Developer Diary

Since the one-month retrospective, we've started wiring the tech demo together into an actual game. From the outside it looks unremarkable — for me it was the moment Novus Terminus stopped being just a pile of working systems.

Until recently there was no title screen. Hit F5 in the editor, world generates, off you go. No menu, no settings, no music, no pause dialog. Everything worked, but nothing felt like a game.

That has changed.

What's now in place

• Intro → Main Menu → Game. Studio logo, clean transition, "New Game" / "Settings" / "Help" / "Quit". Sounds trivial, but it was the prerequisite for everything else.
• Pause menu with confirmation dialogs — so nobody accidentally abandons their village.
• Settings screen with four tabs: Display, Audio, Graphics, Controls. 13 options, all persisted, language (DE/EN) switchable on the fly.
• Audio system — grouped playlists with crossfade, 3D sound effects with distance culling, five separate volume buses. The first sound this game has ever made.
• Gamepad support — Xbox controller is detected, deadzone and sensitivity adjustable. Key remapping is next on the list.

The 22-second beachball

The most embarrassing bug of the past days: on game start, macOS froze for 22 seconds. Classic spinning rainbow wheel. World generation ran synchronously — terrain, biomes, grass, trees, all in one blocking pass while the window stopped responding to input.

The fix was less glamorous than I'd hoped: the generation steps were chopped into small pieces, and between each piece the game gives the OS a brief "I'm still here". Suddenly there's a loading screen with a progress bar and rotating quips, and nothing freezes anymore. No single frame block takes more than half a second.

The sparkle hunt

A second bug was stubborn. Bright dots flickered across the scene — like glitter, but wrong. First suspect: shadow cascade seams. No. Second: fog interaction. Also no. Third attempt, this one out of desperation: glow/bloom completely off.

Sparkles gone. And framerate went up as a bonus.

Cause: the GPU grass shader produces brief HDR outliers at certain sun angles — pixels brighter than 1.0. Normally not a problem. With glow, those outliers get amplified into visible sparks. Temporary fix: glow stays off until the grass shader clamps its output properly. Sometimes the best fix is a toggle.

What's next

The next steps are smaller, but important: gamepad refinement, controller icons in the HUD, testing touch input. The goal: someone can start the game from the menu, play for an hour, pause, change the volume, and exit cleanly — without ever needing the editor.

It's a strange milestone. There's no cool screenshot to tweet. But it's the invisible threshold after which a project stops being a prototype.

What's New

One month ago, Novus Terminus: First Flags was nothing but an empty heightmap and a camera. Today, we're sharing our first gameplay video — and it's all running in real-time. No scripts, no mockups. In just 31 days and 209 commits, we've built a living island world: settlers walk the road network carrying goods on their backs, carriers deliver materials from flag to flag, and buildings rise from the ground through multiple construction stages. Deer graze on meadows while ravens circle overhead. Ocean waves roll onto shores with foam and wet sand. Over 5,000 trees sway in the wind, transitioning seamlessly to impostors in the distance.

We've also added two systems that change how you experience the map: a territory system where military buildings claim land with organic, flowing borders marked by physical posts, and a volumetric fog of war that hides undiscovered areas behind white clouds — with mountain peaks poking through.

Under the hood, the ECS simulation runs on its own thread at a stable 50+ FPS with 25,000 entities. We have 14 state machines driving everything from carrier logistics to deer behaviour, 65+ entity configurations, and a full CI/CD pipeline for automated builds.

What's Next

The biggest gap right now is the production system — buildings exist but don't produce goods yet. That's our top priority. Once woodcutters, sawmills and farms actually work, the real gameplay loop begins.

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What's New

Your kingdom begins with a single headquarters. Everything beyond is unknown -- white fog stretching as far as the eye can see, like clouds that have settled down to rest on the land. Somewhere out there are forests, rivers, mountains, and maybe a rival doing exactly the same thing you are. But you cannot see any of it. Not yet.

This update introduces two closely connected systems that change the feel of Novus Terminus: First Flags fundamentally: territory and fog of war. Together, they give every game a sense of discovery and a reason to think carefully about where you build next.

Territory is claimed by military buildings -- barracks, guard houses, watchtowers, and fortresses -- each projecting a zone of control around itself. The headquarters provides your starting territory, and from there, every expansion is deliberate. You place a barracks near your border, wait for it to finish construction, and watch your territory swell outward. The boundaries are not rigid circles. When two military buildings stand close together, their zones of influence merge into smooth, organic shapes that flow around the terrain. It looks natural, almost like a living border breathing with your settlement.

Along that border, physical marker posts appear automatically, lining the edge of your territory like fence posts along a country road. You can always tell at a glance exactly where your land ends. These are not painted lines or glowing overlays -- they are actual objects in the world, visible from any camera angle. And they serve a future purpose: when two players' territories eventually meet, those border markers become the anchor points for trade routes.

Speaking of neighbours -- when your territory touches another player's, the border freezes. You can stack military buildings behind the line all day long, but the border will not budge. Economic power alone cannot push back an established rival. If you want that land, you will need to take it by force in a future update. This is intentional: peaceful expansion works into unclaimed wilderness, but contested borders demand military action.

Everything outside your explored area is hidden behind volumetric fog -- thick, white, and three-dimensional. This is not a flat texture painted on the map. The fog has real depth and volume. Mountain peaks poke through it, their silhouettes hinting at the terrain beyond. Trees, animals, and enemy buildings are completely hidden inside the fog. As you build military structures and push your territory outward, the fog rolls back, revealing the landscape underneath. The visibility range extends well beyond your actual territory border, so you always get a generous view of the surrounding area before you commit to expanding there.

When you lose a military building -- whether demolished by choice or destroyed in combat down the road -- your territory recalculates. Buildings that suddenly find themselves outside your borders get a grace period, flashing a warning. If you do not restore coverage in time, they shut down: production stops, workers are released, but the structures remain. Place a new military building nearby, and everything springs back to life.

Behind the Scenes

The territory boundaries are generated using a technique borrowed from computer graphics called metaballs. Each military building radiates an invisible field of influence, and the territory boundary is the surface where those fields add up to a certain strength. When buildings are far apart, you get roughly circular borders. When they are close, the fields blend together into smooth blobs. The fog of war uses the same system with a larger radius, so expanding territory and clearing fog happen in one step. All of it runs on the CPU with no special rendering tricks -- the border markers are real 3D objects, and the fog is Godot's built-in volumetric fog system driven by the territory data. This keeps things simple and makes the system ready for multiplayer, where the server needs to be the single source of truth for who owns what.

What's Next

With territory and fog of war in place, the next step is soldiers. Settlers will be recruited at the tavern, equipped with weapons at the depot, and garrisoned in military buildings to defend your borders -- and eventually, to push them.

What's New

Forests in Novus Terminus: First Flags just got a whole lot bigger. This update is all about scale -- filling the landscape with thousands of trees without the game breaking a sweat, and making the simulation itself run more smoothly in the background.

The biggest visible change is how we handle distant trees. Previously, when the camera pulled back far enough, trees would simply vanish or snap to a lower-quality version with an ugly pop. Now, faraway trees are replaced by clever impostor images -- flat cards that show the tree from whatever angle you are looking at, baked from the original model with matching lighting and colour. The trick is in the transition: as you scroll across the landscape, trees crossfade between their full 3D form and the impostor through a subtle dissolve pattern. There is no hard cut, no flicker, no moment where a tree suddenly looks wrong. It just quietly shifts, and unless you are specifically watching for it, you will not notice at all.

The result speaks for itself: roughly five thousand trees on screen at once, a view distance of 150 metres, and a stable 54 frames per second. Forests finally feel dense and sprawling the way they should in a logistics game where lumber is a lifeline. Panning across a valley full of pines and oaks with carriers winding between them is genuinely satisfying now.

We also fixed a shadow bug that had been lurking for a while. Trees close to the camera were sometimes losing their shadows when the rendering engine confused the player's viewpoint with the light's viewpoint during the shadow calculation. That is sorted now -- every tree casts a proper shadow regardless of distance, and the late-afternoon light through a thick forest looks noticeably better.

On the economy side, buildings now require planks instead of raw logs as their construction material. This is a small but meaningful change for the logistics chain: you need a sawmill running before you can expand, which gives the early game a clearer sense of progression. The building menu has a new plank icon to match.

Behind the Scenes

The game's simulation -- the part that moves settlers, updates production timers, and tracks resources -- now runs on its own dedicated thread, separate from the rendering. This means that even when the screen is packed with trees and carriers and buildings, the logic ticking along underneath stays consistent and smooth. Visual updates are neatly queued up and applied once per frame, so the two never step on each other's toes. We also overhauled how the simulation tracks changing values like walking progress or production timers: instead of resetting and recalculating everything every tick, values are now set once when something changes and left alone until the next change. Less busywork for the CPU, more headroom for a bigger world.

What's Next

With the world able to support thousands of trees and the simulation running on its own thread, we are laying the groundwork for much larger maps -- more terrain, more resources, and longer trade routes stretching across the landscape.

What's New

Small things make a settlement feel real. This update adds a handful of visual touches that bring Novus Terminus: First Flags closer to the cozy logistics fantasy we are chasing -- and quietly improves the road system under the hood.

The most satisfying change: carriers now visibly carry goods on their backs. When a carrier picks up a log or a stone at a flagpole, the item appears strapped to their back and stays there for the entire walk to the next pole. You can follow a carrier along a winding forest road and see exactly what they are hauling. It sounds tiny, but it transforms the road network from an abstract conveyor belt into something you can read at a glance -- oh, that one has planks, that one has bread, and the one crossing the bridge is loaded with iron ore.

Building placement got a new preview step. When you choose a spot for a new building and confirm it, a translucent ghost of the structure appears on the ground right away. It stays there, semi-transparent and waiting, until a builder actually arrives and begins construction. Before this, a confirmed building simply popped into existence as a construction site the moment a builder touched it, and nothing marked the spot in between. Now you can place several buildings across the map, zoom out, and see at a glance where future construction is planned -- even if your only builder is still hauling materials on the other side of the river.

Tree trunks now cast proper shadows across the landscape. Previously the trunk geometry was excluded from the shadow pass, so trees looked like they were floating just above the ground. Fixing this was a small tweak, but the difference is surprisingly noticeable -- forests feel heavier and more grounded, and the late-afternoon light raking through a stand of pines finally looks right.

On the road side, the pathfinder now treats existing roads as obstacles. New paths curve around old ones instead of crossing through them, which means your road network stays clean and readable as it grows. The red preview line we added last time has been refined too: it appears instantly when a route is blocked or too long, so there is no guessing whether a road will work before you commit.

Behind the Scenes

The backpack attachment works by finding a specific bone on the carrier model and parenting the goods mesh directly to it. This means the item follows every animation frame -- walking, turning, idle bobbing -- without any manual positioning each tick. The building ghost uses a simple transparency shader on the full building mesh, fading it in at placement and fading it out once real construction geometry takes over. Both features reuse existing models, so they add visual richness without inflating the asset count.

What's Next

With carriers, roads, and building previews feeling solid, we are turning our attention to expanding the roster of workshops and production chains -- more buildings, more goods, more reasons to lay down roads.

What's New

The world of Novus Terminus: First Flags just got a whole lot more alive. This update touches three things you will notice the moment you unpause: animals move again, roads look like they belong, and cutting a road actually matters.

Deer are back. They graze quietly in the meadows, lift their heads now and then, and eventually wander off to a new patch of grass. They follow the terrain naturally -- no hovering, no sliding through hills. Ravens circle high above the settlement, then swoop down, land, peck at the ground for a while, and take off again. Neither species does anything strategically important, but they fill the spaces between your buildings with life. A deer grazing next to a flagpole while a carrier walks past with a sack of grain on her back -- that is the kind of moment we are building this game for.

Roads have been completely reworked. Previously they were brownish strips that floated slightly above the grass, with visible gaps at corners and ugly overlap where two paths crossed. Now roads are painted directly into the ground. Where a dirt path runs, the grass fades away and earthy, pebbly terrain shows through with soft edges. It looks like settlers have actually worn a trail into the landscape. When you demolish a road, the grass grows back immediately -- the path simply vanishes and the meadow returns.

Planning new roads feels better too. The preview line turns red when a route is blocked or would run too close to an existing path, so you know before you confirm whether the road will work. Roads also route more sensibly now, avoiding buildings, trees, and other roads instead of cutting straight through them.

And here is a detail we are especially happy with: when you cut a road with the scissors tool, the carriers assigned to that route do not just freeze or vanish. They turn around and walk home to the depot on their own, finding whatever path they can. It is a small thing, but it means the road network feels like a living system you can reshape without breaking everything.

Behind the Scenes

The biggest invisible change is that animals, settlers, and goods now all share the same rendering pipeline. Before, each type had its own system for placing models in the world, and animals had fallen through the cracks entirely during an earlier engine rework. Now there is one unified pool -- if something exists in the game world and has a model, it shows up. This also means adding new creature types in the future is straightforward.

For roads, we moved away from placing 3D mesh strips on top of the terrain. Instead, the game paints a mask texture that the terrain and grass systems read. Where the mask says "road," the ground shader blends in dirt and the grass shader suppresses vegetation. Overlapping roads blend smoothly, and deletion just repaints the mask from whatever roads remain.

What's Next

With the world feeling more connected and alive, we are looking at expanding the building roster and letting settlers take on new specialized jobs.

What's New

Settlers in Novus Terminus: First Flags just got a lot more believable. We gave every settler a proper inventory -- think tool belt plus both hands -- and it changes the way the whole construction loop looks and feels.

Watch a builder heading out to fell trees for a new building. She walks to the flagpole, picks up her axe, and heads into the forest. After chopping down a tree, she tucks the axe away, hoists the freshly cut log with both hands, and carries it back to the flagpole. She sets the log down, pulls the axe back out, and marches off to the next tree. When every tree on the list is down she drops the axe at the flagpole for a carrier to return to the depot. The entire sequence runs on its own -- no player input needed once the job is queued.

What makes this satisfying is that every step is visible. You can see the axe in her right hand while she chops and you can see it disappear when she switches to carrying a log. Put the log down and the axe is back. It sounds like a small thing, but it solves a problem that had been bugging us for a while: items used to vanish mid-action or linger as ghosts at flagpoles long after they had been picked up. Tools and goods were fighting over the same slot, so equipping an axe could erase a log and vice versa. That is all gone now.

Carriers and depot workers benefit from the same system. A carrier swings a sack onto her back and walks the road network; a depot settler cradles a good in front of him. Every item in the settlement is accounted for at all times -- if it is in someone's hands or stowed on their belt, it will not also be sitting on the ground somewhere.

Behind the Scenes

Under the hood, each settler now carries a small set of slots: one for each hand, one for a two-handed carry, one for a backpack load, and a hidden stash for tools that are put away. The game checks these slots every frame to decide which items should be visible and where. That brute-force approach is intentional -- rather than trying to track every single hand-off event perfectly, we just look at the current state and render accordingly. It is a little more work for the computer each tick, but it wiped out an entire category of visual glitches in one stroke.

What's Next

With the inventory loop solid, we are turning our attention to the world around the settlers -- animals, terrain, and a road system that actually feels like part of the landscape.

What's New

We have been talking about the build loop for weeks, and now it is truly complete -- not just in the ECS plumbing, but visually. You can watch a building go up from nothing and follow every object, every tool, every log along the way.

Here is how it works. You place a barracks on a clearing. The headquarters dispatches a builder who walks out the door, follows the road network to the construction site, and waits at the flagpole. The HQ then sends an axe -- the depot settler carries it to the flagpole, a carrier picks it up, walks the winding road to the next pole, hands it off to another carrier, and so on until the axe arrives at the site. The builder picks it up, and you can see it in his hand.

Now the builder walks to the nearest tree, faces it, and swings. After a few seconds the tree topples over with a smooth rotation -- no more popping out of existence. A log appears where the tree stood. The builder stows the axe (it disappears from his hand, safely tucked away), picks up the log with both hands, and carries it back to the flagpole. He sets it down, the axe reappears in his hand, and he heads for the next tree. When all trees are cleared, he drops the axe at the flagpole -- and a carrier picks it up and walks it back to the HQ for storage.

Meanwhile, the depot settler at the headquarters has been busy too. Every time a log or a returned tool arrives at the HQ flagpole, the settler walks out, picks it up, carries it inside, and stores it. The door opens, closes, and the good vanishes into the depot. It is a small animation loop, but it makes the headquarters feel alive and purposeful.

After clearing and flattening, the builder requests a hammer and the real construction begins. Wood and stone arrive piece by piece through the carrier network, and the building rises stage by stage until it is complete. The entire chain -- from felling a tree to placing the last stone -- runs autonomously. You just watch it happen.

Behind the Scenes

The big technical change behind all of this is the new inventory system. Every settler now has an inventory with five distinct slots: right hand, left hand, a two-handed carry slot, a backpack slot (for carriers), and internal stowage for tools not currently in use.

This solved a bug that had been haunting us for days. Previously, when the builder picked up a log, the axe would simply vanish -- both items were stored in the same single field, and one overwrote the other. Now, tools and goods live in separate slots. When the builder picks up a log, the axe is automatically stowed (invisible but tracked), and when he drops the log, the axe comes back out. The visual system reads the inventory directly every frame, so there are no more phantom items lingering at flagpoles.

We also removed over 1,600 lines of old code this week -- four entire systems that had been replaced by our data-driven FSM architecture. The codebase is getting leaner, and bugs have fewer places to hide.

What's Next

The construction loop is solid. Next we are turning our attention to production chains: woodcutter lodges, farms, and mines. Once goods flow not just to construction sites but between workshops, the settlement will truly sustain itself.

What's New

This is the update we have been building toward for weeks. The settlers of Novus Terminus: First Flags are no longer just standing around looking pretty -- they are working. Really working. And you can watch every step of it.

Place a building in your settlement and the whole machinery kicks into motion. A builder walks out of the headquarters, picks up an axe from the flagpole, and heads to the construction site. Trees in the way? The builder chops them down -- and you can actually watch the tree topple over with a satisfying fall animation. Each felled tree produces a log that appears right there on the ground. The builder picks it up, carries it to the nearest flagpole, and sets it down. Now the carriers take over.

Carriers are the lifeblood of your road network. Each one is assigned to a stretch of road between two flagpoles, and they spend their day picking up goods at one end and walking them to the other. Watch a log travel from the forest clearing to the headquarters: a carrier hoists it onto their back with a loading animation, walks the winding road to the next flagpole, sets it down, and another carrier picks it up for the next leg. The goods physically move through your network, pole by pole, until they arrive at their destination. At the headquarters, a depot settler walks out, collects the delivered goods from the flagpole, carries them back inside, and the door closes behind them.

What makes this so satisfying is that every piece of it is visible and connected. There are no invisible teleportations, no abstract progress bars. If you place your roads poorly, you will see carriers waiting around with nothing to do while goods pile up at a distant flagpole. If you build an efficient network, you will see the smooth flow of materials rippling through your settlement like a well-oiled machine.

The whole construction loop now works from start to finish: the building requests the tools and materials it needs, the headquarters dispatches them, carriers transport everything through the road network, and the builder assembles the structure piece by piece. It is still early days, but the core promise of the game -- build a settlement, design your logistics, and watch it all come to life -- is right there on screen.

Behind the Scenes

One of the trickier problems we solved this week was making sure carriers navigate the roads naturally. Our roads are not straight lines -- they curve and wind across the terrain like real footpaths. Carriers now follow these winding paths precisely, leaning into curves with smooth look-ahead turning. We also made sure that when a carrier is already standing on their assigned road, they take a shortcut instead of walking all the way back to a flagpole first. Small detail, but it makes the whole thing look much more natural.

We also did a big spring cleaning of the codebase, removing over 1,600 lines of old code that had been replaced by our new systems. The game is getting leaner and more robust with every update.

What's Next

The transport chain is flowing, buildings go up, and the settlers are busy. Next on the agenda: getting the first production chains running -- woodcutter, food, mining -- so your settlement can truly sustain itself.

What's New

Something clicked this week. After months of building terrain, animals, shaders, and animation systems, we stepped back and asked ourselves: what is this game really about? The answer came clearly, and it shaped everything that followed.

Novus Terminus: First Flags is not just another city builder. It is a logistics puzzle wrapped in a cosy, living world. The heart of the game is what we call "System Bustle" -- every good in your settlement exists as a physical object. When a woodcutter fells a tree, the log appears on the ground. A carrier picks it up, hoists it onto their back, and walks it down the road to the next flagpole. Another carrier takes it from there to the sawmill. You can watch the entire journey, and if something goes wrong -- a road is too long, a junction is clogged, a storehouse is full -- you can see the problem. Carriers wait impatiently at crowded flagpoles. Exhausted workers slow down and eventually collapse. The jam is visible, and solving it is the puzzle.

This is what sets us apart from other games in the genre. Some city builders treat logistics as an invisible background system. Others give you settlers that bustle around as eye candy but have no real connection to what is happening underneath. In Novus Terminus, what you see is what is actually happening. You are the engineer of your own transport network, and every decision you make -- where to place a road, which junction to upgrade, what to prioritise -- has visible, tangible consequences.

We also finalised the design for the game's three clans, and they are not just cosmetic reskins. Each one plays fundamentally differently:

• The Iron Clan -- Versatile and balanced. They have access to the widest range of military units, including mounted knights, and their economy can adapt to almost any situation. A solid choice for players who like flexibility.
• The Wood Clan -- Masters of endurance and patience. Their workers tire 50% slower than other clans, their warriors fight with a samurai-inspired dual-strike style, and they gain bonuses when fighting in forests. Perfect for players who like to build deep, efficient networks and outlast their opponents.
• The Stone Clan -- The fortress builders. Their defensive structures are twice as strong, their legionnaires wear heavy bronze armour, and their stone walls are nearly impenetrable. Ideal for players who want to build an unbreakable domain and expand methodically.

The interplay between clans creates a natural rock-paper-scissors dynamic: Iron's direct assault overwhelms Wood, Wood's attrition grinds down Stone, and Stone's fortifications hold against Iron. But crucially, this asymmetry comes from how each clan's economy works, not from arbitrary combat bonuses. A Wood Clan player wins by building a logistics network so efficient that their slower army simply never runs out of supplies.

Behind the Scenes

This week also brought a major visual upgrade. We completely rebuilt the cloud system -- they now have rounded, three-dimensional shapes with sunlit tops and shadowed undersides, and their shadows fall correctly on both the terrain and the ocean. We fixed a long-standing lighting bug where the sun was accidentally shining upward (which explained a lot of eerie atmosphere in earlier screenshots), and we added proper aerial perspective fog that blends the ocean horizon into the sky. The whole game now has that warm, golden-hour glow we have been chasing since the beginning.

On the gameplay side, the first interactive loop is working. You can place flagpoles, connect them with roads, open the building catalogue to browse 30 buildings with 3D previews, place buildings on the terrain, and watch carriers deploy to walk the roads between them. Cut a road and the carrier reroutes in real time. It is still early, but the feeling of watching your little settlement hum with activity is already there.

What's Next

Carriers are walking, buildings are placed, but the real magic happens when goods start flowing. Next up: the full transport chain, from tree to sawmill to construction site.