Introducing Posterity

Welcome to this first devlog for Posterity, a game I’m currently developing!

Posterity is a 4X strategy game set in the Paleolithic. You manage a band of hominids across three million years, from australopithecines in the Rift Valley to the first permanent settlements.

None of the australopithecines you start with will live to see the end of the campaign. What you’re actually following is the single thing that ties all these generations together: the story they hand on to posterity, the first time they knapped stone tools, a knowledge of fire, new way of living together. What we would be called, much later, a civilization.

This devlog is the first of a series I intend to share regularly to present the game, its systems and how I’m developing it.

The basics

Fundamentally, Posterity is a 4X: a map to explore, workforce to assign on tiles, a tech tree to research, etc.

It’s a turn-based game set on a hex map representing the land your people currently know (savanna, forest, river…). You assign each turn the available workforce to actions set on tiles: gather berries there, explore that forest, knap some stones into tools… Those actions yield resources to feed and slowly expand the population.

This is the classic part. But there are several key features that I think make it genuinely different:

1. Resources deplete, and depletion drives migration

Every food collection action depletes the tile it is on. After picking up the berries on the bush and hunting the easy prey, maybe what’s left is just a few roots. In other words, you’ll experience what economists call diminishing marginal returns.

This is a central mechanic for the game: resource depletion is the historical, organic reason why hunter-gatherers regularly migrated.

Migrating means leaving this map behind and starting on a new one, often in a different biome.

The question for the player is when:

• Leave early and you give up a familiar country for an unknown destination, and moving often has a fertility cost: the need to keep moving is a major constraint to fertility, more than food availability.
• Leave late and you risk overstaying in a depleted land and consuming the food reserves you’ll need for a long journey. Spend them carelessly and the migration may not carry you as far as you’d like.

2. Migrating jumps you forward in time

The active turn-based part of the game is at the scale of days: gathering roots, hunting prey, scouting a forest are tasks completed in a few days. A typical stay might last a few dozen turns, i.e. a few seasons, a year at most: this is how often hunter-gatherers moved.

This creates an obvious issue for a game.

If a migration covers about a year, nobody will play three million of them. Not to mention that most of those migrations would play very similarly: technological evolution in the Paleolithic happened on a scale of tens to hundreds of thousands of years.

So instead, when the band migrates, the calendar jumps forward by tens of thousands of years.

There are four things you’ll deal with during a leap:

• Generations pass and the population grows (or not)
• New technologies (named innovations in this game) are adopted
• Biological mutations are selected, based on the environmental pressures the people lived under during the active phase
• The great-great-(…)-grandchildren of the previous band head to a new destination. You may choose the direction along the lines of “follow the herds north: plenty of food, little shelter”, but the actual destination may always keep some surprises…

3. How you play steers long-term evolution

A migration lands you in a new map, but it’s not a full reset, many elements persist across the whole campaign.

The way you play between each migration decides how your people develop along the first three axes above: population, knowledge, and biology.

• Manage to stay in one place for a long time and fertility grows
• Spend time exploring and taking risks and the band learns
• Survive in a difficult environment and the survivors adapt

Theoretically you can advance all three at the same time.

But practically, one or two will lag behind, as these three ways of playing tend to work against each other:

• Staying long enough to grow the population means playing conservatively and in a well-known area, which will teach you less.
• Living somewhere you’re badly adapted to will drive biological adaptation, but will probably cost lives and fertility.
• Adapting to a hostile biome technologically (such as furs and fire in the cold) and the evolutionary pressure drops away.

The last one in particular is interesting: you don’t choose to become a cold-adapted Neanderthal in a menu, you just play in the cold without fire (or little of it), often enough and long enough, and the cold adaptation will be imposed to the descendants through natural selection.

Depending on how you played, after three million years you may arrive at Homo sapiens, but also at another kind of human we could have been: maybe a Neanderthal line, or even a completely speculative one made of hypercarnivores or aquatic apes.

Design choices

Early in the development, I’ve settled on several design principles to create identity and focus:

Mechanics that reflect the period.

The standard 4X recipe (cities that produce, units that fight, science that accumulates) doesn’t really work for a hunter-gatherers setting.

The big advantage I see in building from scratch instead of modding one of the existing civ games is that I don’t have to compromise on the design.

I can have bands that migrate instead of cities, make danger that comes from the environment instead of rival bands, trigger innovation through accidental discoveries instead of researchers. Overall I’m trying hard to ground the systems in what we know about Prehistory and avoid anachronisms and clichés whenever possible (no cavemen clubbing bears).

That said, it’s a game, not a documentary. Whenever I have to choose between historical accuracy and fun, the latter wins.

Deep under the hood, simple on screen.

My job is about modelling systems, so I love designing deep, interconnected machinery. But I’ve played Caveman2Cosmos, and I’ve experienced how this can turn into too much complexity.

So I’m adamant about cutting every click and decision that don’t matter much. And if a system stops being interesting or relevant at some stage of the game, I’d rather remove or replace it.

No game over.

From my personal experience, I don’t want to see a game over screen after investing tens of hours in a campaign. Or worse, suffer a soft game over where you don’t even notice the campaign was doomed until hours later.

So this game just won’t have a game over screen other than reaching the end of the campaign. It’s a single-player game and there would always be the option to reload a save anyway, so I’d rather design a game around that than pretend you can lose permanently.

This does not mean that there’s no tension, or that decisions don’t matter. A famine can force a migration toward a destination you weren’t ready for. An over-ambitious or unlucky hunt may cost lives that will hamper population growth. Migrating into a land you’re not adapted to costs fertility. All of this may hurt, but more importantly all of it will change who your people become and what their history will look like, something I hope I can make interesting enough that nobody wants to savescum it away.

And non-design choices

Saying what the game is not can be as reavealing as saying what it is, so here’s what I’m not developing:

• A survival game. Survival is a real challenge in the Paleolithic, but that’s the context, not the loop. No inventory, no detailed crafting, no managing individuals. The unit is a band and its descendants over millions of years.
• A competitive game. There are other hominid bands on the map, working the same land, and they’re as much an opportunity for cooperation as a source of rivalry. They exist to serve a single-player experience; they run on their own rules rather than as opponents trying to steal a victory from you. The real pressure comes from the world: the leopard feeding on your people, the crocodiles waiting at the waterhole, the depleted land that can no longer feed you. The fourth X in this game is more about the megafauna than about other hominids.
• A narrative game. The story handed down through the generations is the connecting thread of the game, but it’s a story you write, not a predefined one.
• A roguelite. A territory isn’t a self-contained run that ends at a shop where you buy upgrades for the next one. It’s one piece of a single continuous history, shaped by every migration before it.

When is it going to be playable?

The good news: most of the systems are in and running. There are edges to round off and content to tune, game balance is way off, and visually it’s still fairly rough, though I feel the style I wanted (a 18th-century map aesthetic) is there.

The bad news: when you think you’re 80% done, there’s 80% left to do. So a beta or Early Access build is still too far off for me to give a date. Not 2026 anyway.

In the meantime I have plenty to write about. I’m aiming for a devlog about once a month, presenting the various systems of the game (food, animals, exploration, crafting, innovation, mutations…) and sharing updates about development.

I’m developing this solo on the side of a time-consuming job, which means development may take time, but also that I’m not under pressure to ship it before it’s ready just because I need to fill my fridge. If the Paleolithic turns out to be a complete, satisfying experience, I’d like to carry the game into the Neolithic and beyond, with mechanics that change from one age to the next. But a complete, genuinely fun Paleolithic comes first.

If you’d like to support the development of this game, the most useful thing you can do (aside from talking about it!) is to wishlist the game on Steam. It’s free and very important to give it visibility!

And because this wouldn’t be complete without some visuals, here’s a first look at the game: