Now that the project had properly started with research, the next problem was fairly simple in theory and slightly horrible in practice: deciding what actually makes it into the game and in what form.

We ended up with quite a huge pile of notes, references, timelines, layers of context, personalities, places, tensions, works, institutions, ideas, and all sorts of historical “stuff” that was - obviously - all “crucially relevant”. Then again, we’re building a game not an interactive encyclopedia…

So a big part of this phase was selection, categorization and synthesis, trying to figure out what can be generalized into game mechanics and how the content could interact. Which means, we started layering, and cutting out what doesn’t seem to properly fit into these gameplay layers.

This applied to pretty much everything: cities, authors, works, dynamics, interactions, policies, factions, developments, and the larger progression of ideas. Even the project tree came out of this process, because the more we organized the historical material, the clearer it became that certain advances, shifts, and intellectual movements needed to be structured in a way that’s familiar to gamers and historically accurate.

That was probably the main challenge here: staying factual without ending up with Crusader Kings or Europa Universalis - which are not things a very small team could tackle.

So this stage was a lot of filtering, grouping, simplifying, and arguing with the material until it started making sense as an implementable game.

Messy work, but necessary. Probably one of the most important phases, really, because this is where the project needed to convert accurate historical facts into gameplay mechanics.

(September 2025)