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 →
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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