AFTERCODE BUILD R1 · IN DEV
Devlog Archive
[R0] VIDEO Watch · 9 min

Devlog 02 — Why a solo dev picked terraforming

A walk-through of the design space narrowing — open-world ARPG → survival → terraforming-first — and what each iteration taught me before the pivot.

The 9-minute video above (or below, depending on your scroll) is the long version. The short version is in this post.

The constraint nobody talks about

Solo dev = one developer × ~30 hours/week × 18-month runway before money pressure. Some genres fit that envelope. Some don’t.

Open-world ARPGs don’t. They demand a content layer that grows linearly with playtime — every hour the player puts in, somebody had to author an hour of content. Items, encounters, tilesets, dialogue, quests. There is no scaling trick. Diablo IV had ~700 people. Path of Exile 2 had ~150. I have one.

Roguelites scale better. Procedural content + run variety. But roguelites need constant novelty per run, and the design space for “what’s the next surprise” gets thin fast unless you have a content team feeding it.

Survival games are tight. The constraint loop (food, water, temperature, oxygen) is genuinely interesting, but the genre is crowded enough that “another survival game” is not a marketable position in 2026.

Terraforming-style automation games scale phenomenally well. A few interlocking systems → hours of emergent play. The systems do the work. Planet Crafter is two devs. Satisfactory is ~25. The genre is forgiving to small teams in a way that nothing else is.

That observation alone didn’t make the pivot. It just kept showing up in my notes.

What the iteration history actually looked like

I’ll spare the full timeline; the vision-pivot post has the in-depth version. The short arc:

  1. Open-world ARPG sci-fi. Diablo + Helldivers in a blender. Built combat, dungeons, hub, vendors. Worked. Felt like a competent ARPG and nothing more.
  2. Survival flavor on top. Added storms, shelter, food. The food/water vitals were friction without payoff. Cut them.
  3. Storms became the spine. Storms gave outdoor combat real texture — the act of returning to base was suddenly a beat in the loop. That’s when I knew “outdoor → indoor → outdoor” was the real cadence.
  4. Base-building expanded. Phase 15 in the old roadmap was “buildable defenses”. I started building Satisfactory-style modular kits. The base became the most interesting object in the game.
  5. The realisation. The base wasn’t a feature anymore — it was the thing. Combat was service to the base. The base was service to a planet. Pivot.

What was preserved across iterations

A surprising amount. The animator blend tree, the hotbar, the audio stack, the inventory, the world streaming, the status pipeline. The infrastructure never cared which genre I was building.

What changed every iteration was the goal and the content:

  • ARPG goal: kill the boss → loot → kill the next boss.
  • Survival goal: don’t die.
  • Terraforming goal: broadcast Earth.

Each goal demanded different content. The combat feel — the moment-to-moment of weighty top-down action — survived all three.

What this means for design moving forward

Three things I’m carrying forward into every R-phase:

  1. Build the systems first, the content second. Content layers are linear-cost. Systems are exponential-payoff. Every system I build correctly produces hours of play. Every piece of content I build produces minutes.
  2. Subtractive design beats additive design. Each iteration above was cutting something — vitals, dungeons, NPCs, quests. The pivot wasn’t “add terraforming” so much as “remove everything that wasn’t terraforming.”
  3. Solo dev = systems dev. The genres that fit my envelope are the ones where five interlocking systems produce surprises the players find, not surprises the designer hand-authors. Terraforming, automation, roguelites with deep system depth, sandbox sims. Pick from those.

What’s in the actual video

The video above walks through:

  • (0:00) The pitch in 60 seconds.
  • (1:30) Why the open-world ARPG framing didn’t fit a solo budget.
  • (3:45) Live build footage from the v0.4.0 jam-mode playtest scene.
  • (6:20) The overlap zone between terraforming, building, and combat.
  • (8:10) What the next 6 months look like — R2 through R10.

If you want the next one when it drops: the newsletter. If you want to back the build: the support tiers are open.

The next post in the design-space series is about combat shape: Notes on top-down ARPG combat in 2026.