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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN

@gorillabyte.bsky.social

Independent game studio from Austria. Building HARDPAN, a real-time strategy game on real city streets in 2084. Pre-alpha clips and dev notes. #indiedev #rts

Posts Replies Media

Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 9h

Ground units only drive along real street edges, so closing one edge is a real event. Here a strike drops a building onto the street and every route bends around the block. Would you block it, or leave it open as a trap? #indiedev #gamedev #rts #indiegame #osm

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Fair challenge, and you may be right. I haven't tested the layers one at a time yet. First playtest have shown better preception by players special in far zoom. If the glow carries it, which would you cut first, the smoke or the scorch?

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Thanks. The idea is one strike, one block, and the road is gone, so the route has to bend around it. With your street reopening after the fire, do players wait it out or reroute anyway?

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 10/10/2026

Reworked the artillery strike this week: playtesters couldn't spot the impact once zoomed out, so it now leaves black scorch, smoke and an ember glow. Second image: the collapse closes the street and the route bends around it. #ScreenshotSaturday #indiedev #gamedev #indiegame

Night top-down view of a city block in the game HARDPAN after an artillery strike: a collapsed building burns in several spots, black scorch spreads around it, and hatched marks on the street show that the road is closed.

The same moment with the tactical overlay on: a dashed teal route line bends around the burning block instead of running through it, and a teal Mortar tower on the left sits inside its range circle.

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Phone and desktop from one three.js build is a hard target for an RTS. Box select and right-click orders don't map cleanly to touch. How did you handle selecting groups of units on a phone?

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Ants make sense for real-time strategy. A colony already behaves like an economy you have to manage. Small heads-up: the Steam link in the article goes to the wrong game page.

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Width is the part I lean into: each street gets a width class from OSM that caps how many units fit side by side, so narrow streets become chokepoints. One-ways are ignored for units; they caused silly detours. How does your fire engine handle it, with a real turning circle?

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Mostly by keeping vehicles out of the problem: in the sim, units move node to node on the street graph, so there's no turning radius at all. A tight junction only matters for how it looks. The data does get cleaned: OSM nodes closer than 2 m merge into one junction, and polylines are simplified.

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

More about the game and a monthly dev newsletter: hardpan-game.com?utm_source=b...

hardpan-game.com

HARDPAN — Tower wars on real streets. 2084.

The ground stopped holding water — so the cities became the wells. A real-time strategy game of simultaneous attack and defense, fought through real city streets that collapse as you battle over them.

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

The convoy in this clip drives through a real Austrian town's street network. HARDPAN builds its levels from OpenStreetMap data, so every block and junction exists. You defend your streets while pushing a convoy into theirs. Pre-alpha. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors #indiedev #gamedev

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Gorillabyte · HARDPAN @gorillabyte.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This instantly took me back to Tentacle Wars, which I sank way too many hours into. Love that motes are economy and shield at once, so every split is a real gamble. Does the AI actively punish an overextended front?

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