Mar 9 and 10 were a flood. Mar 10 alone was 123 commits, the busiest day of the month. Some of what went in:
- Earned nicknames. 27 titles a person could earn from what they’d actually done.
- Last words, inheritance and jealousy.
- A meteor event.
- Battlefield graves that stayed where the fighting happened.
- Factions that remember. Betrayals carried across years. A leader’s death started a fight over who was next. Empires that grew too big started to crack. Proxy wars, arms dealing, and debt that forced a faction to sell land.
- The camera. Follow-cam, bookmarks, slow motion.
Bodies
On Mar 12 I wrote the problem down plainly: “truely i dont have any real experience in blender so it will be difficutl for me to build everything in a reasonable timeline”. I asked for a plan, and the plan worked. By Mar 13 all eight races had bodies: Simthyn, Vyranthi, Keltrumavem, Dracotora, Psilobin, Borgnoral, Dravessi and Brakkoth. Each had its own sliders in March: crystals, beaks and plumage, scales and crests, caps and spores, tusks, fins and gills, armor plates. I even asked for one slider that went past good taste: “can you also make one slider that lets it be weird and deformed? people love that shit”
Getting them to move took the rest of the month. On Mar 18 they finally walked. By Mar 21 bodies, skins and animation were all working together. On Mar 22 we brought in 515 animations from two motion libraries, and after 110 duplicate file names were made unique, that came to 625. Fighting styles from katana to boxing, farming, sleeping, sneaking, drinking, and seven ways to die.
Souls
Then the big one. On Mar 22 the plan for the soul system got written and built the same day.
As of March 22, every person in the world carried four things: a Fear, a Want, a Belonging, and a breaking point. That was the whole design. Four numbers and four types per person, small enough to run on ten thousand people at once. The idea behind it: people in PRIDE were behaving, not living. They needed something to reach for.
When the pressure on a soul passed its breaking point, it broke, and how it broke depended on who they were. With strong belonging they sacrificed or revolted. With weak belonging they ran, hid, or deserted. Driven by fear, they fled. Driven by want, they organized or grabbed what they wanted.
By Mar 27 people were acting from their souls. Crime came out of want. Religion fed belonging. Fear spread to people standing nearby. And recruiting changed that month: people decided for themselves whether they wanted to join you. That night I put the whole point of the system into one question: “why arent pawns communicating with each other? i feel like that communication, rumors, passing of information, assigning tasks, asking for help etc all of that will lead to life”
On Mar 30 the title of the game became a mechanic. When a faction got powerful enough, its members got complacent. When it started losing, that complacency, the fear of losing it all, and belonging falling apart hit at the same time, and it cascaded. The fall from pride wasn’t scripted anywhere. It just happened. Pride is the fall, made into a mechanic.
Calls I made
March is where a lot of my rules got set. Here is how they read then, and some have changed since:
- Wars would never be scripted. All three scripted war declarations came out. Two factions could start out hating each other, but a war only happened if it grew out of what was going on between them.
- Buildings didn’t make anything by themselves. I caught a plan that assumed a farm just produces food. A farm needed a farmer who actually walked out and harvested. A temple needed a priest. Every person was a real worker in a real world.
- Most fights ended in a knockout, not a death. Kenshi style. People woke up, healed, and got better by fighting. The chance of being executed after a fight dropped from as high as 75% to between 5 and 20%. But when someone wanted to slow down bleeding too, I said no. Bleeding had to stay dangerous. The tension was whether your friends bandaged you in time.
- Heroes were rare. At one point the game made 301 heroes in two days. The bar went from 3 kills to 15.
- Empires would fall slowly. On Mar 28 I told the AI tools what I wanted from the long game: “established empires shoundt fall quietly and it should take a long long time problly”. Big powers were supposed to shrink and grow over years, not vanish in a week of testing.
- People could refuse you. A merciful pawn would refuse an order to execute someone. Someone who wouldn’t enslave captives wouldn’t do it. Your best fighter might be the one who said no.
- The cats. This one’s all me. The Wandering Paws were a faction of cats, and only cats. They were neutral healers who showed up after battles and patched up the fallen, whoever they fought for. They never recruited and never conquered. In March, seven of the eight races loved them and the Dracotora stayed neutral. You could attack them, but it was a stupid idea.
What went wrong
31 towns underwater
The first fix for a flat, boring map was too good. On Mar 6 I wrote: “TOO much of the world is underwater, like the starting spot is drowning, theres no boats lol”. The next day we found it was worse than that. On Mar 7, 31 of the 55 settlements were spawning underwater, including two capitals and three whole factions. Three regions had their base height set below sea level, and the land also sloped down to the south, so more than half the settlements sat under the sea. The camera spawned underwater too. On top of that, 34 settlements had been placed for a rectangular map, and the continent was an oval, so they landed on the ocean floor. Fixed with a sea-level check, a solid platform under every town, and moving those 34 back onto land.
The invisible people
Mar 15 was a whole day, 29 commits, of people with real 3D bodies being invisible while the old placeholder people showed up fine. Theory after theory. Their collision was too wide because of their outstretched arms and wings, so they shoved each other off screen. A setting turned them off and never turned them back on. The ink-wash material rendered them see-through. By the end of the day they were visible, and frozen in a T-pose.
On Mar 17 I put the standard in writing: “they should never be in a t-pose, they should always be doing something even if thats laying, sitting, idle widdling, stretching, fighting”. The real story took until Mar 21 to find. First, the 3D program’s name for the skeleton came through as a fake extra bone, and every limb attached to it collapsed into nothing. Then the final answer: the animations were made in centimeters and the bodies were built in meters. A 100x mismatch.
Animation comedy
Once people could move, they moved wrong:
- They finished walking and kept walking.
- Civilians walked like they were carrying a sword and shield. Then everyone walked with their arms up.
- The seizure. People flipped between standing and wandering every single tick, because those two states skipped the rule that you have to commit to something for a few seconds.
- The character preview took about 30 commits to light. Black silhouettes. Shadows only. Lights cranked up to absurd levels, then blown out. One commit is literally titled “Blast preview lighting bright.”
It is why I made the rule that ended the week. On Mar 21 I wrote “there is never a time to use bandaids instead of the best practice”. Every workaround had created the next problem.
Gridlock
Mar 28, the logs filled up with people stuck and unable to move. 1,200 people near the towns, all blocking each other. Nobody could get past anybody. The fix was letting people walk through each other, the way Kenshi, Mount & Blade and RimWorld do it. With hundreds of characters on a top-down screen, bodies blocking bodies just doesn’t work.
Souls breaking everywhere
Also Mar 28: an 8-hour test produced a 4-million-line log, and in it were 2.5 million soul breaks over 80 game days. Pressure could only ever go up, never down, so everyone was in permanent crisis. A hard review found seven more critical problems. Calming down was 187 times too slow. The cooldown after a break was so long it took 31 real hours. One danger multiplier was applied twice.
99% dead souls
And then the last day of the month. The function that creates most of the world’s people, more than 13,800 of them, never called the one function that gives them a soul. So 99% of the people in PRIDE had empty souls. No fear, no want. The system the whole game was built on was doing nothing for almost everyone. One seeding bug. Brutal luck, except it wasn’t luck at all.
Fixing it set off a chain:
- Wildlife started having mental breaks. Deer and wolves were in the soul system. Animals lost their souls that day.
- Everyone got complacent on day one, because complacency counted the world’s 300 years of lore as peace time.
- A few people broke every 2 seconds, forever.
- Every intelligence report got flagged as fake, because any report that didn’t match another counted as a contradiction.
- Farms with no farmer were producing at full strength. After the fix they got only what grows wild.
Formations that were never switched on
Also Mar 31: I looked at the world and there were no formations. No coordinated movement at all. The formation code was already fully written. It just never got turned on, because an attack order never set a formation. Once it was on, I saw it with my own eyes: squads patrolling in a line, attacking in a wedge, guards spreading out.
What I learned
Built isn’t the same as switched on. Formations, soul seeding, a whole day of hooking up features nobody was calling. March kept teaching that lesson.
Do it the right way first. The animation mess dragged on for days because every workaround created the next problem. Find the proper way and use it.
Audit everything, then build. Finding more problems halfway through a job means the first look wasn’t complete.
Watch your units. Centimeters versus meters. 0 to 1 versus 0 to 10. Game seconds versus real seconds. The soul system alone had three time bugs.
Protect what can’t be replaced. One export overwrote a finished rigged body and broke every animation for that race. Never again.
Next up
April to June: the quiet stretch.
March in numbers: 659 commits · 29 of 31 days with a commit · busiest day Mar 10 (123) · v0.02 Pre-Alpha to v0.12 Living World Alpha · 1,436 total by day 55.
If you could give one NPC in any game a real soul, who would it be? Drop it below.
Colophon
Season 0, chapter 2 of 7. The images are real captures from the build, and the two charts are drawn from the record.
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