Kenzie Games

Indie game studio in Tunisia. Building Codename Atlas, Nationfall & BlockRise. Real development progress, systems, failures and rebuilds.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

Would you spend half a day visiting a flood-hit neighbourhood if it gave you no immediate political advantage?

That is one of the choices we are testing in Codename Atlas. The difficult part is making the game remember why you went.

https://t.co/3sQ8UzRZmG

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@redkardevs Same here. Our first city was assembled from generated models and bought packs, each fine on its own, together a catalogue. Bringing artists in on textures and art direction mattered more than any single asset: one rule for materials instead of forty.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@Giulio6686 One we started watching: visits per view. A Reddit post of ours got 755 views and sent 3 visits to the itch page. The view count said it worked, the ratio said almost nobody wanted to know more.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@SorolifGames Where does the player read the rage level: on the orcs themselves, or in a bar in the UI? Feels like the kind of state you'd want to spot mid-fight without looking away from the units.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@5_pm_studio When a real building doesn't fit your grid, do you scale it down or give it a bigger footprint? Our casino only started to read as a landmark once it went from one plot to 3x2 (37 x 24 m). Shrunk to a single plot, it was just a shop with a sign.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

We rebuilt fourteen BlockRise shops last week. They were flat placeholder slabs, some facing away from the road. Now: real textures, readable signs, and three of them literally turned around to face the pavement.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@CityBuilderOn Does each district get its own entrance design, or is it one repeated? At that size the glass canopy alone already reads as metro from above.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@IIShazlyII Ours this month wasn't even a bug: three of our shops turned out to be facing away from the road. Nobody had checked them from the street, we only found out when we rebuilt them.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@forgotten_vale Does the shortage show on the map itself, like idle workers or half-finished houses, or only in the resource bar? When we reworked our RTS opening, the lesson was that something you can only see in a panel feels like it didn't happen.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@Smitty_Games Reads well: the tanks separate cleanly from the ground and the two sides are obvious at a glance. Is colour the only team cue? In our tycoon we committed to colour and pattern for ownership so colourblind players aren't locked out.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

Same plot, same one-storey footprint, same camera. Our BlockRise fashion shop went from flat cream walls to a textured render, dark trim, an arched sign and real side windows. One of fourteen shops we rebuilt to face the street.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@1LikeDogsAndCat Do laws change what the town looks like, or only the numbers? Curious whether a player can read a law's effect by looking at the map.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@luden_io Fun. Procedural per block or hand-placed modules? We moved our tycoon's buildings onto our own procedural script, and the hard part wasn't the generation, it was keeping forty buildings in one art direction.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@WOTWCityBuilder Do you judge them from the gameplay camera or up close? Our buildings only started reading properly once we checked each one from the play camera, 345 m out, before looking at it at eye level.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@SummitOElements Ours: a script meant to hide oversized visuals around camps was walking 16,631 transforms in LateUpdate every single frame. 56 ms per frame on its own. It only needed to run when something changed.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

A test we took from a r/tycoon thread and now use as an acceptance check: hide every sign. If you can't guess what the building is, it isn't done. Our BlockRise pharmacy leans on the rooftop cross and the green awning. Before/after, same camera.

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

Our BlockRise casino was a one-plot box with a sign on it. It's now a 3x2 monument: verdigris dome 16.5 m up, colonnade, and a gold sign still readable from 345 m out. Before/after:

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

Two playable political moments, eight years apart.

2026: observe a local assembly before the vote.
2034: navigate a campaign office where every conversation carries pressure.

What makes a political decision feel important in a game?

https://t.co/Scbkfgjm1Z

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@ant77man 1200 ships at nearly 30 fps is already a serious gain. Are you profiling the targeting cost separately from rendering now, or is the next bottleneck somewhere else?

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@WhoElsButMe We're building Nationfall, an RTS where a small territory grows into a nation. This week we worked on making the coastline feel like part of the world instead of a hard map edge. Here's the latest devlog: https://t.co/SSydCfX2Di

[Kenzie Games @kenzie__games]

@vivaladev Congrats on opening the playtest. What kind of feedback would help you most in the first round: pacing, balance, or whether the core loop is clear?