Spirit of Europe - Enlightenment

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• Announcements·1 Sept 2026Official

  Devlog 7 - The Imp in the System

  Once our great web of interrelations between works, projects, developments and policies was fully loaded up, looking pretty and shiny in Miro, it had to actually be implemented.While we find implementing systems quite satisfying, this particular web seemed to always turn into creepypasta levels of spaghetti. So, we refactored. And again, and again… Then we realized: Nope, it’s not working because it can’t in that form, we have feedback loops in here at a design level: if developments are required by personalities to produce works, which unlock tech, which is required by policies, which then enable those same developments, the problem is no longer the implementation - the real imp is the design. Therefore, some of the design assumptions had to be revisited. So, we had to go back to some ground rules and impose some serious restrictions and compartmentalise unidirectional relations at first, to make sure we can track everything. Needless to say, all of this also impacted the content itself, so it was back to the content to re-filter it and re-adjust it. How? Well, remember those initial design boards and docs? Yep, we went back there to scour for alternatives that would better fit our new adjustments to the systems.So this stage was a quarter construction, a quarter revision, and half frustration. But by the end of it, the project finally seemed to settle on something much more solid.(February 2026)
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• Announcements·25 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog 6 - The deep web

  Once the project had some visual identity and a basic technical backbone, the next step was giving the world actual moving parts.This was the phase where cities, authors, works, stats and factions started becoming proper gameplay entities. This also meant defining how they relate to one another, which again, required some adjustments of the data and even some design tweaks, because some interactions were still not adding up.A lot of this phase was about building the relationships between gameplay entities and basically forming the gameplay systems. We focused on the nodes/cities and their respective personalities, which brought about their works, which needed interaction and relationships with the wider world - as they have in history.So we went back to the design board to sort out how the projects tree would look like: which works were crucial to which fields of science, philosophy, economics etc, and which fields evolved into others or provided the foundations for yet more advanced ones. So we categorized them into tiers and domains, we selected which works will go where and had some idea on how the tree would look like.Then, we also needed to make sure we glue the “tech tree” together with other moving parts, so developments and policies needed to enter the mix. We sorted out the requirements and unlocks of each “tech” in the tree to make sure it all glues up - of course it didn’t, so we had to go back to the content and adjust it, find ways to beat it into submission without sacrificing historical accuracy.Then we grew tired and decided the implementation for all of this will be easy once it’s all clear so we can take a break and leave some work for the next devlog.(January 2026)
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• Announcements·18 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog 5 - It starts looking like our game

  Once the technical groundwork was in place, the next step was less about raw setup and more about identity.This was the phase where the project started getting its first proper in-game language: UI templates, some textures, widgets, node framework, and the first structured passes on authors, works and related data.That mattered a lot more than it may sound. This project carries quite a lot of historical information, so presentation was never going to be a minor issue. The interface had to start finding a balance between readability and aesthetic, between structured yet not lifeless.This was also one of the first moments when the project’s visual direction began to feel coherent. The Enlightenment-inspired paper look, the more print-like interface elements, the general sense of “ink, notes, manuscripts, diagrams, layered thought” - all of that started entering the game here, even if still in early, unfinished form.At the same time, we were laying in the first real gameplay-facing content structures: nodes, authors, works, and the systems needed to support them. So while this stage still involved a lot of framework work, it was also the point where the game began to feel less generic and more like itself.(December 2025)
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• Announcements·11 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog 4 - Can we finally start now?! Please?

  So, after all the research, filtering, structuring and design wrestling, it was finally time to do the thing people usually think gamedev starts with: opening your engine of choice and building actual game stuff - because that’s what all those YouTube pros making “make Diablo in one day” tutorials do, right?This phase was mostly about technical groundwork. Project setup, engine-side decisions, early content pipeline tests, camera controls, post-process experiments, map work, materials, and the general question of how this thing should actually look.A lot of it was first-pass work, obviously. The point here wasn’t polish, it was to establish a base that could support the game later without immediately collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. Which meant making and testing some tools, fumbling with technical and implementation tradeoffs etc.This is also where the visual side started properly entering the conversation. Not final art, not even close, but the first steps towards atmosphere: how the map should feel, how readable the world is from a gameplay perspective, what style we want, how much is just right, and how to avoid making the whole thing look either utterly dead or undoable - you know, scaling problems.Basically, this is finally the moment where we started working on the actual product. (November 2025)
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• Announcements·4 Aug 2026Official

  Devlog 3 - Reality check!

  So, after the historical material was filtered, sorted, layered and generally bullied into a shape that made sense for our game, we reached the next perfectly normal phase of development: discovering that game design ideas are much clearer on the Miro board than they are once you try to sketch out your data structures.This was the point where the “design version” of the game had to start becoming actual data…That sounds simple enough, until you actually sit down and ask: what exactly is a city in systemic terms? What is an author? What is a work? What counts as a project, a development, a policy, a faction, what layer do they belong to, what indicators they contain and how everything relates to everything else… What are the common denominators?!Because at first, of course, everything sounds brilliant. You sketch out systems, connections, progression layers, interactions, and think: yes, this is going to be elegant, rich, clever, very impressive, definitely no problem here.Then reality hits: nope, that won’t work. That overlaps with this here. That creates nonsense edge cases. That mechanic seems redundant. That is way too expensive to build. That is historically interesting but mechanically useless. That is mechanically interesting but introduces historical inaccuracies. Back to the drawing board.So this stage became a back-and-forth between design and structure. Change the design, adjust the data model. Adjust the data model, realize the design needs to change again. Repeat until things stop fighting each other and you have clarity-ish…A lot of the core gameplay layers started settling here: nodes, authors, works, projects, developments, policies, factions, events, and the logic connecting them. Not in their final form, obviously, but in a form stable enough that actual development could begin without rebuilding the whole thing every three days.Probably one of the least visible phases from the outside, but a very important one. (October 2025)
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