The goal of this post is to explain, in more detail, what Shogun Exodus aims to be as a game, how I plan on getting there, and the roadmap from where I am right now (October 2026) to the final release.
Shogun Exodus is, by all accounts, an ambitious game, with a large feature set, and I think explaining how those features fit together, and why they are made in the order they are, is important to understanding both the final game as well as the road to releasing it.
Let’s start by just explaining Shogun Exodus.
Shogun Exodus
In brief, Shogun Exodus is a 2D simulation-heavy colony sim / ruler RPG, set in a grimdark far future on a distant planet, where humanity has regressed to a period resembling the Warring States period of Japan (Sengoku Jidai).
The game is heavily inspired by games like RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, Warhammer 40K, and Kenshi.
But what does that really mean? Let me set the stage:
You awaken from your Cryo Tube feeling confused, the memory injections from the Izumi Cognitive Updater are jumbled, and your body feels weak. You look at the date – XXXXXX – you were awakened more than a century earlier than you should have been.
Main Castle Artificial Intelligence: “Honored Shogun, I deeply apologize for breaking protocol, but your assistance is urgently needed. Your brothers, set to rule your lands while you rested, have squandered your gifts. After decades of mismanagement, they eventually died one after the other, victims of their own callous and exorbitant lifestyles. Shogun, the Castle is in ruins, your Servants are all but gone, and supplies are low. You are once again needed.“
You knew those worthless fools would fail. They will not be missed. You will need to rebuild the glory of your Shogunate, set up production in your Castle, expand your influence and rule, and recruit an ever-larger army to secure the land.
Your time to Rule is Now.
You begin as a Shogun with a relatively small castle and a handful of Servants. You are awoken from your Cryo Tube, your Castle is in shambles, and you need to rebuild and reconquer the land.
Inside that castle you’re dealing with a fairly deep simulation of actual people – needs, jobs, relationships, health, equipment, schedules, personalities – and the physical infrastructure required to keep them alive and productive.
You expand that castle vertically and horizontally, build production and infrastructure, manage resources and logistics.
But unlike a more traditional colony sim, the world does not end at the edge of the colony map. The Shogun, whom you personally control, can leave the castle, travel through the wider world, encounter settlements and individuals, trade, recruit, investigate events, negotiate, fight, and eventually exert political control over settlements and factions.
Additionally, while Shogun Exodus is a 2D game, unlike most colony sims, Shogun Exodus is fully made in HD graphics. This means that facial and body details are clearly visible, missing limbs will be visually presented as actually missing (or rather, replaced with cheap prosthetics), scars will be clearly visible on faces, pawns are visually distinct, and clothing, armor, and weapons show up beautifully. All of this is presented in a visual “painted” style, inspired by Japanese sumi-e paintings.
Planned Features
To start with, it’s important to be honest: Shogun Exodus is in Early Alpha, and currently planned features are just that. Planned Features. The final feature set may be different. This is the current planned feature set as of October 2026.
Next, I think it’s best to group planned features into two separate categories: “Core Features” and “Auxiliary Features”. Core Features are the features that I think of as “the reason I’m actually making the game”. The stuff I want to play around with myself. The real meat on the bones. Auxiliary Features are “nice-to-haves”, the features that I think would be cool to add on top, the features that should hopefully slot in neatly once the underlying systems and data are already in place, the kind of features that would make the game stand out, add depth, but are not necessary for the core idea of the game to work. So let’s start with the Core Features.
Core Features
HD 2D Graphics and Painted Visuals
While Shogun Exodus is still a 2D game, those graphics are in HD. In most 2D colony sims, graphics are intentionally kept light, in SD format. There are good and valid reasons for that.
But a core thing about Shogun Exodus is that I wanted every pawn, every building, every armor piece, and every placeable object to be clearly visible in HD, so you could genuinely see the details of them. See what they are made of. See how it fits on someone.
Additionally, Shogun Exodus is shown in a Japanese sumi-e-inspired painterly visual style. This fits both the setting, a “Feudal Japan” type world, and also gives it a unique look that I feel stands out in the crowd. Comic-style little cute pawns work great; I have nothing against them, but it’s not what I want with Shogun Exodus.
Servants and NPC Simulation
Every Servant and NPC in Shogun Exodus is intended to be an individually simulated character rather than simply another static NPC with a hardcoded life. Additionally, you, the player, never directly control NPCs in the game – you can give them jobs, schedules, and so forth, but you can’t click on someone and directly take control. NPCs have their own lives and ideas for what they want to do.
Characters have Needs, Traits, Skills, health and body statistics, schedules, jobs, equipment, relationships and personal histories. They can like or dislike other people, develop memories of events, have families and backgrounds, suffer injuries and permanent physical changes, and react differently depending on their personality and circumstances.
Many of these systems also interact with one another. A character’s Traits may affect how quickly they sleep, what work they are good at, who they get along with, or how they react to a particular event.
Physical changes to characters are also intended to be visually represented. Scars, missing eyes and lost limbs can appear directly on the pawn, while things such as body type, hairstyles, tattoos, makeup, clothing and equipment are visible because the game is rendered at a considerably higher visual resolution than most traditional colony sims.
Castle Building, Production and Logistics
Your Castle acts as the “Base” of the game. You can expand it horizontally and vertically, build new rooms and place furniture, machinery, storage and production equipment inside them.
Servants can be assigned Jobs and work priorities, while resources need to physically move around the Castle through hauling and storage systems.
Production is also intended to rely on interconnected infrastructure. Mining provides raw materials. Electricity powers machines. Water is pumped and transported through pipes. Food requires resources to grow and can later be cooked into meals. Materials can eventually be turned into clothing, weapons and other crafted items.
Rather than these existing as isolated systems, the intention is for them to form one large production and logistics network that the player gradually builds and maintains.
Additionally, everything is made of something and comes from somewhere, and that information is available in every object. You can click on any crafted object, see what it’s made of, see which stats those materials carry with them, click on those materials, see where they come from, how to produce them, and so on.
The Shogun
Unlike most colony sims, you the player don’t simply exist as an invisible all-powerful overseer floating above your colony. You personally control the Shogun as a character inside the world.
The Shogun lives alongside the Servants in the Castle, has their own body, equipment and stats, can interact with other characters, and can eventually personally leave the Castle to travel, explore, trade, negotiate and fight.
Over time, the Shogun will develop through RPG-like systems involving Skills, equipment, injuries, relationships and other character-specific mechanics.
Procedural Generation
Procedural generation plays a major role throughout Shogun Exodus.
Pawns are procedurally generated with their own appearance and characteristics. Castles can be procedurally generated. Maps, buildings, settlements and eventually parts of the wider world are intended to be generated from reusable systems rather than being handcrafted.
This is important both for replayability and for the scope of the game: rather than manually creating every building, settlement and character, I can create systems capable of producing many different combinations of them.
That said, I am fully aware of the risks that Procedural Generation can bring – a lacklustre feeling of randomness. This is something I will continually be keeping in mind as I develop the game.
Varied Biomes
Shogun Exodus will exist in different Biomes. You could also call these “procedurally generated maps with differently defined default parameters”.
Essentially, the starting map in which you build and expand your Castle, in which your Servants live, can be different. And each time you start a new game, that starting map will be slightly different. As of writing this, Biomes are set up to function on 3 different parameters: Mountainous or Flat – Wet, Normal, or Dry – Hot, Normal, or Cold.
There is a different Biome for each of those combinations, and each combination creates a different map in which you build your castle. For example, Wet means it will rain more than in a Dry biome, or Hot means you’ll get more heatwaves while Cold will mean you get more Snow. A “Rocky” biome (Mountainous) will have more minerals in the ground than a Flat one, but may also present you with more problems to build around.
Modding
Finally, Shogun Exodus is being designed with modding in mind from Day One of development – a “Modding First-Approach” you could say.
Much of the game is deliberately data-driven, with items, characters and other systems defined in ways that allow them to be expanded or changed without rewriting the underlying game. Very little is “hardcoded” into the game; instead, it relies on Systems that rely on Data and uses simple JPG or PNG files for almost anything visual.
The exact final extent is still hard to say for sure this far out, but I can say that my aim is to make Shogun Exodus an extremely moddable game, up there with games such as RimWorld, Stellaris, or Skyrim.
As of writing this, basic modding is already fully possible for the game, and a continually updated Mod Guide (currently just local on my computer) already exists.
Auxiliary Features
Events and Emergent Stories
One of the broader and more important goals of Shogun Exodus is to create what is called Emergent Storytelling. That is to say, the game doesn’t follow a pre-planned story; instead, each playthrough is intended to result in new emerging stories generated by not only your actions, but also the actions of independent AI-driven NPCs.
This should already happen naturally, as every NPC in the game is different from another, and will act slightly differently than another. But I would like to take it even further.
The Event System is planned to allow everything from minor personal interactions to equipment failures, workplace accidents, discoveries, combat encounters and larger narrative events to occur dynamically, with multiple possible outcomes based on the stats and settings of whoever (or whatever) is performing the action.
Because these events happen to individually simulated people with their own Traits, Needs, Relationships, Memories, Skills and Histories, the same event may have very different consequences depending on who is involved.
The hope is that the combination of these systems creates stories that I never specifically wrote myself, and that will be unique for every player in every playthrough.
The World Outside the Castle
I almost don’t want to put this in the Auxiliary category, because I consider it a big part of the game, but in the grand scheme, I suppose it is.
The Castle is the center of Shogun Exodus, but it is not intended to be the entire game. The wider world will contain different biomes that can be explored by the Shogun and their Servants through expeditions and missions.
Early expeditions will likely be primarily event-driven, while later development is intended to expand this into broader exploration of generated environments containing resources, locations, characters and settlements.
Traveling traders will also visit the Castle, providing one of the first links between your isolated settlement and the larger world.
To be clear, this does not mean “physically walking around a physical world outside”, but rather that you can go on Event-driven expeditions or send your pawns on missions (think Gathering Missions, for instance, looking for resources to bring back).
If you’re familiar with Crusader Kings III, you will have an idea of how these are supposed to work.
The world itself is represented strategically rather than as one continuous walkable map.
Towns, Cultures, Races, and Factions
Eventually, the wider world is intended to contain outposts, towns and cities populated by the same kinds of individually simulated characters found inside your own Castle.
Much like exploring outside the Castle, this does not mean “walking around a physical city”, but is rather intended as a 2D representation of a city with individual buildings you can enter, with its own individual pawns.
These settlements are intended to provide places to trade, recruit people, acquire missions, gather information and interact with the wider political world.
This is then intended to expand into different Cultures and Factions. And beyond that, different Races that will have their own unique traits and characteristics, visual look, building styles, and so on.
Combat and Conflict
Conflict will eventually exist at several different scales. Individual characters can carry weapons and armor, with combat influenced by their Skills, physical statistics, equipment and injuries. The Castle can be attacked through raids, while expeditions can lead to violent encounters outside it.
Later, this is intended to expand into larger conflicts involving settlements and factions, including attacking and defending territory as the Shogunate grows.
Prisoners, captured characters and other consequences of conflict are also planned to become part of the larger simulation.
War and Territory
Over time, the Shogun will be able to influence, persuade or conquer settlements and expand their control over territory as part of rebuilding the Shogunate.
This will include sending raiding parties to cities, protecting cities under your rule, influencing cities and factions to join you, and so forth.
Put together, that is obviously an incredibly large feature set. Which leads to a rather reasonable question: How exactly do I plan on building all of that?
That brings me to probably the most important part of this post: the way Shogun Exodus is actually being developed.
Development Methodology
The development of Shogun Exodus may at times seem a bit strange, but it’s built in a very deliberate way. The main way to think of my design and game development philosophy is: Systems.
Here I will somewhat carefully invoke the game Star Citizen, as its development cycle shows both what I’m trying to achieve and what I’m trying to avoid.
Let’s start with what I’m trying to avoid: Early on, Star Citizen got caught up in needing to look very pretty, have early available gameplay, and pump out promised features, so that its backers had something to play. That made sense from a business perspective but has left Star Citizen with a lot of unfinished features that work very poorly together. That’s specifically what I don’t want to happen to Shogun Exodus.
Now, what I’m trying to achieve: Since then, Star Citizen has done its best to rectify this mistake, by building out the foundational technologies needed for new features before releasing content for those features. That’s what I’m trying to do from the beginning.
Almost a year before I actually started developing Shogun Exodus, I was planning out features for it (though at that time it wasn’t called Shogun Exodus), and more importantly, the order in which I needed to make those features since many depended on others already being finished.
If I say the game will contain “Cultures, factions, and towns, filled with individually simulated NPCs with their own lives, history, and memories”, that by itself sounds like a massive feature set – and in a way it is. But if you break them down into parts relying on other parts, they become less so, and it makes sense if I explain it the other way around:
First, I work on getting a procedural building spawner working (in fact, this was one of the very first things I implemented in the game!). OK, now we have the buildings for towns. Then I work on filling those buildings up with parts and furniture – currently, those are things such as beds, chairs, power generators and so on, which are in their base versions already in the game.
Next, I work on getting pawns/NPCs working, with all their individual needs, traits, and relationships. Much of this is also already implemented in the game.
Because after all, what use is a town full of empty buildings with no one inside them?
But before towns, I will be creating apparel systems, food, a monetary system. Why? Because sure, OK, so now I have buildings and AI inside them. But what use are they? I still need to create interaction with them; I need to create products they can actually sell you (such as food or apparel), or missions they can give you or hints for quests you can go on.
So the roadmap to a town becomes: Procedural building → Placeables in those buildings → Pawns with needs → Foods for those needs → Interaction with those pawns → Apparel system for those pawns → The value of those items → Trader who can sell you those items → and then finally you can use that to set up fully procedural buildings, which are essentially just clickable points in a town.
Take it a step further back, and look at something as simple as a Bed:
A bed can participate in:
placeables → needs → ownership → schedules → sleep → room functionality → procedural residences → inns → towns
Likewise, look at that list, but going the other way. Sure, “Towns” might be an impressive feature to have “implemented”, but it would be empty and without purpose, and would rely on refactoring once all the dozens and dozens of systems it relies on are actually implemented.
So it might seem silly to set up some of those things early, or as though development is sometimes slow. You might wonder, “Why is he spending time creating a Job System for pawns that have almost nothing to build?” Well, one reason is because pawns without jobs are not interesting and will not need anything. And if you don’t need anything, there’s no reason to buy anything.
I hope this is starting to make sense.
Another example would be combat:
Right now, if you look at the game, a reasonable criticism might be “there is no external conflict in the game, and thus no real survival mechanics, apart from basic needs – so Raids should be a key priority to implement”. Totally fair – but there’s a reason that’s much further down the road.
Before Combat, first I want to implement Apparel. Why? Because I want Armor to play a role, and more so, Weapons to play a role – and weapons are basically the same system as Apparel. Next, I want to implement Skills, so that combat can actually be based on the individual stats of individual pawns, not just “who has the better equipment”.
But we’re still not done. Before a “Raid” happens, it would make a lot more sense to implement something easier first: a traveling Trader. That would allow me to set up the system for having procedurally spawned pawns visiting your Castle before having to worry about Combat.
Then I’ll want to implement basic expeditions that your Servants, and you the Shogun, can go on. Here I’m talking about relatively simple procedurally created events, such as those found in games like Crusader Kings III. Why? Because it allows me to set up the system that calculates how Armor, Weapons, Stats, and Skills work together when fighting another NPC.
Only then does implementing an actual Raid make sense, because now I have all the prerequisite systems required to easily implement that. And at the same time, it means I’ve already implemented a lot of other features I would want in the game anyway!
If I went about it the other way around, sure, Raids would happen a lot earlier in development, and perhaps from an external point of view it would look like the game was further along. But in reality, those Raids would be based on temporary half-implemented features that would need to be redone at a later stage to be fully implemented and work correctly with everything else.
By carefully thinking about the order in which I implement features, I can actually build out the game in a far more efficient way that’s both better for internal consistency and much faster in terms of development speed in the end – even if, halfway through, it looks like things are lagging far behind.
Consider this: A pawn isn’t merely an NPC. It can eventually become:
Servant → trader → visitor → enemy → town resident → recruit → faction member
And equipment can become:
apparel → armor → weapons → trade goods → loot → crafting → social/economic value
I hope that also helps answer a fairly obvious question: “How can one person possibly make all this?”
The answer isn’t “I’m going to individually implement 500 features.” It’s more like “I’m trying to create a relatively small number of flexible systems whose combinations produce a much larger apparent feature set.”
As I said earlier, a key design methodology in all of this is “Systems”. And in fact, if you happen to read my post on my professional background, you’ll know that building interconnecting Systems is both what I enjoy and what I consider myself pretty good at these days.
Almost everything in Shogun Exodus is developed with this methodology in mind.
I say “almost”, because of course, as Forrest Gump so nicely put it, “Shit Happens”. Sometimes I get ahead of myself, because some features are more fun to build out than others. Other times I postpone a feature because I know it’ll be really complicated, and frankly a little boring, and at the end of the day I’m just human and I want to make stuff I find fun to make.
Or, as seen with my recently implemented Weather System, sometimes I start implementing “a tiny feature that I’ll finish in a day”, I get sidetracked, I realize it would make sense to build it out correctly from the start, the feature expands, and I end up creating a major system for which there is no current gameplay impact.
Shit happens. And more so, marketing happens.
See, adding in a World Background to my game is completely unneeded at this point. The same goes for updating my graphics, which I did a few months back. These, right now, have no gameplay impact, and could realistically wait until I go into Early Access – but realistically they are needed, because the presentation of the game depends heavily on them.
Another example is Apparel. In a perfect world, Apparel would wait until sometime after the first playtest. Apparel is a System that has many dependencies: what it is made of, how those materials are gathered or grown, how it impacts combat stats, and so on. But realistically, I need to implement it pretty soon. Why? Because right now every pawn in the game is running around in the undies, and that presents… pretty badly, visually speaking. For instance, I’ve had people ask me if the game was a “NSFW/Naughty” game, because they see half-naked pawns running around in a building. That’s no good.
So while in an ideal world a System like Apparel would wait until much further into development, realistically it needs to be implemented earlier. Things like this will happen.
First Playtest
So, the next obvious question is: When will anyone be able to actually play Shogun Exodus? As of writing this, my hope is that I’ll have my first playtest in 3-6 months (which will likely also be when I launch the Steam page).
By then, I should have all the basic needed systems implemented that will allow for a basic coherent gameplay loop. But I have a pretty important caveat here for anyone reading: I doubt the game will be very fun to play at this point, and it’s more of a technical playtest than a “vertical slice fun-test”.
By the first playtest, Shogun Exodus will still lack a fairly substantial number of Systems and Features, and I really do mean fairly substantial. That’s important to note, because a large part of the fun in these games comes from the large set of interconnecting features – and many of those features will still not be implemented. Instead, the playtest will focus primarily on whether users can:
- Actually run the game. Like… does it actually run on people’s computers, apart from mine?
- Understand what they’re supposed to do in the game, does the UI make sense?
- Are there major game-breaking bugs that I’m unaware of?
- Is the very core gameplay loop enjoyable, or does it show evidence that there are parts of the game I already need to seriously reconsider?
So the first playtest won’t be a “mini-demo”. It really will be a play test. Even as I’m writing this, I know there are features currently in the game that I need to redo/scrap, because just playing around with it myself, I found that they turned out to be a massive pain in the ass when actually playing the game. These are the sorts of things the playtest will be made for.
So ok, with that out of the way, what do I expect the game to contain for this playtest?
Playtest Features
- Working Save/Load systems (finished).
- Auto-Save System
- Quick Save System
- Basic Tutorial Intro, with being woken up and given backstory intro etc., being told what to build, how it works, etc. (not started)
- Customization of the Shogun, your starting Servants, and a single finished Biome (mostly already finished).
- Procedurally Generated World Map (finished).
- Procedurally generated starting Castle map (not started).
- Settings menu featuring toggles for various graphics, as well as audio controls for music and atmospheric effects. (semi-finished)
- Dynamic Weather System with a variety of states and effects – limited gameplay impacts (finished).
- Two genders, 3 body types for each, 6 facial shapes, 10 facial features for each gender, and 30 hairstyles (finished).
- Beard/Makeup/Tattoos (not started).
- Procedurally generated starting Castle (finished).
- Construction System for placeable objects, including material selection, scaffolding, resource hauling and Builder jobs (mostly finished).
- Buildable Stairs (finished).
- Food Rot mechanic (finished).
- Item Rust mechanic (finished).
- Smoke and Ventilation System (finished).
- Day / Night Cycle (finished).
- Room Lighting and related Buffs/Debuffs (finished).
- Pawn Death and Corpse Hauling (finished).
- Items have weight, pawns have Max Carry Weight, and Weight impacts movement speed (finished).
- Pawn and Shogun persistent Inventories (finished).
- Items have full data, such as what they are, where they are gotten from, characteristics, worth, weight, etc. (finished).
- Procedurally generated pawns, with names, traits, etc. (finished).
- Needs (mostly finished)
- Sleep, Food, Social, Relax (finished)
- Toilet need, hygiene need (not started)
- Dynamic NPC pawn interaction for various needs (finished).
- Traits (e.g. “Fast Sleeper”, “Depressed”, “Misandrist”, etc.) (implemented, but will be expanded more later)
- Buffs / Debuffs (implemented, but will be expanded more later)
- RPG interaction style with pawns. (not started).
- Variable music in scene. (started, but currently only looping a single soundtrack)
- Full Body System. (not started)
- Full body in data; few things have in-game relevance yet.
- Scars, lost eyes, lost limbs, etc. visually shown on the pawn.
- Impacts interaction with others. (may be moved to later)
- Mining System. (not started)
- Automatic and Manual versions of Miners.
- Mineral blocks depend on biome.
- Electricity System. (started)
- Automatic Power Generator, requires Mined Carbon Ore to run (finished)
- Manual Power Generator, requires pawn to generate power (not started)
- Power Cables (not started)
- Automatic Miner Requires Power. (not started)
- Water System. (not started)
- Get water from ground like mining; water block depends on biome weight.
- Manual pump and automatic pump.
- Automatic needs power.
- Pipes.
- Water needed for growing food.
- Food growing. (not started)
- Food Grower job type. (not started)
- 3 different food types (finished).
- Food grower needs Water and Electricity to run. (not started)
- Job Types (Builder, Hauler, Miner, Grower) (mostly finished)
- Pawn Schedules (finished)
- Containers – nameable and able to set content settings (finished)
- Pawn Overview Screen (finished)
- Custom UI and Animations (finished)
- Expanded Building System. (not started)
- Build new rooms, side to side and up.
- New “Build Mode” to simplify the building mechanic.
- Apparel System. (not started)
- Set up for Back, Feet, Inner Lower, Inner Upper, Outer Lower, Outer Upper, and Helmet
- Build Beds, designate Bedrooms / private vs bunker / beds can have owners. (beds exist, but currently cannot be built)
- Build chairs. (chairs exist, but currently cannot be built)
- Build food bowls. (food bowl exists, but currently cannot be built)
- Basic balancing of Needs, Rot, Rust, etc. to at least be fun, if not balanced. (not started)
- Potentially working Mods (theoretically they should already work, but not properly tested yet).
When looking at the list of planned features for the playtest, keep the Design Methodology in mind – the list might look like it needs a lot of individual features, but many features “copy” Systems from other features.
For instance, Mining and Water drilling are essentially the same System, just implemented with different data and visuals. Electrical cables and Pipes are also essentially the same System. The System for having the Miner rely on power from the Generator is the same System as having the Food Grower rely on Water from the drilling. Just to give a few examples.
So while it may seem like a lot of features are still not implemented, in reality, a lot of those features rely on the same Systems – so once one of them is implemented, the others can be implemented incredibly quickly.
The Roadmap Overall
The roadmap below shows the overall features and systems that I am planning to implement after the first playtest. The way it should be understood is what features will roughly be implemented in what phase, not what features will be implemented before that phase starts.
This is a rough roadmap, and to be clear, it may change. You’ll also notice that certain Phases are listed as two different ones, such as Alpha/Beta, or Beta/Early Access – this is because I just realistically don’t quite know yet which order those things will be implemented in, and I’d rather be up front about that now than try to invent an exact timeline that I can’t realistically be sure of.
Last, the features are deliberately kept somewhat broad and vague, unlike the much more detailed list of features for the Playtest. Again, this is because I cannot, realistically at this time, be sure of the details of how those features will play out in the end.
This is not intended as a full and complete list.
Alpha:
- Event System.
- Mini events for everything, such as building items faster, catastrophic failures, pawn interactions, etc.
- Expeditions / Missions for Servants.
- Expeditions / Missions for Shogun.
- Finished/Expanded Biomes System for all Biomes.
- Building biome-specific objects on starting map.
- Support Pillars for extending rooms (visual).
- Set up machines so only specific pawns can use them from a chosen list.
- Windmills, solar cells for power generation.
- Better UI showing pawns using/being inside a thing/sleeping/mining/etc.
- Updated/Cleaner UI.
- Tutorial / ‘System Message’ System, castle AI.
- Expanded AI Body Stats, strength etc.
- Fit/Fat in pawn body image depending on Stats.
- Skills System.
- Food growing with different types of crops, animated grow cycle.
- Cooking, meals, recipes.
- Choose starting biome from several variants.
- Crafting System.
- Traveling traders.
- Basic sound effects.
- Everyone has Backgrounds / families.
- AI (potentially Shogun too) has “Memories”.
- AI has social relations, such as liking or disliking certain people they interact with.
- Beard/Makeup/Tattoos/Hairstyles/Body types have an impact on other pawns’ views of them.
- Working Mods System.
Alpha/Beta:
- Full Biomes with Fully Generated Map to be explored.
- Dirt / Cleaning.
- Trader System.
- Combat System.
- Game Launcher System.
- Options settings to skip intro, logos, etc. when launching the game.
- Mods System.
- 10 inner, 10 outer clothing sets, available in a variety of materials.
- Broad weapon system with many types, like swords, spears, clubs, arrows, different damage types they deal, armor penetration, attack speed, etc.
- Procedural Raids.
- Captured Prisoners.
- Slaves.
- Building “Decorations”.
Beta/Early Access:
- Outposts, Towns, Cities.
- Cultures.
- Religions.
- Races, race-specific towns.
- Major Factions.
- Influence / Taking over territory.
- War System / fighting war-like skirmishes, attacking places, defending places.
- Mech armor.
An important note on features listed in Beta/Early Access – these are all very late-game (in terms of development) features, and as it stands, it’s extremely difficult for me to grasp how easy or hard they will be to implement.
By the time I reach this stage, some of these features may be borderline trivial to implement, requiring nothing more than some data and PNG swapping. Alternatively, I may realize that, for my vision of them to truly shine, they would essentially become DLC-level features.
While they are, as it stands, features I plan on having in the finished game, realistically they should also be taken with a grain of salt at this stage of development.
Final Thoughts
Shogun Exodus is an ambitious game, and at this stage in development, it’s very hard to say which of these features will stay in, which will be cut, or which still-unknown features will be added.
However, my hope with this post is to give you an idea of the game that I’m trying to make, and how I’m trying to make it.
Full Steam Release is still a long way away, and Early Access is probably 1½-2 years away, if all goes to plan, and many things will undoubtedly change in the meantime.
Until then, I hope to have piqued your interest, and I hope you stick around for future updates. If you’re interested, please join my Discord server, where I post regularly and talk about the game more casually, or follow me on YouTube where I post devlogs and Shorts showing off the game. You can also follow Shogun Exodus on X and Instagram for a heads up whenever I post a new automated devlog update to the site after having implemented something.
See you around, Shogun.