The first three weeks of September came down to one question. What does PRIDE IS THE FALL actually look like?
For a while the answer was a stylized ink-wash look, painted over everything. On Sep 4 I looked at the frames one more time and said what I’d been feeling for days:
“ok so somehthing is clearly way too wrong with the inkwash being applied, its making nothing look like the approved textures, can we take all that away and then add stylization later? lets just get the game looking good first”
I ended that message with “our vision is elite.” I meant it. This chapter is about what happened once we stopped hiding the world under a filter and started making the world itself look good.
What got built
A world with 1.2 million things in it
Sep 1 started with a gut punch and ended with a win. For weeks I’d been saying the distance looked empty. Turns out every single run that placed grass, rocks and trees across the world had been thrown away the moment the world saved. More on that below. Once it was fixed, the world had 1,219,845 things in it. Density went from about 17 objects per square kilometer to about 580. By Sep 16 it was 2.21 million.
That night I wrote down what all that space was for: “remembber you can walk ANYWHERE on the map that isnt underwater lol, this is a core feature”. The plan was that rivers get bridges, with more than one crossing and more than one way around, even if it’s the long way.
Taking it all away
Sep 2 was ink-wash day: palettes for nine regions, special effects stacked on the screen, the works. My honest reaction at the time: “im confused all the inkwashes look the same.” Then a couple hours later, “i guess the ink wash is correct? Idk it looks so similar to me lol”
That evening I stopped second-guessing my own eyes. “this looks pretty aweful. i see squares all over the ground, assets have circular shapes on them, this is not premium and pretty terrible.” And: “right now our game looks terrible visually.”
Sep 4 the look got rejected a second time, and the reason was ugly. Under all the effects, the frames were bare geometry sitting on the engine’s grey placeholder. The style was draining the color out of everything, stepping the light into five flat bands, and stacking four more passes on top. No texture could live through that. So twelve minutes after my message, the stylization came off. Nothing got deleted. It can come back later, on top of a world that already looks right.
We set a new bar that day: beat Kenshi’s artistic detail. Then we lined our frames up next to Manor Lords, Baldur’s Gate 3 and Kenshi and measured the difference.
Sep 5 was six authored ground surfaces, a meadow and tree canopy redone as late summer, and five rounds of lighting tuned against those reference games. Then I looked at three frames and said: “Yes, this is the base. Build on it.”
That same night I took my first real look around the new base, and I didn’t hold back: “the buildings look unrefined and placed wonky, pawns are floating sideways in the air, no proper skins on any structures or pawns, zero items armor or weapons show, also can see th elarge rings again in atleast one photo, ground cover looks fantastic.” The ground was right, and everything standing on it still needed work.
Sep 6, the busiest day of Season 0
349 commits in one day. Nothing else from February to September came close.
- Towns started to look like towns. Streets got houses facing them, and a hill town sat on its hill. Every settlement got a center stone that grew with it: a cairn, then a menhir, then a henge.
- A new building kit. The dolmen hall and the trilithon gate. I’d told the tools what I wanted: “just like we did for the ground textures, we want to have beautiful designs and textreus for all the buildings items etc”.
- 440 natural wonders. Rock, water and ice, forest and coast, and old stone monuments, each one with real-world ancestry. We pulled the actual shape of Earth’s landforms from public elevation data to build the new terrain.
- The people got kinder. A passer-by carrying food could feed a stranger who was down. A friend who saw someone breaking walked over and talked them down. Burial became a real job that pawns answered.
Late that night I wrote “looking great love this.” I asked for the best captures to get saved because “they’re pretty cool and show great progress.” And one more rule for the road: “we should have multiple variants of everything right? thats how we dont get stale i feel.”
Words matter
Early in the month I found out The Fall had become a name for four different systems at once. I shut that down hard: “The only scripted fall that should happen is if a PLAYER fires the maridian engine and chooses NOT to get inside of it.” In September The Quieting was the outbreak that turned pawns into the infected, and I did not want it starting on its own. I said why: “the reason we dont want to have an automated quieting htat happens without the player triggering it is that it could ruin a players peaceful playthrough and force them to fight zombies, we dont want that.” So The Fall retired as a word inside the game that month, and everything that happened in the world went by its in-world name.
Same day, 96 new weapons went in, and I set a rule I feel strongly about: “ranged weapons should absolutely not become meta in this game, it sucks when you can just range cheese anything, ranged should mostly be for harassing and skirmishing from afar, but this game is truly about melee combat, blood, grit and gore.”
The world turned ancient Greek
Sep 12 I made one of the biggest calls of the year: “i want our theme and era to feel not just medieval europe, but heavily ancient greece, troy, oddesy and illiad vibes.”
It fits the name. Pride before a fall is the whole Greek idea of hubris. So the whole world took it on, every region in its own way. In September the plan looked like this:
- Hard white light. The sun went white that week.
- Citadels over castles. Massive stone walls, one gate, a court, a great hall on the hill.
- Bronze over iron. Iron was the Ironweld’s pride.
- The song of deeds. What you did got remembered.
- Guest-right. The stranger at your gate got fed before he got questioned.
In September each region kept its own climate: white lime plaster and terracotta roofs in the green heartland, giant fitted granite and dark pine up in the mountains, stilt platforms and reed domes in the marsh. Nothing Gothic anywhere: no pointed arches, no half-timber, no battlements. Two old laws stayed put. There was no sea travel in this world, so the odyssey was a journey over land. And everything stayed original.
That afternoon I looked at the new frames and wrote “approved on all fronts images look great.”
Bodies and faces
Sep 13 I walked in through the real front door: menu, New Game, character builder, first world. It went about how you’d expect. “woah first off int he builder the bodies are warped to insane proportions, the skins are also totally destroeyd.”
The first try at rebuilding the cast came back wrong too. “in no way is that correct, theres a huge box around it.” So we rebuilt the eight races from the bodies I’d already approved and gave them new skins made for the new look. On Sep 14 I saw the side-by-side and said “Yes, this is the direction.” Then: “everything is perfect except the borgnoral that needs revision on the skin.” By lunchtime: “borgnoral looks great now.” That signed off all eight races (those bodies and skins were cut in October and are being remade).
The character builder got a real audit too: 53 traits, each priced by what it did to your pawn.
Food from the land
Sep 16 I settled how eating would work: “wild foot should exist, forageble and huntable, farming etc should be to support larger establishments and progreess to higher tech becasue you’re not focused on food just like in real life.” So the plan was that you can forage and hunt, and farming is what lets a town grow past what the land gives for free. The first numbers caught a bug, though. Wild food ignored the seasons and was carrying about a fifth of all the food in winter. So wild plants died back in winter. Hunted animals didn’t.
Unreal Engine 5.8
Sep 21 I asked the obvious question: “Should we just move project to 5.8? Why wouldn’t we do this?” Then I made the call: “Do this as priority one then align after. Get us to the most powerful place we can be.”
I installed it myself that evening, sitting there going “its installing now i think thats it?” By 9:55 PM PRIDE was running on Unreal Engine 5.8.2. The game drew frames faster on it, 8.3 milliseconds against 9.1 on the old version. The old engine got uninstalled and gave me back 28.3 GB of disk.
What went wrong
The world that saved empty
This one still gets me. Every scatter run the project ever did was thrown away at save. The game built all the grass and rocks in memory, said DONE, and then saved a world with none of it. The proof was sitting on disk the whole time: 172 files, every one the exact same size, all empty. The log said DONE every time, and it was telling the truth about the wrong thing.
Giant rings and a tabletop mountain
Two asset kits measured size differently, and one wrong guess made a 29 meter fire basket and fence panels 80 by 74 meters. When the fix went in on Sep 1 I checked the frames and wrote “in the images confirming i no longer see green marks or the rings”. I flagged one more oddity in the same message: “some items i do see swelling up out of proportion as it moves though”. And the whole Ironweld mountain range turned out to be one flat tabletop made of 3,191 identical summit cells. After the fix it had eight peaks.
The bandage that was a sword
Items in the loot tables were stored by their position in a list. Back in February that list had 138 items. By September it had 419. So almost every loot entry pointed at the wrong thing. In one run, about 500 of 600 market items were wrong, and a bandage came out as a sword. After the fix, items were found by name.
Rules the engine never read
The souls of every pawn came from a set of templates, and the engine had loaded zero of them. The rules telling it where to look sat in a settings file the engine never reads. Twelve kinds of content were invisible because of it: items, weapons, races, religions, named characters and more. Moving one section to the right file took the soul templates from 0 to 40, and 9,616 pawns got real souls.
Food, the honest version
The first food reading said not one settlement could reach anything to eat from the land. That was half right. Farms were feeding the world fine, with 149,844 units of food from 16,975 harvests. But a pawn without a job had nothing in the wild to reach. Wild food fixed that.
Feet, ground, and a new engine
- Pawns floating in the air. 248 building meshes were one solid block inside, and a pawn placed in the air just never fell. After the fix nobody stood, slept or died on a roof.
- The ground had a grid. “there needs to be something with the ground that better randomizes, i can too clearly see the ground gridding.” One fix made it worse. The seventh try broke the pattern up.
- 5.8 broke 20 materials. The new engine stopped setting a few flags on its own, so 20 materials showed up as the default. Fixed the same night.
Life
Sep 8 through 10 there were no commits at all. The power went out in there too. Later a Windows update forced a restart in the middle of everything, and my message after was “please pick up where we left off the computer updated and forced restarted fml.” And at one point I had to mention “for what its worth, the camera has not moved once inside the windwo where youre taking screenshots.”
Sep 19
I’m putting this one here as it happened:
“man we are so far from where we want to be, shit is flying in the air, shadows look all fucked and square, assets look like shit, UI/UX looks like shit, pawns dont look right, beasts are no where to be found and still have shit skins. I’m ready to give up.”
I didn’t give up. Twenty-five minutes later I wrote “bro we need to pause everything, get to a good stopping point. get your plan set to resume at my mark”. At 2:29 that afternoon I gave the go-ahead to continue. That same day I put my foot down on how decisions get made: “CAN YOU JUST SOLVE THIS LIKE A GAME WOULD HAVE IT NOT SOME RANDOM THOUGHT PROCESS.” By Sep 21 I was looking at new frames and writing “they look pretty fuckin cool, not finish but nice.”
What I learned
Get the base right before you style it. No filter can save a world that doesn’t look good underneath. Surfaces, light and shape come first. Style goes on last.
DONE doesn’t mean done. The log said DONE every time the world saved empty. What’s on disk is the truth, and what’s on screen is the truth. A passing check is not the same as a good-looking game.
Play it yourself. The first time I walked in through the front door like a player would, I found problems that every automated test had missed. From here on I play the real game, through the real menu, and the picture beats the numbers.
Solve it like a game would. When the answer to a design question already exists in how good games work, use that answer.
Take the break. On Sep 5 I asked for a pause because “i wanna run some generals zero hour.” Command & Conquer since 1997. Some things don’t change.
Next up
Sep 22: I asked whether we had made the assets yet.
September 1 to 21 in numbers: 1,700 commits, 972 of them bookkeeping · 18 of 21 days with a commit · busiest day Sep 6 (349) · Unreal Engine 5.7 to 5.8 · 4,824 total by day 229.
If you could steal the look of any game for your own, which one would it be? Drop it below.
Colophon
Season 0, chapter 6 of 7. The images are real captures from the build, and the two charts are drawn from the record.
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