Going to Savannah tomorrow to hang out with Mike "world record for most videogames" Thomasson , and old friend from artschool
**Dev Update – Roadtrip Progress & Direction**
Quick update now that I’m back in **Georgia** and properly settled again.
A lot of the work during the roadtrip wasn’t flashy, but it ended up being some of the most important groundwork I’ve done on the game so far. Working from a laptop forced me to slow down and really think through systems instead of just building content, and that ended up paying off.
The biggest thing I locked in was the **seed system**. The game now runs on four separate seeds: Galaxy, Chapter, Marine, and History. Galaxy handles the big picture stuff like map layout and world placement. Chapter controls identity and visual/naming bias. Marine is the individual Space Marine stream, and History drives long-term Imperium events, Tarot behavior, and Warp weirdness. Everything procedural now pulls from those seeds instead of using random calls, which means campaigns are fully repeatable and shareable.
I also spent time cleaning up how **daily actions** work (the “Daily Do” layer). That system is now clearly separated from location-wide behavior, which makes it much easier to reason about things like travel, downtime, healing, meditation, and long-term attrition without everything bleeding together.
Marine generation got some love too. Each Marine now feels like they come from a consistent stream rather than being a one-off roll, which is important once you start tracking losses, veterans, and long service histories.
Creatively, I had a really good conversation with **Alan Merritt** during this period that helped clarify something I’ve been circling for a long time. We talked about early Warhammer, the Great Crusade era, and the idea that Games Workshop actually wants *new* stories—not just tighter retellings of existing ones.
That pushed me to finally commit to a specific Chapter for the game: **the Dark Crusaders**.
They’re perfect for what I’m trying to do. There’s very little official lore, which means the player can define the Chapter without breaking canon, and it also helps me **limit scope** in a healthy way. Instead of trying to support every possible Chapter identity, I can focus on making one feel deep, coherent, and meaningful. Fleet-based, crusading, guarding the Pilgrim Path—it all lines up naturally with the mechanics and the tone I’ve been building.
Choosing the Dark Crusaders feels less like narrowing the game and more like finally giving it a spine.
Now that I’m stationary again, the next phase is much more about execution: Terra as a starting/tutorial space, Warp travel becoming playable, Tarot reacting to history and exposure, and turning all this scaffolding into something the player can actually touch and play.
More soon.
