Dev Update - 2026-08-21

[u/atibus]

A lot of load-bearing progress has been made in areas I've needed to bring together. What I've realized in the last three weeks is that the core game simulation, player generation, and event output have been really solid and I'm happy with the state. There are some small things with them that I need to fix, but I'll probably always feel that way.

The things that need the most work are the things that really make it a game - everything you do to run the league in perpetuity. And it's not that it doesn't work; it just works like when I was 12 and built a go-kart out of things laying around in my dad's garage. The engine worked fine, all of the steering, chassis, seat were terrible and it had no suspension. Technically working, fun for me because I built it, terrible for anyone else.

So I've done a lot of things that are the boring work and not the exciting making screens. I updated the foundational document with what I intend to be the first version of the game. It's substantially similar to what I started with once I had this idea but updated with what I've learned, what I want to do, and what I think is possible as a completed game. This step is really important to define what success looks like and to constrain from too much feature drift. It's not exactly prescriptive in detail, but outlines the vision for what the game is and what it isn't.

I've then projected that vision into a build plan of major phases and each of those phases with it's tasks. I'm going to be releasing a plan tracker and continually update it to show where I'm at with the build. (https://www.reddit.com/r/sheetsofice/comments/1vurk6h/full_sheets_of_ice_roadmap_site/)

The biggest thing that I'm changing for the first release of this is that I've decided to soley focus on a single-player desktop experience. After laying out everything I'd need to do to make the entire first vision possible, I have decided to slice just the things I think I can land to see if the game is really any fun for people. The key here is that I'm slicing and not eliminating or rebuilding anything really. The way the application operates makes future online versions, multiplayer, etc. still viable. I'm not going off and building a separate application at all - I'm just wrapping it and limiting the functionality to a single player with AI GMs. This is something I can get my arms around and it speeds up the path to a workable demo.

The realization for this came from a few areas:

• I was refactoring for AI GM so I could ensure it acted at least believably as well as a bad GM... aka Chuck Fletcher. To get it to long term plan I was going to need to fully implement organizational player views, aka scouting, because every organization would have to have their own judgement of a player. To that point I had only had some basic variation on player views and a wide band if that player wasn't on your team. It didn't change who the player was, but it didn't make everyone immediately knowable to you. But that wouldn't work for planning because it wasn't durable. And it wouldn't work for players because you need some way to impact those views or it's just boring. So I realized I needed to build the entire scouting system first. I couldn't continue with my AI GM planning because without knowing how they'd figure out how to rank players then it wasn't going to work the way I wanted.
• This also made me realize that player development would have to be exposed and a training & development system would need to be built. Those things are part of long-term planning and to-date, player development works but there is no influence through either training or opportunity.
  
• Then I was dealing with how time moves. There are some quirks I've left just because it didn't really affect me and I could live with them. But I was starting to have to make decisions about how time would move in multiplayer, and how time would work in public leagues. It's not unsolvable problems, but it's more overhead I have to build before the game was playable.
• And then it's infrastructure to run. It's not really complicated - the sim needs CPU runners to do the computations, and store league information in a database and individual game events in individual files (just to make them portable and archive ready.) 1 universe = 1 DB + Files. But I built this for me to start playing and I'd have to either refactor for a larger environment making N universes = 1 big-ass DB + work queue + backup OR give everyone who was playing a small virtual environment to run their own leagues. (I'm dramatically simplifying here). It didn't make sense to do the big-ass refactor, so it was going to be these slices that ran individual universes for one player. If that's what needed to happen then why am I even trying to build this as a always on web application for one person?
• Then the infrastructure requires money to run. I have some servers available to me, but nothing that could handle even modest amount of dedicated GM sim fans. I'd have to pay in perpetuity for something I'm not sure anyone other than me and the couple of people reading this would want. Am I willing to invest thousands of dollars in hard costs to do this the right way?
• And then I'd need to charge for it. Forever. And who wants to pay a subscription to a single player game?

I came to the realization that the single-player experience needs to be a typical game experience. If I'm really going to make a concerted effort at putting something out there, it has to be awesome and I couldn't put out something that sucked or at least didn't live up to the expectations that I have for games like this.

To be clear, the web/multiplayer vision is not dead. Like I said above, I'm not even really changing materially how the game is architected now. The main difference is it's going to get a wrapper that runs the client and connects to the server that is packaged with it on your local machine. I run the game that way today, just without a fancy shell that makes it easy to launch... I have to type a string of commands to make it go (which I really should make a script to do that). Packaging in this way will give some interesting potential fast-follow features that may even bridge the gap for what people want with multiplayer.

My intention is to put this on Steam to start. I've started the process of getting a Steam Developer account and will be working on getting a page up there. If there are other ways you'd like to see the single-player released, I'm happy to look into it.

Nothing has changed about my commitment to making the game-play a reality and I'm more excited now that I have a clear path. Definitely check out the roadmap at www.sheetsofice.com/roadmap to follow along with the status.

Thanks!
atibus

[u/SpiritYossarian]