Field notes
Devlog
Progress, decisions, and occasional notes on building a game with AI coding agents.
Found a bug or have feedback? File it on the GitHub issue tracker →
The enemy colony gets a new brain
The complaint I hear most — the AI is too easy, it always dies — finally gets a real answer: two sim fixes that give the enemy teeth. And the enemy colony can now be driven by Jev, TypeSafe's decision model, on standing orders you write yourself. Playtest coming soon.
Read →The ants learned to be afraid
A month of work in one post: seven sim versions of new ant behavior — fleeing, risk-aware foraging, battlefield scavenging — plus a full architecture review and the thirty-odd PRs it caused, touch groundwork, and a licensing decision that lets anyone ship Subterrans to an app store.
Read →Getting out of the player's way
The controls got a four-stage rework: a tool palette instead of overloaded clicks, a camera that actually zooms, a game that shows you your own queued commands, and controls that teach themselves — all of it render-only, with the simulation untouched.
Read →Sanding down Phase 3
Phase 3 shipped a game loop. The ten days since were spent making it correct, fast, and survivable — a meaner and better-behaved spider, fixed invasion pathing, real tooling, save robustness, and a starvation bug that needed finding.
Read →Phase 3 shipped: it's a round now
Phase 3 is done. Seven mechanics, eight implementation stages, seven sim-version bumps. Here is what shipped and what it actually felt like to land.
Read →A new roadmap
The roadmap has been reorganized into phases. Where we are, where v1.0 is, and what changed from the old structure.
Read →Phase 3: designing the first real round
Phase 3 is the first version of Subterrans where a match has a beginning, middle, and end. Here is what it introduces and why.
Read →The week the ants got better
Visible brood carry, diagonal motion, real pixel-art terrain — plus a structured codebase review that found twenty latent bugs you'll never see fire.
Read →First players, first bugs
What changed in two weeks of going from private repo to embedded demo: real issue reports, the last Phase 1 gameplay seams, and one system that got smaller instead of bigger.
Read →The seven principles
Seven non-negotiable architectural rules for Subterrans, why each one matters, and what breaks if you skip it.
Read →Why Subterrans
What SimAnt was, what's missing in 2026, and what Subterrans actually commits to building.
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