The city we built in 12 months

On August 14, 2025, Chaos City had four buttons: work, traffic, bribe, hospital. Each with a cooldown and a line of log. That was the game.

Today the city has regions you take over, NPCs that remember what you did, a turn-based card battle, a player marketplace, a police force that investigates anyone who abandons an extraction, and a season that will deliberately wipe much of it.

This is the first in a series of devlogs running to launch. The point is not to sell: it is to show what got built, how, and where we were wrong — including the exploits we found in our own economy.

What changed in 12 months

• The city became a map. Regions drawn as polygons, each declaring what it allows: commerce, stealth, transport, crafting, field ops.
• Actions became consequences. Working gives XP; aborting an extraction calls the police; losing a fight costs the gear you were carrying.
• Combat was rewritten from scratch as a turn-based card battle — live PvP, Elo arena, tower, boss, and region assault.
• The economy got a ceiling. One shop with a per-level cap on paid advantage, per-region passive income with a daily ceiling, and four money-laundering routes closed.
• The interface was rebuilt three times. Drawer → modal → a shell pinned to the viewport, with the whole game fitting on screen without the page scrolling.
• The game speaks two languages. Portuguese and English, including database content: missions, skills, regions, recipes and NPCs.

The numbers behind the work

None of this is a quality metric — it is a stubbornness metric. It serves one purpose: to show this is not a weekend prototype asking for your email.

Three layouts in one year

The first layout was a sidebar with a drawer. It died because opening a drawer for every action was expensive on a phone. The second traded drawers for modals and got faster. The third — the current one — pins the game inside the viewport: the HUD lives on a side rail, the activity feed lives inside the terminal, and the page does not scroll.

July 2026: the version that went into the UI audit.

September 2026: the game inside the screen, with the terminal holding the feed.

The same decision on a phone, at 390px wide.

The mini-HUD is the summary of that story: health, energy, money and level always visible, without costing a navigation.

Why this devlog exists

Because a browser game has a trust problem before it has a fun problem. Nobody sinks 40 hours into a character without knowing whether the server will exist in March, whether the shop sells victory, and whether the exploit their neighbour is running will get fixed.

The answer we have is to publish. Every Tuesday: devlog or patch notes. When we close an economy exploit, the post will say what it was, how much it paid, and how it got shut — after the fix is live. Devlog 04 is exactly that.

What comes next

Devlog 02, next Tuesday: raid — get in and get out alive. The extraction window, the backpack you can lose whole, and why quitting halfway costs more than dying.

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