I started with one blocky city and a straightforward plan: let people mine it, rob it and annoy the police. BUILD 70 now carries persistent worlds, an economy with consequences, ambulance response, enterable rooms, simple block-built crowds, physical tool swings, clear weapon sights, staged mining damage and installed desktop builds. The plan has developed complications.
Shipped is checkedWorking means workingPlans have no datesThe game may object
How to read this thing
Direction, not a hostage note
Checked means it is in the current beta. Working now means code or art is being made but has not passed every release gate. Planned is ordered ambition, not a promise wearing a date.
Roadmaps are famously accurate documents, which is why this one contains no dates.
✓ Shipped● Current beta◐ Working now○ Planned× Superseded
01
Shipped Where it began
One life. One city. Several bad decisions.
The first real version already had the argument at the centre of Hard Block Life: the city should not be scenery. Roads, walls, trees and ground should be material. Crime should create heat. Getting home alive should matter more than the robbery.
Early police strategy was essentially “run at the problem.” It was a start.
What actually shipped
A breakable voxel city that doubles as shelter and inventory.
Mining, building, lairs, stashes and a one-life crime run.
Shops, stolen vehicles, police heat and score banked on escape.
Shared seeded rooms for 2–8 people making coordinated mistakes.
The original public GitHub build, replaced by the protected Cloudflare beta.
Foundation Break the world. Carry it home.
02
Playable now BUILD 70
The city remembers what you did, then sends a bill.
The current beta is a compact crime sandbox where worlds, sites and cities retain consequences. The player can launder a robbery, watch an ambulance work the aftermath, take police through buildings and onto roofs, aim through a weapon-specific sight picture, read a block breaking through staged cracks and install the same BUILD on Windows, Mac or Arch.
Playable now means I have personally made these bugs someone else’s problem.
What BUILD 70 keeps live
Dedicated room worlds preserve validated block edits and reconnect identity while 2–8 players share the live city.
Dirty cash, laundering, repeat-site security, separate city heat, notoriety, the Board and pre-job risk make money remember how it was earned.
Injured and critical pedestrians remain in the world while ambulances dispatch, treat, load and drive them to a clinic.
Ground- and first-floor rooms, walkable stairwells, roof access and routed police pursuit turn building shells into playable cover.
Localized vehicle damage, bounded debris, deterministic fire and persistent service state keep crashes and rebuilding physical.
Authored storefronts and weapons now meet darker lighting, distinct axe, pickaxe and shovel arcs, and synchronized muzzle flashes, smoke, tracers, casings, recoil and sound.
Each gun owns its hip and ADS framing; staged crack shells replace shrinking red blocks, and bounded miniature pickups replace letter cards without changing loot or collection.
Ordinary pedestrians are simple 132-triangle block people with separate head, arms and legs, six readable reactions and region-matched detachment on terminal sniper or close-shotgun hits. The authored adult remains the player model.
The local model gallery exposes the shipping procedural civilian plus all 52 active authored assets and their real runtime diagnostics; unsafe box proxies remain quarantined at every distance.
Fixed-step simulation, bounded world streaming, Worker saves and a warmed post chain protect desktop frame pacing without hiding the High preset.
Browser production and installed Windows, universal Mac and native Arch builds are on BUILD 70; TestFlight remains BUILD 63.
The close-up quality batch is now inside BUILD 70. The next hard design problem is recovery: verify the progression reward report, choose a reinstall-safe tester identity and build any deeper wound system around a non-lethal outcome instead of stacking more punishment on permadeath.
Injury only earns its complexity if the wounded player still wants to play.
What is on the workbench
Per-weapon sight framing, staged mining cracks, bounded miniature pickups, simple block civilians, detachable terminal hit regions and physical tool arcs ship in BUILD 70.
Reproduce the reported milestone that reached completion without visibly paying its reward, then make any refused grant impossible to miss.
Choose a recoverable tester identity before adding reinstall-safe progress; the privacy and support consequences are part of that choice.
Start player wounds with a non-lethal downed, robbed and hospitalised outcome; only then layer the existing six hit regions into recoverable limb state.
Keep limb consequences identical on every client: full desktop may show detachment and blood, while iPhone and touch keep the limb attached and visibly incapacitated.
Add light/heavy bleed, blood-trail tracking, painkiller overrides, zone armour, ammunition traits, surgery and prosthetics as measured slices—not one raid-calibrated punishment dump.
Three.js remains the shipping runtime. The validated Unreal proof is preserved and parked.
DOWNED×RECOVERYSHOCK / WOUNDS / ARMOUR / PROSTHETICS / SAME RULES
04
Horizon The Big World
Make somewhere worth getting lost in.
The horizon is a generated world with geography that explains itself: mountains make valleys, rivers shape roads, roads connect distinct cities, and the current room slice grows into richer blocks, building types and routes worth escaping through.
“Make the map bigger” is several engineering disciplines wearing a trench coat.
What the horizon contains
Mountain ranges, rivers, lakes, fjords, coastlines, farmland and forests.
Blocks, lots and setbacks that support larger zoned cities, landmarks, parks, furnished building types and jumpable roof fabric.
Highways, long-distance traffic and eventually public transport.
Fire stations and fire crews, multi-city mutual aid, more wildlife and responders that react to a larger world.
Big World Roads should eventually go somewhere.
05
Dream The world remembers
Give the world a past. Then let players ruin it.
The current game already remembers edits, repeat targets, local heat and notoriety. The big dream is deeper history: a world that existed before the player, where people have names, homes, relationships, memories and motives, and every mine, grave, weapon or abandoned house points back to something that actually happened.
Most legends will be weather, crime, lies or somebody getting confused. A vanishingly small number may be properly weird.
What the dream means
Named people with households, work, relationships, routines and bounded memories.
Generated settlement histories, migration, trade, disasters, crimes and succession.
Ruins, old mines, graves, artifacts and rumors with real provenance.
Player and NPC actions entering the same canonical history, eventually under one authoritative shared world.
A PERSONA PLACEAN OBJECTA VERY DUBIOUS RUMOR
Terms of unreasonable ambition
The small print, but readable
This page is meant to be open, not accidentally contractual. Here is exactly what the labels mean.
01
No dates
This is one-person development. A calendar would mostly document new and inventive ways to be wrong.
02
No fake precision
A feature is not 78% complete because somebody coloured most of a rectangle.
03
Now means now
The current-beta chapter describes BUILD 70. Working and planned items stay visibly separate until they pass their release gates.
You have reached the irresponsible end
Come make the plan worse
Play the game that exists, tell me what is funny, tell me what is broken, and occasionally enjoy the fact that those are the same thing.
