Oct 7, a little after one in the morning, I signed off on a lineup of all eight peoples of Sinthora walking side by side. Psilobin, Dravessi, Keltrumavem, Vyranthi, Simthyn, Borgnoral, Brakkoth, and Dracotora, each with a walk, a four-move fight, and an idle stance of its own.
Five days later I cut every one of them.
This is the world of PRIDE IS THE FALL as it stood in October 2026, halfway through being remade. Some of it was set. Some of it I tore down on purpose. Every call in here was mine.
What was already set
PRIDE IS THE FALL is a top-down sandbox. You start as nobody in a living world full of people with their own fears, wants, and grudges, and that world doesn’t wait for you. It’s called Sinthora.
By October a few things weren’t moving. The map was a square 50 kilometers on a side, about 1,390 square kilometers of it land you can walk. On Apr 6 it had been shrunk to 30 kilometers to pack people in tighter, and on Jun 10 I put it back to a true 50. It had 59 settlements, and its tallest peak, the Anvil Throne, stood at 2,300 meters.
The look was set too. When I started, the pitch said medieval. On Sep 12 I asked for ancient Greece instead, Troy, and the feel of the Odyssey and the Iliad. Since then the whole world has been written in a Bronze Age Aegean register: hard white light, citadels instead of castles, bronze instead of iron, and guest-right for strangers. It suits the title. Pride is the old Greek flaw, the one that brings the hero down.
Writing a look down and building it are two different jobs, though. In October the building kits for the citadels and long halls weren’t placed yet, and the towns still read as grids.
Under all of it sits one rule. On Oct 11 I wrote out what the first minute of the game should feel like: stocked stores, coin, trade routes, piles of food and water, full armories, and a world that barely notices you arrived. I ended it like this:
“thats part of the pride fall, the player is no one, stop thinking you’re special, welcome to sinthora”
On Oct 12, around five in the afternoon, I settled how the world itself is spelled. In the code it had been Sinthora since February. From Feb 20 the lore had been spelling it Synthora. I ruled Sinthora, the way I write it, the way the map says it, and the way the loading screens say it. That left 69 uses of the old spelling to fix in the lore, the codex, and the game’s text, and by Oct 14 all 22 pages of the wiki were done.
The order of things
On Oct 3 I stopped and looked at how we were going about the whole thing. The plan from late September had us testing co-op, friends joining one world, in front of a game that wasn’t built yet. I put us at about 40 percent of the way to a game, so that order was backwards. I set a new one. Build the whole single-player game first and make it alive. Then I play it and try to break it. Co-op testing would wait until after that.
From that day every piece of work got ranked by one question. What does a single player meet first, and is it finished?
A week of fixing bodies
The eight bodies in that lineup had a history. In July I’d locked them in. On Jul 23 I wrote: “these are final race files until i say otherwise”.
In early October I asked for all eight to go through a better build process, so they’d look amazing and work in the character creator. On Oct 5 I said, in capital letters, to just make new bodies from the approved images, the way we had for the beasts.
The fixes that week were real, and some were ugly. The Psilobin, my mushroom people, had see-through front feet. I spotted it on Oct 5, and it turned out to be 3,651 faces turned inside out. After the fix there were six. The bird-folk Keltrumavem had no weights in their thighs or shins at all, so their knees couldn’t bend. After the fix they bent about 50 to 60 degrees in the walk. The Simthyn got real hands, with 32 hand and finger bones.
On Oct 6 I looked hard at color too. The models looked great but whitewashed. I wanted every race in several colors with its own unique parts, things like feather length, tusk size, or a fur crest, so no two people would ever look identical.
The beasts got the same eye that day. One tail was picking up chunks of the ground. One beast had background showing between its legs. The hollowcantor, I wrote, was just an elephant, and it didn’t fit the world.
By Oct 7 the eight bodies were fixed, approved, and walking in a row. On Oct 10 I went through the new pictures of the races and creatures in the game and said they looked good.
The night a town looked right
Oct 11, a little after five in the afternoon, I was looking at a town at night in the editor and grabbed a screenshot. Then I typed:
“this screenshot is the first clear sign our game can work, ive never felt more positive about this process”
The wide night shots of the towns were a different story. They came back black, measured at almost zero brightness. On Oct 12 I ruled that the game needed moonlight: a cycle from full moon to new that never goes fully black, and moonlight that counts when someone tries to sneak, so a bright night is a bad night for thieves. The torches, which I loved, had to stay the brightest thing in the dark.
The October 12 check
On Oct 12 the whole game got a hard look, area by area, measured against shipped games. The question was plain. Were we getting close to something I could play, or squarely in development?
Squarely in development. The 14 areas averaged 2.1 out of 5. About 66 percent of what the game is meant to have was built, and 30 percent was proven and visible in play.
The deep layer was real. In a 10-day run with no player at all, the world sent out 726 caravans, and 677 of them arrived. People treated more than 1,500 injuries, spread about 31,000 rumors, and posted 2,285 bounties. Seven test runs, one of them 20 days long, ended with zero crashes.
What a player would actually see was thin. On day one, none of the 31 town shelves started stocked, and armories sat at 12 percent. None of the 33 body armor slots had a model. All 27 beasts could only stand and walk, with no attack, no hurt, and no death. The frame rate sat around 45 at the top settings on the target laptop, against a target of 60.
That empty first day was the opposite of what I’d written the night before. The world is supposed to exist before you show up.
Then I looked at the ground. In the Ashenmere Basin, the crater country of salt and ash, I wrote: “look at the ground its pitch black and theres atleast 3 hard lines splitting zones – this looks unrealistic and frankly like shit :)” No line like that should exist anywhere in the world.
The trees had the same problem. Next to the new roads and towns, the old tree models looked out of place, and I said the models themselves weren’t up to par anymore. Then I pushed further: there could be trees that grow nowhere but in our world. That afternoon I approved a roster of 14 tree species, four of them found only in Sinthora. The small ones were for chopping. The giants, 25 to 45 meters tall, I ruled too big for any axe, though a person could still kill one slowly, by ring-barking it over a season or burning it in a drought, as a deed everyone would see.
Cut it all
That night, a little before half past ten, a status note came to me. It said it was still to be confirmed whether anything made with certain older 3D tools, ones outside the short list I had approved, was left in the game.
I didn’t want anything left to confirm.
“woah woah woah, we cant wait to confirm anything thats all gotta be cut out! We dont use any of their assets we’re remaking everything that came from that erra”
That one line cut a lot. All eight race bodies from the Oct 7 lineup traced back to that era, either directly or through weights and shapes carried over from older bodies. So did 32 crowd bodies, the armor fits made for them, and eight portraits. All of it came out of use. Nothing was deleted. It was archived, out of the shipped game.
A few minutes later the beasts came up. Four of them still stood on September bodies from that same era. My answer was short: “uh ok well shit thats wrong!! we gotta fix those everything has to be original”. All four went back to be drawn again from our own written designs.
Remaking from words
The remake started right away, alongside the rest of the build. Each race kept the design I had already approved. That look got written out in words, AI tools drew fresh concepts from those words, I picked the ones that matched, and only my picks went on to 3D, a new rig, and new shape sliders. Nothing got copied from the old bodies.
The first round set the bar. My call on the Keltrumavem was that they looked terrifying and unique, like nothing in any other game, and that rendering became the style for every race and every beast.
The picks came with calls. The Brakkoth came back wearing armor, and I said their plates are bone growing out of the skin. The flintskip had been drawn as a rabbit, and I didn’t want to be out there killing rabbits, so it became a deer about three meters tall. I renamed two beasts whose names clashed, so the ashcrawler became the Kindlewait and the shalefang became the Shaletooth. The Psilobin redraws I called perfect, and I picked the winners.
The Simthyn fought me all day. Round after round missed. One came back as a dozen copies of the same ape. One came back as a blend of every race at once. I pointed at the Bigfoot-style Simthyn sheets I had approved back in July and wrote:
“look at these – these are the direction i wanted us to go – gritty – dark – violent”
That evening I also made it plain that I didn’t need 14 options. I needed three clean ones.
One more call changed the character creator. I liked the idea of a few versions of each race’s body, with the art style nailed first and customization on top, so the world gets even more variety. That became two or three base bodies per race, one skeleton per race so every animation fits every body, and 11 fresh shape sliders each. The Brakkoth and the Psilobin got three base bodies apiece. On Oct 13 the creator got a body picker, and a bug got fixed where the colors you chose in the creator never made it onto your character in the world.
One clean skeleton
The skeleton was the last piece of the old era. Every race shared one, and its animations carried joint offsets left over from the cut bodies. On Oct 13 I ruled for a fresh one: 65 standard bones, plus three tail bones for the Dracotora and the Dravessi, with every one of the 751 animation clips brought in again on top of it. By Oct 17, 585 of them were in.
The first ones walk
On Oct 14 at about six in the morning, the remade Psilobin became the first new race body to pass the walk test, five clips out of five. The Brakkoth passed around noon the same day. The Keltrumavem passed on Oct 17.
Not every remake landed on the first try. On Oct 17 I wrote:
“to note i do miss the old stronger looking drakotora these are thinner”
A minute later the remade Dracotora went back to its canon build, thick, sturdy, and wide in the stance, before anyone rigged it.
Just after noon that day I said I still wasn’t seeing the new models in the game. By 12:47 the new Psilobin and Brakkoth were switched on in the game’s data. The Psilobin now stood 1.70 meters, its design height, instead of 1.92.
The beasts were moving too. The pyredelver was redrawn, and I approved its new body on Oct 14.
What I learned
Approved is not the same as finished. In July I called those bodies final until I said otherwise. In October I said otherwise.
A world can be deep and still look empty. Mine ran ten days with nobody watching and moved caravans, rumors, and bounties across the map, and the first thing a player would have seen was an empty shelf.
Original has to go all the way down, from the first sketch to the last bone.
And when one thing lands, the way the Keltrumavem did, it becomes the bar for everything after it.
Where it stands now (October 2026): Every old race body was cut on October 12, and all eight races are being remade from scratch on a clean skeleton. The Psilobin and Brakkoth bodies are rigged and pass the walk test, the Simthyn and Vyranthi designs are approved, and the other races are at earlier steps.
What’s the hardest thing you ever scrapped and rebuilt from scratch, in a game or anywhere else?
From the same month: The Forge.
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