Spirit of Europe - Enlightenment — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Devlog 12 - Are we there yet? | 2026-10-05 | With the world built and the game finally playable from start to finish, we reached that magical stage of development where everything is technically there and working, yet the game is unplayable and most definitely not fun!Some were the usual technical suspects: save/load issues, menu oddities, settings not behaving, transitions acting strange, tutorials not always showing when they should, some audio bugs, buttons misbehaving, missing clears, missing checks, missing portraits, missing warnings - the standard “how is this even connected to that?” kind of nonsense.Then came the real game-maker part for this genre: balance.There have been endl |
| Devlog 11 - Where 3D? | 2026-09-28 | At this point, most game systems were in place and largely working, the UI was there, content was there, we still needed some portraits and whatnot, but otherwise it was “all done”.So this phase was about building the actual 3D world.That sounds simple enough, until you actually try to figure out what kind of 3D world this game should even have. Because this is not a city builder, not a character action game, not a grand strategy map in the usual sense but something… different. It needed to feel atmospheric, historical, not too stylized, and light enough to run on older machines, since we figured peeps rolling enthusiast-grade hardware wouldn |
| Devlog 10 - Flashback | 2026-09-21 | At this point, the game had enough moving parts that it needed proper long-term progression, not just local interactions and isolated unlocks. So it was time to finish up the projects tree.The projects tree is like your usual tech tree in most strategy games. Our has a twist though: historical personalities produce works through inspiration - which is a currency produced by your cities and various developments. These works coagulate into projects - which are whole fields like “celestial mechanics”, “steam power” or “chamber music”.This setup, coupled with the fact that the player doesn’t have enough time to complete the whole tree and/or conq |
| Devlog 9 - Yes, yes, but where is the game?! | 2026-09-15 | Once the UI skeleton was there and the game had its real content sitting inside actual widgets, the next obvious question was: alright then, what can the player do?That is where developments, policies and actions properly entered the picture.Because cities - or nodes, as they’re internally called - have developments which the player can unlock and build up. Those developments unlock actions. A printing press allows the player to publish pamphlets. A public opera house might make the masses happy, but the elites won’t like rubbing their fancy silks against a commoner’s rough hide coat - as for the clergy, well, they never condoned that buffoon |
| Devlog 8 - And so, it begins… | 2026-09-08 | Like any respectable 4x game, we need UI. Widgets… Lots of widgets… Modular and procedural widgets within other widgets that fit into lists of widgets that are integrated into the grand “Main_UI”.Once design and implementation stopped eating each other alive, it was finally time to put actual, visible content into the game in a form we could see and interact with.This was the phase where the first proper in-engine framework started taking shape. Nodes got their own structure, widgets started appearing, the data foundations were laid in properly, and the project started shifting from logs and strings printed to the screen to actual widgets.Of |
| Devlog 7 - The Imp in the System | 2026-09-01 | Once our great web of interrelations between works, projects, developments and policies was fully loaded up, looking pretty and shiny in Miro, it had to actually be implemented.While we find implementing systems quite satisfying, this particular web seemed to always turn into creepypasta levels of spaghetti. So, we refactored. And again, and again… Then we realized: Nope, it’s not working because it can’t in that form, we have feedback loops in here at a design level: if developments are required by personalities to produce works, which unlock tech, which is required by policies, which then enable those same developments, the problem is no lo |
| Devlog 6 - The deep web | 2026-08-25 | Once the project had some visual identity and a basic technical backbone, the next step was giving the world actual moving parts.This was the phase where cities, authors, works, stats and factions started becoming proper gameplay entities. This also meant defining how they relate to one another, which again, required some adjustments of the data and even some design tweaks, because some interactions were still not adding up.A lot of this phase was about building the relationships between gameplay entities and basically forming the gameplay systems. We focused on the nodes/cities and their respective personalities, which brought about their wo |
| Devlog 5 - It starts looking like our game | 2026-08-18 | Once the technical groundwork was in place, the next step was less about raw setup and more about identity.This was the phase where the project started getting its first proper in-game language: UI templates, some textures, widgets, node framework, and the first structured passes on authors, works and related data.That mattered a lot more than it may sound. This project carries quite a lot of historical information, so presentation was never going to be a minor issue. The interface had to start finding a balance between readability and aesthetic, between structured yet not lifeless.This was also one of the first moments when the project’s vis |
| Devlog 4 - Can we finally start now?! Please? | 2026-08-11 | So, after all the research, filtering, structuring and design wrestling, it was finally time to do the thing people usually think gamedev starts with: opening your engine of choice and building actual game stuff - because that’s what all those YouTube pros making “make Diablo in one day” tutorials do, right?This phase was mostly about technical groundwork. Project setup, engine-side decisions, early content pipeline tests, camera controls, post-process experiments, map work, materials, and the general question of how this thing should actually look.A lot of it was first-pass work, obviously. The point here wasn’t polish, it was to establish a |
| Devlog 3 - Reality check! | 2026-08-04 | So, after the historical material was filtered, sorted, layered and generally bullied into a shape that made sense for our game, we reached the next perfectly normal phase of development: discovering that game design ideas are much clearer on the Miro board than they are once you try to sketch out your data structures.This was the point where the “design version” of the game had to start becoming actual data…That sounds simple enough, until you actually sit down and ask: what exactly is a city in systemic terms? What is an author? What is a work? What counts as a project, a development, a policy, a faction, what layer do they belong to, what |
| Devlog 2 - The metamorphosis (pun intended) | 2026-07-28 | Now that the project had properly started with research, the next problem was fairly simple in theory and slightly horrible in practice: deciding what actually makes it into the game and in what form.We ended up with quite a huge pile of notes, references, timelines, layers of context, personalities, places, tensions, works, institutions, ideas, and all sorts of historical “stuff” that was - obviously - all “crucially relevant”. Then again, we’re building a game not an interactive encyclopedia…So a big part of this phase was selection, categorization and synthesis, trying to figure out what can be generalized into game mechanics and how the c |
| Devlog 1 - Project boot | 2026-07-25 | Did you think we were going to start talking about the development of a game? Nonsense!History! History was on every single menu for the past weeks…I wanted to kick off these updates with the part that came before the actual debut of gamedev: research.This project is built around real history, real historical figures, real tensions, and the larger zeitgeist of the Enlightenment. So before we could properly build systems, UI, events, or anything really, we had to spend quite some time figuring out what exactly we were building from.That meant going through material related to the period as a whole, not just collecting isolated facts. Social st |