I've changed the visibililty of Project Millwheat to "public", but also archived it.

Project Millwheat was an idea I had since forever, mostly inspired by games such as Travian and Knights And Merchants.

With my love for #Medieval things, the idea of a game that has you handle the production chain of medieval products such as baking bread, was something I wanted to crate. Build a farm producing wheat, a mill processing it into flour, and a bakery to bake the bread.

Hence the name "Millwheat". I'm not sure what I would have called the final game.

You can also read my initial post on the PBBG-reddit: Project Millwheat and a follow-up post: Pre-Alpha of Millwheat.

These posts explain a bit more about the idea and what I was going for.
There's also the GAMEDESIGN.md file, but it's written in what I like to call "developer notes".

Open sourcing

This project was private for a long time and I haven't touched it in years. But because of Dependabot I was still looking at it every now and then. I decided to open source it, so that anyone can take a look at it.

The project itself is abandoned, and as such I have archived it, but for learning purposes it's available now. You can find it on https://github.com/gerbenjacobs/millwheat.

Designing a game

This was a clear example of good ideas not being enough to make a good game. There were so many design decisions that still had to be made, for it even to be a playable game.

The original idea was that everything takes an hour and that this would be a PBBG that you check in on, every so often during the day. I had great plans of adding battles and fluid map control, but I never got that far.

The project was also written in Go and I was relatively new to specificially web development in Go. And truth be told, it's not the best language for this.

So when I figured that even for me playing it, the hours of waiting would not be enticing enough, development fizzled out.

The future

I'm secretly still working on my Spacegame project, but between work and family, that's of course going slow. (Although I've done a lot of work since I posted that note.)

Besides that, the original "wheat, flour, bread" idea is still living rent free in my head and I could see myself making a Travian-like game. If you want that itch scratched there's Europe 1300 (not HTTPS) and The Grail Lords, some PBBGs that are still running and have a similar concept.

The other Thing™ that I also might wanna do, is update my Transport Game Europe project to use a more modern tech stack. It's kinda stuck on Laravel 5.7 and PHP 7.4.