Living colonists
Shift-based daily routines on a global clock — work, sleep, eat, commute, relax. Track one and you can follow their whole day.

Forged Flow — In development
A colony sim where everything revolves around the colonists.
A living alien world, simulated to the individual. Your dropship and ten sleeper freighters were pulled through a one-way wormhole — the fleet is all you have. Build the bones of a colony, found districts, and learn to live on a planet that was alive first.
The pitch
RED SOL treats them as the simulation.
Every colonist has one of twelve personality archetypes, a wealth tier, a job on a ten-rung ladder, and a personal shift — day, evening or night — so the colony is awake and working around the clock. They sleep, eat, commute and take their leisure where it suits them; they age, couple up, and eventually retire. And every one of them had to be made or woken: colonists are grown in the colony's Foundry from its own resources, or revived — one deliberate shuttle mission at a time — from the cryo bays of the ten freighters in orbit. There is no immigration. When the last bay is empty, the Foundry is all you have.
What they want — across ten categories from nourishment and connection to culture, nature and faith — is what pulls the economy forward. Wants create demand; demand opens businesses; businesses need resources you mine, refine, manufacture or import. As colonists grow wealthier they aspire to higher-tier experiences that are hungrier for power and materials, and the whole colony has to climb to meet them.
You place the civic backbone directly: power, life support, clinics, schools. Everything else you found as districts — give an area a character, and the colony fills it to demand, resource availability and profit: several coffee shops, competing gyms, the occasional business that fails and closes. It grows with you rather than only because of you.
And it all happens on a planet that was alive before you arrived — nine biomes, wandering herds and flocks, megafauna, weather and wind, rivers and lakes, all generated from a seed and different every game.
Comparables
Design pillars
Every system was designed and proven in a working prototype before it was written into the engine.
Shift-based daily routines on a global clock — work, sleep, eat, commute, relax. Track one and you can follow their whole day.
Colonists enter as workforce-ready adults, age by the sol, couple up into shared households, and retire as seniors. Each works a personal shift — a day crew, an evening crew and a night crew keep the colony running around the clock.
Twelve archetypes — Homebody, Socialite, Thrill-seeker, Scholar, Gourmand — weight each colonist's wants across ten categories. Happiness is how well their wants are met, not a global average.
Wages circulate in a closed credit economy; money is only created or destroyed at the off-world boundary. Every business runs its own P&L, prices float with scarcity — a stalled chain is felt at the market first — and rising colonist wealth demands higher-tier, hungrier goods. That's the flywheel.
Nine exotic biomes generated from a seed. Herds and flocks that flee your machines, megafauna you'd rather not disturb, rivers, weather, wind and a full day/night cycle.
ONI-deep resource chains moved over real networks — pipe and conveyor mains, hauler drones, maglev lines and a working spaceport. Distance is a cost; transport is the answer.
Per-building hourly load profiles, solar and baseload generation, battery storage, and brownout load-shedding by priority — life support first, discretionary last.
You place civic buildings and found districts with a character. The colony fills them to demand and profit, with real variance. Businesses that can't make it work shut down.
Spaceflight burns colony output — fuel, crew, materials — and pays back in things the ground can't give you: captured asteroids, orbital industry, megastructures. The wormhole that brought you here is still out there. And you never terraform — you learn to live on the planet, not over it.
Media
Captured from the current build — full 3D, day/night lighting, procedural terrain.







By the numbers
Every one generated from the same data tables the simulation runs on, with imagery rendered by an automated photo booth. When a row is added to the game, the encyclopedia — and every system that consumes that category — picks it up automatically.
Under the hood
Simulation depth is only worth anything if it scales, so the architecture was settled before the systems were built.
Agent level-of-detail. Only colonists on screen or actively tracked run at full fidelity. Everyone else advances through scheduled events and cheap per-sol rolls — travel becomes a duration rather than a walk. Fauna use the same trick: the herd is the agent, never the animal.
A 2.5D world. The sim runs on a 2D grid; terrain height is a render and cost attribute, never a third simulation dimension. The planet is pure and deterministic from its seed — generate on demand, simulate locally, render what's near, with chunks streaming around the camera.
Data-driven content. Resources, crops, meals, buildings, vehicles, fauna, personalities and research all live in data tables keyed by id and tagged by tier. Code loops over categories and never references a specific entry — new content is a new row, not a code change, which makes the game mod-friendly by default. Referential integrity is validated on every boot.
Tested like software. Automated probes exercise the spaceport, rail freight and terminal systems on every round; a standing model audit checks all 300+ art assets; the in-game encyclopedia's imagery is generated by an automated photo booth.
At a glance
Development
Built in vertical slices — one system fully working and visible before the next one starts.
Colonists, life stages, wants and happiness; the closed economy with per-business P&L; districts; the research tree; the real-time power grid; health, weather and disasters. All eleven planned slices, landed and playable.
The renderer was rebuilt in full 3D with day/night lighting, then the world went procedural — seeded 1000×1000 terrain, nine biomes, lakes and rivers, streamed chunks, slope-aware foundations.
Native fauna and megafauna, threats and defence, maglev transit, the spaceport and its fleet, survey and fog-of-war, the in-game encyclopedia — refined through 250+ verified playtest-and-fix rounds and counting.
Economy balancing across the full arc, polish, and packaging toward a build that can be put in front of players and partners.
The studio
Forged Flow is an independent Australian game developer. RED SOL is its first title — a long-form simulation project built deliberately, in vertical slices, with each system designed and specified before it's written into the engine.
The result is a project unusually far along for a studio its size: the full design is documented across a canonical spec set, every major system is implemented and playable, and development runs on a disciplined loop of playtest rounds, automated probes and per-round verification — more than 250 rounds deep.
Fact sheet
Contact
Open to conversations with publishers, and happy to send a longer design document, a build walkthrough, or answer anything about the simulation architecture.