THE BLOG RETURNS: CARCASSONNE IS FUN AND INSPIRING!

Its tough in the games industry right now, but lets not waste that down time!

5:41 AM (AEST), Nov 25th, 2025

Introduction

It’s been a long time since my last post, but as I mentioned before, it was for very good reasons. During the last three and a half years, I’ve been working in the games industry as a Unity Games Developer! Sadly, my studio has recently faced some tough times and had to make some roles redundant. Unfortunately, mine was one of those roles. During my time at SavySoda, I learned a lot and grew into a much better developer. I’m genuinely thankful for the opportunities I had and will always be grateful for those experiences. So, what’s next? Well, while I search for new opportunities in the industry, I’m excited to finally have some time on my hands to work on some personal projects, and can’t wait to get talking about it!

Right now, my current plan is not to panic.. I’m going with the flow! I have a few ideas in mind, so I’m going to start experimenting, throwing some things together and not just with games development but with other creative ventures too. If something sticks, then I’ll keep pushing those ideas forward; otherwise, it’s okay; at least I gave it my best shot!

That brings me to why I have revived this blog: I have a new game idea, and I think it’s time to start sharing its development journey! The first idea I want to share is a new survival game concept. I know—it might sound ambitious for a new personal project, but don’t worry, this isn’t a regular survival game..

Survival Tile? Survival Chess? Let’s go with Survival Simulator 2026 for now!

A few months ago, my brother got me a board game called Carcassonne for my birthday, and I can honestly say it changed my life! The first time I played it just blew my mind. I quickly became addicted, got all my friends addicted, and soon we were playing so much that I started dreaming of those darn little tiles!

One night after a long board game session, I got thinking, what if, after finishing your Carcassonne map with friends, you could play another game on that same map? What kind of game could it be? Something like Age of Empires or Civilization? Suddenly, it clicked. What if there was a survival game where, instead of exploring the map, you build it? From there, my imagination went wild, and I came up with what might be the most amazing game idea I’ve ever dreamed into existence!

The core concept is simple: your player starts on a single grass tile. Each turn, you draw a tile from a shuffled deck and place it on the map, allowing your map to expand turn-by-turn. The map features tiles with resources like trees, rocks, and berry bushes, and you must command your player to interact with these tiles. Think of it like queuing tasks for your Sims while the timer is paused. Once you’ve planned your actions for the turn, you start the day, and your player carries out the assigned tasks in order.

Development

Since this is a development blog, of course, I’m not going to reveal all my game ideas without starting development work on them first! There isn’t much to show yet, and I’m not ready to share the source code, but I will share some concepts and what I’ve got working so far.

The start of development has focused mostly on the map, creating manager classes for the Decks, Maps, and Tile Hands, which has allowed me to create a MapTile placement system that supports picking a tile, checking for legal placements, and allowing placement on the actual map.

After finishing the map system, I have started work on organising the project to scale better with how the idea has evolved. I have most of the structural backend ready to handle the turns and each phase in a turn, queuing actions, and, of course, placing tiles on the map. Currently, I am working on the UI, mostly trying to make something functional so I can start jumping into testing the core concepts and design of the game. Below is a mockup of the current UI of the MainScene, and a screenshot of its current implementation in the game.

As you can see in the video, sprites aren’t quite matching up when connected. This isn’t a bug; it's an issue with the sprites used for these MapTiles. The sprites have been generated by AI for now, so I can focus on the programming and design work, but hopefully, in the near future, I can draw these myself or find an artist willing to help fix these issues!

Final Points

This is all I have to share for now. More development blog posts are coming soon, I promise! With future updates, I hope to share more actual code and project progress, and hopefully a fun demo for you to try as well. I hope someone finds this interesting, but most importantly, I hope that by posting again, I hold myself accountable to keep developing this project. I really want to see this game come to life so I can spend hundreds of hours playing it myself!