I started August naming animals and ended it counting the dead.
This was the month PRIDE IS THE FALL got teeth. Beasts that hunted each other. Battles that left bodies in the grass. Co-op that stopped falling apart when somebody’s leader died. It was also a month where a whole way of making beasts fell apart in front of me, so that’s in here too. If I’m reading this twenty years from now, I want the whole thing, not the highlight reel.
What got built
A bestiary that only lived here
Aug 1, 29 beasts and 6 plants got their names. One rule: no Earth animal names in the mouths of people who’ve never seen Earth. Every name had to be a compound that meant something in this world. The crestfall carried the idea in August: a herd beast with a scythe-shaped crest, and the bigger the crest got, the closer it was to turning to stone. Pride is the fall, even for the cattle.
Five of them I asked for straight up: animals that didn’t exist anywhere else. In August the hearthfeign looked like a dead campfire until it hunted you. The diapason was an eyeless hunter that found you by sound. The knellwether was a walking archway with a hollow bell inside. The emberwake was a three-legged glass lantern that walked. And the crestfall.
The first four stood in the engine that same night: crestfall, pyredelver, knellwether and sicklestride.
I also said, almost as a throwaway, “a few non interactive birds flying would be cool.” The flying beast we tried for it came out deformed, so I cut the ambition down to size: “we dont need flying beasts, we just need some birds flying around for flavor.” After that there were flocks of gyrecall wheeling over the cliffs. They were scenery, but a sky with something moving in it felt alive.
Then I wanted the animals to live real lives. My words at the time: “There should be juvinile, adult, and elder of all beasts, elder should be most powerful, and largest size of each beast.” And “beasts should random roll like the races do.” By Aug 11 they did. The plan was that every beast would be born young, grow up, and have to earn being an elder, and that no two would be the same.
I wanted them to move like real animals too, with paths, migration zones and spawns, because, in my words, “this is how nature works.” Mid-month the food web went in for real. Eighteen predator and prey pairs that could never actually meet got fixed, and five hunters that couldn’t reach a single meal finally could. In August every beast got a lair to come home to, twelve of them across the map. And the cats became sacred in the code. Nobody touched the cats.
Battles where people finally die
Here’s what a “battle” looked like on Aug 19 when we finally measured one. 528 fighters. Over in 34 ticks, and 30 of those were the walk in. The attackers ended with 59 dead, 199 downed, and zero left standing. Call it an execution. It was over before a player could even get there.
I was pretty direct about it at the time: “i have to be real with you though, if we cant have wars of factions, this game isnt gonna work, atleast has to be hundreds of pawns in the largest fights.” And: “how do we get 1000 pawn active fights live? thats really the game.”
Waiting game-days for a big war to happen on its own was eating hours, so I said “dude just for testing spawn in 500 fighters.” After that there was a button that took the two biggest factions that already existed and threw them at each other. Same people, same rules, no waiting.
Aug 20 it clicked. Before, fighters were standing about 400 meters from the enemy they’d been told to fight. They were 330 times too far away to swing. After the fix: 270 fighting at once instead of 64, and 168 casualties instead of about zero.
Same day I killed battle music for good. I wrote that we want “ambient world music like they do in kenshi.” Fights carried their own sound effects, right where they happened. As I put it: “this isn’t Pokemon. no battle music, that’s so immersion breaking.”
The rest of the month made fights feel like people were in them. This is how the rules read in August:
- Armies march at the speed of their slowest legs. “large armies are gonna be slower than special forces of high level pawns.” A column moved like the people actually in it.
- Nobody signs up for a suicide run. The median battle was 19 to 1, because nobody ever asked a pawn if the fight was worth dying for. After that they could say no. One fighter didn’t charge a hundred unless it was a last stand.
- No clock decides a battle. 92% of 74 battles were ending at exactly 12 rounds, which worked out to a 1.2 second war. The timer was gone. A fight ended when somebody broke, got away, or got cut down.
- Running is a choice. “once you’re in a fight it should take a convincing to try and run away, especially if you could be cut down and you’d leave your friends behind.” After that a loyal pawn with friends still in the line held.
Wars don’t all have to be huge either: “wars dont need to be 1000 vs 1000, maybe one band of raiders is tired of another picking off their caravan targets.” Conflict at every scale. That’s the world I want.
Why anyone fights at all
Here’s a big one. Pride starting a war, the thing this game is literally named after, had never once happened. The game measured pride as a one-day jump in renown, and that only happens while you’re already conquering. But if you’re already at war you’re at the war ceiling, so the war got refused. Pride could only exist during a war, and it was banned for that exact reason. After the fix it built over a week, weighed how much the target was worth envying, and could start a fight.
Turns out 85% of every war the world ever wanted died in three silent refusals that nobody counted. They got counted after that. And wars started from wants: grief, hunger, a lost home, envy. In August the rule was: no want, no war. I’d said it flat out on Aug 21: “rember wars, and EVERYTHING else, should be driven by needs wants or desires of the soul, this is ALL emergent gameplay in the sandbox.”
One rule I set early in the month: no forced peace. “i hate in other games like total war when you’re about to win with a decisive battle but then are forced into stopping the war.” In the design, war fatigue hit your people’s heads, with bad moods and deserters. It never took the decision away from you.
The Old Law
This one came from me. I wanted a way for two pawns to settle a feud without it turning into a killing. “Pawns can challenge each other to mutual combat,” hand to hand only, when they both agree.
So in August there was the Old Law. You called it in public, in front of witnesses. Both fighters stood at the measure, and stepping out meant you yielded. Fists only. Drawing a blade was a serious crime. Prideful pawns yielded late, of course. If somebody died, it was a blood feud. The world wrote it down like this:
He invoked the Old Law; they squared it at dusk before forty witnesses, and the debt was rounded in full.
The pawns needed a way to talk about it, so they got the Common Hand, a language of pictures. I said “symbols would be the coolest so theres clear language but we dont need translations etc.” Later that day I asked “what if it was painted in blood not ink,” and that settled the look. It started with 27 blood marks. I also put a cap on it: “we cant have thousands of sygils popping up everywhere you wont be able to see the game, it needs to be powerful, impactful, tasteful use.”
Co-op that held together
Aug 5 I sat down and made eleven co-op calls in one session. That day’s rulings: a friend hosts; when players want different speeds, the slowest wins; and permadeath still means something with friends. If you die, you “can either take over as a friends character (with approval, friend offers) or they can roll a new character to enter the world if their faction has no remaining NPCs.”
By Aug 6 a leader dying no longer froze everybody’s world. Aug 23 we found out why people joining a friend’s game saw an empty world: one missing flag in the code meant every joining player saw zero people. Zero. One flag.
A world that kept time
Seasons were 10 days long. That meant a winter lasted ten real hours and a year took forty. I wasn’t having it: “seasons can not be 10 days, thats just ridiculous.” In August I set a season at 30 days and a year at 120. That one wasn’t free, by the way. 246 numbers in the game had been tuned for 10-day seasons, so it took a while to settle back in.
Smaller stuff that made the world feel more real:
- The dead were remembered completely. No contracts from beyond the grave.
- Saves stopped dying at 2 GB. One test world died on day 39 because its save got too big to write.
- Prisoners cost you. They ate your food, slowed your march, and tried the walls at night. And here was the twist: a prisoner could pick the lock on their irons and keep wearing them, shuffling along like they were still chained, waiting for the right night.
- Costs got real. “making a tunic shouldnt take 30 leather, it should take like 3 or some shit, know what i mean? we gotta be a semblance of reality.” Checking every cost turned up a loom that made cloth out of nothing.
- Anyone could heal. “Medics already exist in the world and can heal regardless of job.”
- A wiki. By the end of the month there was so much lore that I said “even I’m starting to lose track of lore points and things like the Rot.” So the game got its own wiki: 211 pages and 3,032 links.
What went wrong
The beasts that wouldn’t stand up
Getting beasts into the game was brutal. On Aug 1 I wrote: “none of these beasts have the fine detail that makes them look alive, this isnt working so far :(” On Aug 2 I wrote: “the beasts are not even facing the right way and dont have skins.” The skins were “extremely stretched,” like a “low rez version of our game.” That one came down to how the textures were cut up. Only 1.3% of each texture was actually being used. After the fix it was 51.8%.
Then they floated. They faced sideways. Six of them lay flat on their backs. My notes: “the after looks great, its just floating sidewise, feet need to be down on floor.”
Even the ones standing up weren’t beasts yet. By Aug 4 I could see it: “the skin however, doesnt look like an animal, it looks like blotches of color, the tail is also disconnected and part of it is floating.”
The worst part is that the checks kept saying they passed. The skeleton and the body were turned ninety degrees from each other, so a beast lying flat on its back still measured as standing up.
The toilback that fought back
One beast ate the middle of the month. The toilback was a tortoise-shelled bull, and its skin would not stay on straight. Aug 10, late: “something catastopic happened to Toilback…. we already solved this how are we struggling here we put the instructions in -_-” An hour later: “for toilback im seeing the face skin on the butt.”
It took me until Aug 12 to see why. “ok i clearly see the issue, the approved art is showing THREE different beast models, not the same model from three sides.” The art we were building from didn’t show one animal from three angles. It showed three different animals, so a skin built from it could never line up.
The week the beasts fell apart
I want to be honest about the middle of August. We had a whole system for making beasts, and it fell apart in front of me. What I wrote, word for word:
“damn these are all fucked up i thought we had a working system -_- we’re cooked chat”
I stepped away, came back, and figured out what was actually wrong. “so many of them look like real animals from the zoo, lets try again fresh but use mythical beasts as the inspiration.” Lore first, then the look, one version of each beast. Then the next batch came in and I wrote “ok tehse are looking great!” Not every one. “crestfall is just a horse, needs redesign, ashgleaner looks like a box needs redesign.” But we were moving again.
The roster got locked at 27. The wreckdrake got cut, by my own call: “ok they look ok, but lets cut the wreckdrake as a creature.”
Four days earlier, between toilback fights, I’d finished a Kenshi run with a new co-op mod, buggy but a lot of fun, and wrote “ive never been so sure that our game will be a world hit when we’re finished.” Both things were true in the same month.
The silent ones
Most of August’s worst bugs had the same shape. The game asked a question, got no answer, and never noticed. They didn’t crash anything. They just quietly made the world worse.
- Elections crowned foreigners and corpses. One faction elected its own dead leader fifteen times.
- The Wanderer had no blade. Seven of the nine starting items matched nothing in a catalog of 311. “Worn Katana” never existed. Nobody had started a New Game since July 6, so nobody noticed.
- Your squad kept vanishing. To the game, a player-controlled pawn only meant the leader. Seventy seconds in, two of your three people had no body.
- The animals were all stacked in eight piles. 85.2% of hunts found nothing to hunt while the world sat at its full 1,000 animals.
- Hunters got paid for corpses. 622 kills claimed, 183 real deaths. Predators could only smell prey 40 meters away on a 50 kilometer map, so there was one predator kill in nine days. After the fix they smelled prey a kilometer and a half away, starved after six days without a meal, and every kill left a carcass for whoever came next.
- New Game dropped me in a pit. “we spawn into a hold i cant get out of.” “there shouldnt be any locations you cant get into or out of on the map except water.” The spawn never checked if you could walk out.
- Every market square was empty, and twenty creatures were rendering plain grey. We thought it was four.
What I learned
Measure it before you believe it. Three times we read 500 fighters at 60 fps and called it a win. The camera was sitting 8 km away from the battle. One speed fix we celebrated never actually turned on. After that every check said out loud what it did, and a check that stayed quiet counted as broken.
Find a better way instead of trying harder. Early in the month I made it a rule: “always learn and find better ways to do what you find difficult.” If something fails twice, build a better method before a third try.
Depth is for everybody. I wrote this down in August, and it was the north star then: “This is the ultimate game to get lost in but simultaneously isn’t too complex like Dwarf Fortress or something that casuals can’t play. It is for everyone, at all levels of depth.” The plan was no tutorials: the world shows you.
Keep the receipts. Aug 4 I started an archive folder for screenshots “worthy of revising 20 years from now when our game is a smash global hit.” Some of the images in this post came out of it.
It wasn’t all rough, either. On Aug 9 I wrote “we are great this is fun, we are making a wonderful emergent sandbox experience.” That’s August.
Next up
September is the look. By then the world had teeth. It was time to make it beautiful.
August in numbers: 854 commits · 30 of 31 days with a commit · busiest day Aug 30 (141) · 3,124 total by day 208.
What’s the coolest creature you’ve ever run into in a game? Drop it below.
Colophon
Season 0, chapter 5 of 7. The images are real captures from the build, rough ones included, and the two charts are drawn from the record.
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