Transparent Development

The living roadmap.

Building a slow, living god-game means letting systems take root before building on top of them. Here is an honest record of what has shipped to the engine, what is active in testing right now, and the milestones queued along the path to Early Access and full release.

Explore milestones Return to game page Parallel slices
M0 / Baseline Closeout Delivered August 21, 2026

The world beneath every story.

The foundational substrate for the entire world: a persistent 3D diorama camera, a deterministic simulation where one real-time hour equals one full village day, dynamic solar lighting from dawn through twilight, and ambient weather. Every system built afterward rests on this bedrock.

  1. M1

    Village Foundations & The HEED Loop

    Delivered August 27, 2026

    Words become physical deeds. The village listens, evaluates, and acts through an embodied Demi-God. Villagers are not puppets: they weigh requests against their own temperaments, bonds, and memories, and walk every errand across the map with zero teleportation shortcuts.

    • Divine Whispers and Hearing: Speak naturally in your own words. The Demi-God listens, interprets, and speaks with villagers within earshot.
    • Autonomous Wills & Moral Refusals: Villagers possess distinct backstories, birthdays, and social memories. When a request violates who they are, they hesitate or refuse.
    • Grounded Movement and Labor: Villagers physically walk to trees, stone quarries, and farmlands, wielding site-aware tools and carrying gathered materials by hand.
    • The Soul Codex: Villagers reveal personal likes, dislikes, and spiritual affinities over time through natural conversation, community gossip, and relationship milestones.
    • Generational Heritage: Children inherit clothing pigments and physical traits from both parents, allowing family lineages to be seen across the village commons.
    • The Living Chronicle: An unbroken village history recording births, weddings, milestones, grief, fallen raid victims, and unkept promises.
  2. M2

    Village Survival, Living Economy & Tactical Defense

    Active in Development & Testing

    Household survival meets tactical defense. Villagers must eat from their own larders before drawing from shared village stores, fences and walls cost real resources, couples court across seasons, and when danger arrives at the border, the village becomes an interactive tactical battlefield powered by the Living Arcana.

    Survival & Economy / Delivered to Engine

    Home Larders and Reachable Provisions: Every villager belongs to an entity-linked home. Families store food in their own kitchen larders and eat home meals first, drawing on village granaries only when home stores empty. The HUD displays total village stores alongside reachable food.

    Costed Construction & Courtship: Fences, gates, and walls deduct authentic timber and stone, refusing construction honestly when materials run out. Courtship spans seven in-game days of visible lead-up before weddings may roll.

    Tactical Defense & Living Arcana / Active Playtesting

    The Living Arcana (22 Major Cards + Minor Suits): The Demi-God wields 22 Major Arcana cards as divine catalysts. Cards fork celestial lightning, weave protective wards, heal wounded defenders, or refund action points. The hand fans smoothly under the cursor with tactile drag resistance and authentic woodcut borders.

    Surface Chemistry & Card Reversals: Wands ignite brush; Cups extinguish flames and create fog; Swords deflect arrows; Pentacles raise earthen barriers. Flicking a card inverts it into its Shadow aspect, unleashing devastating wrath at the immediate cost of vitality, faith, or village dread across 156 expressive states.

    Hearth Echoes & Court Archetypes: The 16 Court Cards resonate directly with living villagers, triggering evocative memories during draws. Draw probabilities dynamically reflect village history, shifting with famines, harsh winters, or bountiful harvests.

    Quick Decrees, Parley & Sanctuary Retreat: Docked Quick Decrees with 10 presets and cinematic time dilation. Foes have Resolve meters: focused parley can convince enemies to break, surrender, or join the village. Non-combatant villagers intelligently flee to home and shrine sanctuaries during raids.

    • Complete household provisioning cycle with home larders, communal granaries, and reachable hunger pacing.
    • Authentic material accounting for fences, walls, and gates with diegetic refusal when stores run dry.
    • Full 22 Major Arcana card catalog and 4 Minor Arcana suits integrated as physical battlefield catalysts.
    • Upright and Inverted (Shadow) card polarity expanding strategic choices with honest sacrificial costs.
    • Dynamic battlefield surface reactions: fire ignition, water dousing, mist shielding, and stone barriers.
    • Psychological turnover and parley system to resolve encounters through words and morale breaks.
    • Civilian sanctuary AI ensuring families and children take shelter during perimeter emergencies.
    • Scalable simulation and rendering supporting 200+ active villagers with distance and animation LOD.
  3. M3

    Settlement Authorship & Village Crafting

    Next Up on the Horizon

    Shaping the settlement on purpose. Building upon the zoning, nature, and precision placement foundations already running in the development build, this milestone puts settlement authorship into the player's hands while keeping all labor, hauling, and construction grounded in physical reality.

    • Authored District Zoning: Designate residential quarters, artisan commons, farming parcels, and sacred temple grounds to guide where villagers settle and work.
    • Precision Construction: Place homes, workshops, timber bridges, and defensive works with smooth 360-degree rotation and clear terrain alignment.
    • The Nature Build Tab: Plant intentional birch groves, apple orchards, and sacred pines, shaping the surrounding wilderness with care.
    • Crafting & Container Networks: Villagers craft specialized tools and goods in workshops, moving supplies through dedicated storage barrels, crates, and specialized bins.
    • Building Upgrades & Expansions: Expand modest dwellings into multi-room cottages, furnish interior spaces, and upgrade community workshops into productive artisan halls.
  4. M4

    Continent Arc, Regional Atlas & Ascension

    Queued for 1.0 Horizon

    Beyond the first hearth. Once the founding village thrives and stands strong, the game opens onto a wider regional atlas where overland trade, daughter settlements, and rival divine domains unfold over generations toward the final Ascension ceremony.

    • The Regional Atlas: Send scouts across mountain passes and river valleys to survey new territories and uncover forgotten ruins.
    • Secondary Settlements: Guide emigrating families to found specialized sister settlements such as coastal fishing villages, highland quarries, and farming vales.
    • Overland Trade Caravans: Establish caravan routes between settlements to exchange rare stone, cured timbers, preserved provisions, and crafted goods.
    • Rival Divine Domains: Encounter neighboring peoples guided by other gods, choosing between spiritual conversion, peaceful diplomacy, or defensive strength.
    • The Ascension Ceremony: Complete ancestral monuments, guide the continent to spiritual harmony, and conduct the final rite of Ascension.

Parallel feature slices

Living stories growing alongside the spine.

These self-contained features develop in parallel with the macro milestones. They enrich the daily texture of the world without holding up the core simulation ladder.

Delivered to Engine / Balance Tuning

Fishing & River Lore

Cast directly into rivers and ponds with dynamic line tension and custom rod handling. Featuring distinct 3D fish species, cast camera framing, catch history records, and sacred River Tally Poles where Kyrios gathers omen bones from the water.

Dual flick and pull casting 3D fish species River Tally Pole integration
Delivered to Engine / Chronicle Integrated

The Divine Inquest

When an unexpected tragedy or suspicious death occurs in the village, gather witness testimony, hear conflicting accounts from neighbors, and deliver a divine sentence: Bless, Temper, or Stand. Every verdict leaves a permanent mark on the village Chronicle and community trust.

Witness testimony Threefold divine verdict Permanent chronicle impact
Active in Development & Tuning

Pastoral Arcana & Shrine Lecterns

Extending the Living Arcana beyond combat into pastoral village life. Build a Shrine Lectern of Omens to foresee upcoming village crises, and use sacred cards such as Temperance on clinic records to soothe and heal bedridden villagers.

Lectern of Omens Clinic convalescence Pastoral card casting
Delivered to Engine / Continuous Expansion

Affinities, Gossip & Grievances

Villagers remember past treatment and form personal opinions of the Demi-God. They whisper gossip around evening hearths, nurse private grievances after broken promises, and express genuine gratitude when their households thrive.

Soul Codex discovery Grievance lifecycles Evening hearth gossip

Stay close to the hearth

Follow development as the village grows.

We publish quiet, thoughtful development updates when major milestones land. Join the list to follow along and receive notification when the Steam page goes live.

  • Milestone release notes explaining what landed in the game engine.
  • Behind-the-scenes previews of the Living Arcana, zoning, and village minds.
  • Notification the day the Steam Store page and Early Access launch arrive.

Development and launch updates only. No spam, ever.

Coming to Windows on Steam

There is no hurry.

Watch for a while. Whisper when something matters. The village will keep living either way.

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