The roadmap

The ring of Ringshadow

Every milestone is a moon on the giant's ring. What is done orbits in the sunlight. What comes next is turning into the shadow, and what comes later is still deep inside it. Scroll, and the ring turns.

  • DONE built, in the sunlight
  • NEXT the work in line, at the edge of the shadow
  • LATER planned, deep in the shadow

In the sunlight · done

The strategy game

The real-time strategy game, playable today.

  1. Done

    A frontier RTS

    Prospectors drill Stardust Ore and pump Metallic Hydrogen on Ashfall Reach, while armies of up to eight players clash over the deposits.

    • An engine-free core: the economy, pathing, combat and the AI in plain C++20
    • Its tests build with clang and run in about 7 seconds
  2. Done

    Twelve playable units

    Prospector, Ranger, Comet, Juggernaut, Firefly, Dropship, Longbow, Kestrel, Hailstorm, Peregrine, Atlas and Scorpion, each with its own cockpit, weapon and ability.

    • The last three joined the roster designed and built: an air-superiority fighter, a heavy assault walker, a burrowing mine
    • The Peregrine pilot and the Atlas crew speak with voices of their own
  3. Done

    Dive into any unit

    Click any of your units and the camera dives in. Drive it like a shooter, in first or third person, and hand it back to the AI with Esc.

    • Shooter feel and night sight
  4. Done

    The AI commanders

    Your team's AI commander runs the army. The command map gives it a stance, objectives, expansions and requests, and it plans the rest.

    • Building buttons the AI can handle queue a request for it
  5. Done

    Pilot leveling

    Drive a kind of unit and every unit of that kind gets better. Each level offers two upgrades and you keep one: 216 of them across the twelve kinds.

  6. Done

    Day, night and weather

    The sun crosses the sky and the beacons come on at night. The weather runs on the game clock: clear, cloudy, rain and storms.

    • Volumetric clouds, cloud shadows, wet ground and hulls, lightning and thunder
  7. Done

    KSTR 88.7 Stardust

    The music plays as a radio station with original songs and in-world ads between them.

In the sunlight · done

The engine and the name

  1. Done

    The Unreal port

    The game began as a Swift and SceneKit live wallpaper. It now lives in Unreal Engine 5 only, and the Swift version is retired.

    • Open source and public domain (CC0) from 2026-10-06
  2. Done

    It's called Ringshadow

    The game was called Autocraft. It's named now for the huge ringed gas giant in its sky, the one the prospectors live in the shadow of.

    • The GitHub repository took the name on 2026-10-09
  3. Done

    Three platforms, v0.1.0

    Release builds for Windows and Linux on a build machine in AWS, and the Mac build at home. The first pre-release, v0.1.0, is on GitHub.

In the sunlight · done · 2026-10-13

The MMORPG mode, built so far

One pilot in a lasting world. Single player first, on a local server that is the same program a public world will run: only the host changes. Playable today as a test mode.

  1. DoneM1

    Drive through a server

    The server is its own program, and the game is only its client. You drive a Prospector through it, over our own protocol on UDP.

    • An authoritative server on the engine-free core
    • Snapshots of only what is near you, sent as differences
    • Prediction and correction, tested under made-up lag, jitter and loss
  2. DoneM2

    The world map and regions

    A world of regions side by side, generated or crafted by AI agents with a region tool. Drive across an edge into the next region, or fly from pad to pad.

    • The first world: three by three regions
    • Build wherever it fits, paid from your wallet
  3. DoneM3

    A world that lasts

    The server saves the world, and your pilot comes back as you left it: levels and picks included.

    • A save every 5 seconds and on stop
    • Resume your world, or start a new one
  4. DoneM4

    Flights and polish

    Flights lift off, cross and land. The world map takes the keyboard, and the HUD is cut down to one pilot.

    • Every screen checked picture by picture with a shot harness
  5. DoneM5

    Ready to ship

    The traffic is encrypted, and the server travels inside the Mac package. The Metallic Hydrogen loop is proven: pump at a Derrick, unload at your Citadel, fill the wallet.

    • X25519 and XChaCha20-Poly1305 through Monocypher (CC0)

In the sunlight · done · 2026-10-14

A pilot's long road, under a living sky

A hundred hours of progression and a world with its own day, weather and events. The story is on the blog.

  1. DoneM6

    A hundred levels and a living sky

    The Prospector levels to 100, with a skill tree of 65 nodes in five branches. Buildings come from blueprints found in the world. The server owns the clock and the weather.

    • Level 10 in about an hour, level 100 in about a hundred
    • A 40-minute world day: 30 of light, 10 of night
    • Foundry modules and Lab research
  2. DoneM7

    A world worth crossing

    The ringshadow sweep, starfall, KSTR contracts, blueprint sites you can see from afar, flights that burn MH, a guided first ten minutes and a new home screen.

    • Starfall: two or three a world day, a crater with a rich deposit
    • Three radio contracts a day

The terminator · next

M8: the realm under siege

Buildings become the realm's, and the Prospector gets enemies. Parts have landed; the rest is being built.

  1. NextM8

    The realm, the Brood and the defences

    Buildings belong to the realm, the Citadel taxes, sells and sends you on missions, and alien bugs swarm the places worth being. Next come the guns to hold them off.

    • Landed: the realm's buildings, the tax and the shop, missions and the Journal, the Brood, a world server that runs on after you quit, mercenary prospectors
    • Being built: the Citadel's turrets, the AA tower and the gatling gun
    • Then: turret upgrades, canyon defence in waves, the Matriarch's nest, regions that follow the land, the Dropship between landing pads

The terminator · next

Next, in single player

Each step ships in the single-player game, on the local server.

  1. Next

    AI pilots

    AI characters who are pilots themselves replace the AI commanders: a character, a city and a level, like a player. They mine, build, take contracts and fight, and keep the world busy where players are few.

  2. Next

    Cities

    A city forms where pilots build close together. Its pilots raise it with ore, MH and hours of labour, and each level opens more. Cities are the safe places.

  3. Next

    More regions

    A bigger world map, and travel between its regions.

  4. Next

    No-man's land

    The open ground between the cities: claims, dwellings and the fight over the deposits and wells.

Deep in the shadow · later

Later, online

The same server program, out in the world.

  1. Later

    The public server

    The server on a public host, accounts and login, and other players in your world.

  2. Later

    The market, crews and chat

    Trade between pilots, crews that ride together, and a way to talk.

  3. Later

    Thousands of pilots

    Regions on separate servers, a pilot handed from one to the next at the border, and copies of the crowded places.

  4. Later

    Hosting

    The official world on the Ringshadow AWS account, and a server build anyone can run for a world of their own.

Taken from the design docs and the work log in the repository. Nothing after the sunlit moons has a date yet.