Devlog #0: Building Nine Springs in public

I’m making a turn-based isometric CRPG, and I’m going to build all of it in the open: the systems, the art, the mistakes.

The game

Nine Springs (九泉) is a sealed arcology three kilometres underground. It was built for three million people and sealed eighty years ago, when a nanotech fog called the Grey swallowed the world above. About 200,000 people are left. The Bureau rations the air, a syndicate holds the water pumps, cybernetic kung-fu schools guard their floors, and copies of the dead live on in the network, not all of them sane.

In Chinese, 九泉 is also an old name for the land of the dead. The builders sold the place as a spring of life. Its residents live in the grave.

If you’ve played Underrail, Fallout 1 and 2 or ATOM RPG, you know the kind of game I mean: hard tactical combat, builds that change how you solve problems, and a world that remembers what you did.

What already works

The prototype runs in the browser on Three.js and WebGPU. So far it has:

Turn-based combat with action and movement points, free movement (not locked to tiles), melee reach, ranged falloff, magazines and reloading, energy weapons and grenades.
Body damage: hits land on the head, torso, arms or legs instead of one health bar.
Stealth AI with vision cones, alert states and sneak attacks out of real-time exploration.
Surfaces, feats, crafting, a game clock and healing over time.
Character creation and portraits, plus save and load.
A level editor for building the maps, and two places to walk around: Jishi Hall, a clinic run by rogue doctors, and the Walled City market district.

None of it is final. Most of it is ugly in places. That’s the point of showing it.

Why in public

Games like this get found slowly, by people who care about the genre and tell each other. I’d rather those people see the game while it’s still changing and tell me what’s wrong while I can still fix it.

What you’ll see here

Devlogs like this one, roughly every two weeks: what got built, what broke, what I changed my mind about.
The wiki, which grows with the game. It covers the world, the factions and the rules, and leaves out spoilers.
Short clips on social media most weeks.

Next up: the first full fight in Jishi Hall, start to finish.