Hello! January flew by… and what with my actual job picking back up, my velocity on Parchment slowed down a bit. Nevertheless, I have plenty to talk about! The first is that I am headed off to GDC 2026 this year, in SF, California. If you’re going to be at GDC, shoot me a message so we can connect! You can find my socials on the blog here or you can join our discord server and find me there. But let’s get into a game update. First up, mountains have gotten better!

Beauty corner: Mountains

I spent a majority of my time this month on mountains, and I hope the work is showing! I’m quite pleased with the progress, given I’m not an artist at all. That being said, they are far from perfect and I have spent way too many days just sitting at my desk trying to fine tune them for little gain. So for now, I’m moving on and I will likely come back around to work on them later.

Beauty corner: Trees

Since mountains got some love, I decided it was time for the trees to get an upgrade as well. They now have a richer green color, they have variety baked in, and if you look closely, they have a slight wind effect to give them life. Check out the clip below - can you see them wiggle?

Report: Server tech playtest

In January we released a build to friends and family to validate the initial network technology. We launched a realm called Hightower and let players sign and mess around. Although attendance was low (<10), no one reported any server or network issues. This is a massive win for me, given all the heavy work put into the server tech ahead of time. (See Building a world that never sleeps). Naturally, a low amount of connected clients at sporadic times hardly tests and validates the entire stack. For that we’ll need hundreds more and plenty of “soak time”. But it is a win nonetheless to see brand new tech not fall over when the first computer that isn’t mine connect to it. It was even more satisfying to have a massive battle against my co-developer… and have him obliterate me.

Unit Pathing

Pathfinding v1 has been added to the game! This might not seem like much, and perhaps a rather trivial addition, but it is more complicated than that, unfortunately. Most game developers are likely to use Unity’s built in Navmesh and navigation - where you bake in the terrain, specify game objects that are obstacles, and let Unity do the hard work for you.

We don’t have that luxury. Why? Well, two primary reasons:

  1. The map is procedurally generated on demand, so we cannot pre-bake the navigation.
  2. Our server tech tells the client its path, not the other way around. The server must make this calculation. But our server is not a headless unity executable running the game as a dedicated server. We have a completely different netstack.

This means the server that runs the entire realm must also calculate the pathfinding. Luckily, it’s set up for just a scenario. The player’s own “worker bee” (again see previous blogs) calculates the path and sends the result to the “queen bee” that runs the realm to minimize disruption and compute.

There are still some limitations we’ll work through - such as traveling over super long distances, but I’m quite pleased with v1.

For February

Our working plans for February are as follows:

  • Continue to improve the look and feel of the game, adding and fine tuning the art pieces and smoothing out rough edges.
  • Improve city/base expansion experience. More buildings you construct will appear outside the center city unit.
  • Improve combat display. Combat panel display bugs will be sorted and multiple visual improvements will be added.
  • Create stacking logic. Units can no longer stack unless certain conditions are met, and travel in and arrive in formation.
  • Finalize our starting capsule art.

See you in a month!