Argosy

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• Announcements·7 Aug 2026Official

  Feature Friday: Week of August 7 - Playtests and Polish

  No Feature Friday last week, and no Technical Tuesday either. Both went into getting the playtest ready, which is the first thing to cover.The playtest is open!!Anyone can sign up. There's no application, no form, and nothing to write.Access goes out in batches drawn at random from everyone waiting. I'm growing that pool slowly rather than letting everyone in at once, because a hundred people hitting a bug I can actually fix is worth more than a thousand hitting it while I'm still reading the first report. If you don't make the first batch you stay in for the next one. Nobody needs to sign up twice.The tavern stopped selling tipsA barrel of beer is 34.8 gold. A trade tip is worth thousands. No single price was ever going to be honest about both, which is why buying the same fact twice felt so mechanical.Standing a round costs 25 gold, once a day per town, and what it buys is a place in the room. Welcome is counted in rounds stood per city and decays while you're away. The landlord gives up more of the same arrangement the better he knows you: first the ware, then the port that wants it, then the money. Standing in town seats you nearer the fire before you've bought anything, though never all the way.It arrives as talk overheard rather than a briefing. A landlord grumbling that three men have come in asking after the stuff. A clerk from another port sat in the corner all evening, marking down what came off which hull. Not drinking. Marking. Some of it asks for a moment's inference, and about one reading in eight somebody is past caring what he says and the whole thing spills at once, ware, price, port and the sum on a full hold.The dice table got the same treatment. Stakes now scale to your purse rather than a flat 100-gold cap, there are long odds alongside even money, and a throw is held for a second or two while the dice tumble instead of resolving before they've moved.Windows that hid what the engine already knewThis turned out to be the same fault in five differ...
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• Announcements·28 Jul 2026Official

  Technical Tuesday - 28th July - What the Merchant wants

  Welcome back to Technical Tuesday, the counterpart to Feature Friday where we pull back the curtain on how the thing actually works, and occasionally how badly it nearly didn't. Last week was the engine loop. This week is the thing the loop exists for: a few hundred AI merchants who read the world, form opinions about it, and act on them. What actually is one of these merchants, in code? And how does a pile of if-statements end up looking, from the dock, like somebody with a plan? Fair warning. Some of this code I'm happy with, some of it I'd write completely differently today, and I'll point at both.Quick Sidenote:A lot of what you will read here is still Work in Progress and a lot of it is....not perfect. Things like the budget per tick being ~3 Merchants and the "every behavior fires, regardless of what the previous behaviors did" are all on my todo list and should be understood partially as a sort of warning of what NOT to fall into. These Technical Tuesdays are an exploration on how Argosy works, not as gospel about how to do it perfectly.I am only human after all :)A merchant is a list of small opinionsThe whole AI hangs off one interface:public interface IAiBehaviour { float Priority { get; } bool IsUrgent => false; bool IsTriggered(AiContext context); void Respond(AiContext context, List output); }IsTriggered asks "does this apply to me right now?". Respond says what to do about it. Neither is allowed to touch the world. Respond gets handed a list, adds to it, and that list eventually goes into the engine's command queue. Same queue your clicks go into. Running from a pirate is this:public void Respond(AiContext context, List output) { foreach ((Ship ship, Position evasionTarget) in _threatBuffer) output.Add(new MoveToPositionCommand(context.PlayerId, ship.Id, evasionTarget)); }That's it. That's the behaviour.Deciding whether to run is about thirty lines. Working out where to run to takes another hundred, because on a map that's mostly land, "away from the p...
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• Announcements·24 Jul 2026Official

  Feature Friday: Week of July 18

  This week was almost entirely one feature. The map editor has had tools for shaping coastlines, placing cities, and decorating the world with sprites. What it didn't have was a way to actually draw on the map - to put a pen to parchment, so to speak. That's what landed this week.Grouping and SortingOne of the things that has been pretty static for a while is the Market Hall window. After some feedback about the sheer amount of information in that window, i did some work on it in order to make it clearer and more customizable to what the user wants to see. There's now Groups and Sorting of the good. This means you can quickly find what you are looking for and/or spot good deals This should help players, especially those new to the genre to understand what they are looking at.The ART toolsThe editor toolbar already had two groups: Nav for terrain and coastline editing, and Deco for sprite placement. There's now a third group - ART - with three tools built around a shared idea: marks you make should look like they belong on a period chart, both in the editor and when the map is loaded in-game. Line tool (hotkey D)Click to place polylines, or draw freehand. The path is simplified on release so you don't end up with thousands of micro-vertices from a loose stroke. After placing, an edit mode lets you drag individual vertices, insert a point on any edge, delete a vertex, or Alt-drag the whole line to reposition it. Style controls cover width, colour, opacity, solid/dashed/dotted patterns, optional curve smoothing, and dot or arrow end-caps. Lines live in the same depth space as sprite decorations, so you can layer them naturally with anything already on the map. Text tool (hotkey X)Three sub-modes:Place - drop a straight label. The text field focuses immediately so you can start typing.Curve - lay text flowing along a path you draw. Click to place path points, double-click to commit. The classic use case is sea names and region labels that follow a coastline rather than s...
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• Announcements·21 Jul 2026Official

  Technical Tuesday - 21st July

  Technical Tuesday #2 - The Beating HeartWelcome back to Technical Tuesday, the counterpart to Feature Friday where we pull back the curtain on how the thing actually works, and occasionally how badly it nearly didn't.Last week I sketched the loop on a napkin: an ordered list of systems, each reading a shared frame and mutating it in place, one after another, with the AI riding along in the same rhythm. That description was accurate at the time. Since then, every one of those sentences has been quietly renegotiated, because "one after another" turns out to be a luxury you cannot afford when 75 systems and a few hundred merchants all want a slice of a 16-millisecond budget.This week is the loop: what one heartbeat of Argosy actually does, and the surprising number of tricks hiding inside it to make that heartbeat land on time, every time, roughly 60 times a second. Fair warning: last week was the napkin. This week is the blueprint.Two loops, not oneThe single biggest change from the napkin sketch: the AI moved out of the loop entirely. In the original design the engine ticked, then the AI thought, then the engine ticked again, all on one thread of execution. The problem is obvious in hindsight. The tick loop wants to hit a hard 16ms budget roughly 60 times a second. The AI, with a few hundred merchants each running a 56-behaviour decision tree, has no interest in 16ms and never will. Chaining them means every heavy AI pass shows up as a dropped frame in the simulation. So they were divorced. The engine runs its loop; the AI runs a completely separate loop on its own background task. They start together and run side by side: await Task.WhenAll( engine.RunAsync(ct), // the tick loop aiLoop.RunAsync(state, engine.EnqueueCommand, ct)); // the AI think loopThey touch through two narrow seams: the AI reads the shared game state, and the AI writes commands into the engine's queue. It leaves every field of the world untouched. The discipline matches the old design; the new pa...
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• Announcements·17 Jul 2026Official

  Feature Friday: Week of July 15

  1,000 Wishlists!!!Argosy hit 1,000 wishlists this week!!For a game that hasn't been announced with any fanfare, has no trailer yet, and is still in early playtesting, that number means a lot. Every one of those is someone who found the game, read what it was about, and decided they wanted to know more. Thank you - genuinely. It's a small milestone in the grand scheme of things, but it's the first one, and it felt worth saying out loud. If you've been following along and haven't wishlisted yet, it helps more than you might think. First Town View assetsThe Town View rebuild has been talked about in previous posts. This week there's something to actually show. The first two custom building assets are done: the Town Hall and the Market Hall. Below are timelapse videos of both being created from scratch. Watching a medieval merchant building come together out of nothing is, I'll admit, more satisfying than I expected. These are the first of what will eventually be a full set of hand-crafted buildings replacing the current static Town View. There's a long way to go, but the style is locked in and the pace is picking up. Another dense week on the development side too. The headline additions are a full tech tree, a proper interactive tutorial, famine finally being reachable in the economy, and a new in-game newspaper. Let's get into it. The Tech TreeResearch is now in the game in full. Rather than a fixed unlock tree you work through in order, Argosy uses an opportunity-driven system. Research projects appear when conditions are right - the right buildings, the right standing, the right moment. A Scholar arrives in town and offers to investigate something. You fund the work, roll progress over time, and eventually unlock an effect that improves your trading, production, shipbuilding, or legal position.There's a Research window to track what's active and what's been completed. Projects sync in multiplayer. Funding a project that's hit a setback can boost it back into viabili...
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