Forged Flow — In development
You supply the frontier. The colony builds itself.
A colony simulator in three parts: colonists who want things, a district planner that builds to meet them, and you — supplying the resources, research and protection that make it possible. Your dropship and ten sleeper freighters came through a one-way wormhole. The fleet is all you have.
The pitch
Only one of them is you.
The colonists generate the demand. Each has a job, a wealth band and one of twelve personality archetypes that weight what they want across ten categories. What they want, and what they can afford, is the signal the rest of the game runs on.
The district planner answers it. You zone ground and give a district its character; the planner decides what gets built inside it and puts it there — housing matched to wealth, clinics, venues, workshops. It watches supply as closely as demand: when a resource runs short it will build the industry to close the gap, provided you have researched it and the materials exist. Fifty-seven of the game's buildings are its to place, not yours.
You supply the frontier. The civic backbone, power, water and life support, the pipe and conveyor networks, the maglev and the spaceport are yours to place. So is the research tree — nothing exists, for you or the planner, until you unlock it. And the planet pushes back, so the perimeter is yours to hold.
Get any one of the three wrong and the other two stall. Starve the planner of steel and the housing stops; skip the research and it cannot fix its own shortfalls; ignore the colonists and the businesses close.
Comparables
Design pillars
Every system was designed and proven in a working prototype before it was written into the engine.
One — the colonists
Every colonist has a job, a home and a personal shift — day, evening or night — so the colony works around the clock. They sleep, eat, commute, take their leisure, age and retire. Those near the camera run in full; the rest run in a cheap abstract tier so the colony scales.
Twelve archetypes — Homebody, Socialite, Thrill-seeker, Scholar, Gourmand and more — weight each colonist's wants across ten categories in three tiers. Happiness is how well their wants are met by venues they can reach and afford.
Struggling, Comfortable, Affluent. Wealth raises the tier of experience a colonist aspires to, and higher tiers cost rarer materials and more power. This aspiration ladder is what pulls the whole economy upward.
Two — the district planner
A district starts from a Resource Point that projects a serviced area. Give it a character and the planner fills it to demand: homes matched to wealth bands, clinics, venues and workshops appear, upgrade as residents get happier, and are displaced as the district evolves. Paths grow organically between them.
The planner reads supply as well as demand. Short on steel, glass, polymers or medicine, it will build the industry to close the gap — smelter, mill, refinery, fab — but only if you have researched it and the raw materials are reaching the district. It even runs a foundry to grow its own colonists.
Every business runs its own profit and loss and survives on resource availability first, profit second. Prices float with scarcity, so a stalled supply chain is felt at the market before anywhere else. Businesses that cannot make it work close, and something else takes the spot.
Three — what you build
Power, water, life support and the civic buildings are yours to place, along with the networks that carry everything: pipes for fluids and gases, conveyors for solids, maglev lines for freight and commuters, and the spaceport. Distance is a real cost, so transport is what makes building far away viable.
Five fields — Biotech, Habitation, Industry, Logistics, Frontier — on a paced primary spine with a specialisation layer of sidegrades. Nothing exists until it is unlocked, for you or for the planner. Research is how you widen what the colony is able to build for itself.
Survey the world to build on it: nine biomes, each gating its own technology, with herds, megafauna and weather that do not care about you. Nests send waves that grow with your footprint, so gun towers and a drone air force are yours to run — and past all of it, the road off-planet.
Media
Captured from the current build — full 3D, day/night lighting, procedural terrain.
Sol 0 — the founding dropship makes its landing pass and deploys its construction drones.
Gun towers and the drone air force break a swarm on the colony perimeter.
Liquid extractors working the shallows at sunset.
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 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, wants and happiness; the district planner and its self-building supply chains; the closed economy with per-business P&L; 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.