Hi,

I’m the solo developer of Gilded Dominion, a persistent browser-based economic/life RPG set in an alternate 1866 America.

The game is currently in Public Alpha, and I’m testing one very specific thing:

After creating your character and playing for about 10–15 minutes, is it clear what you should be working toward next?

I’m not looking for compliments or reviews.

I’d really like answers to these three questions:

1. What did you think your first goal was?

2. Where did you hesitate or feel confused?

3. What would make you come back tomorrow?

Game page:

https://hironakamura.itch.io/gilded-dominion

If you try it, blunt feedback is completely welcome.

Thanks,

Dan

Wating for Feedback

Small update: since posting this, I’ve already made several onboarding and navigation improvements based on the first-player experience — including a clearer landing page, username login fixes, and a new My Profile/Home flow.

I’m still testing the same thing: during your first 10–15 minutes, what is the first moment where you’re unsure what to do next?

Even one sentence helps.

Today’s Gilded Dominion Alpha update focuses on stability and player-reported bugs.

Thanks to detailed feedback from our Alpha testers, we identified and fixed several issues affecting Storage material purchases and Marketplace orders. These fixes apply globally to all current and future players.

What was fixed:

• Storage material purchases now work correctly when the player has enough Bucks to cover the actual cost.
• Marketplace BUY orders now reserve and charge the correct amount.
• Retrying a completed purchase no longer creates duplicate charges, items, or transactions.
• Reusing the same request with different purchase details is safely rejected.
• SELL orders now update reserved quantities and escrow correctly after partial and complete sales.
• Expired sessions now recover properly, including when multiple requests happen simultaneously.
• Invalid or incomplete purchase responses can no longer replace the correct interface state.

The update was tested directly on Alpha using dedicated QA accounts. We verified wallet deductions, inventory delivery, Marketplace execution, retries, escrow settlement, session recovery, and financial records. All temporary QA balances and inventories were restored after testing.

No player accounts or tester data were modified during these repairs.

Next, development will focus on improving the early-game experience, giving new players more meaningful actions during their first minutes, and continuing the visual-art improvements based on community feedback.

Gilded Dominion is still in Alpha, and every report helps us build a stronger game. If you encounter a problem, please share exactly what you were doing and, when possible, include a screenshot.

Play: https://gildeddominion.com Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/BZ3Vu5K9GE

Gilded Dominion — Major Backend Optimization

Yesterday I deployed a major performance optimization for Gilded Dominion’s ALPHA.

The update reduces unnecessary PostgreSQL data transfers and improves background polling. Previously, frequently refreshed pages could repeatedly read more historical data than necessary, especially as player accounts grew.

The new system includes:

• Estimated PostgreSQL data reduction of 93–96% for smaller accounts
• Up to 99.97–99.98% reduction for accounts with larger histories
• Polling stops when the browser tab is hidden
• Page-specific polling stops after leaving that section
• Duplicate and overlapping requests are prevented
• Messages no longer download full conversations while closed
• Marketplace history now uses pagination
• Expired sessions share one token refresh

The update passed 85 targeted tests and 50 native PostgreSQL tests before deployment. ALPHA testing confirmed that login, Events, Messages, Social Status, Employment, Education, Real Estate, Gardening, Livestock and Marketplace still work correctly.

No player balances, inventories or historical records were manually changed, and no database migration was needed.

The optimization is now live. Local benchmarks show a major improvement, but I’m still monitoring real Supabase usage before confirming the final production savings.

Gilded Dominion is a persistent browser-based economy and society simulator set in a fictional America beginning in 1866.

Play the ALPHA: https://gildeddominion.com

Feedback about performance, navigation, onboarding and the first hour is welcome!

Major First-Day Progression Update Is Now Live

Today we released one of the most important Gilded Dominion ALPHA updates so far.

Early player feedback showed us that the game became too slow and passive after the first few minutes. We listened and rebuilt the opening progression.

What changed?

• Laborer → Citizen now takes approximately 3–5 minutes.
• Citizen → Skilled Worker can be completed in a few active hours.
• Civic registration now takes 1 minute.
• General Studies levels 1–10 now take 2 hours in total.
• The first house can be constructed in 25 minutes after its requirements and materials are ready.
• Gardening now ranges from approximately 30 minutes to 12 hours.
• Samuel Reed now provides clearer instructions and additional objectives when an account first reaches Citizen and Skilled Worker.
• A new Journey panel shows the current objective, destination and next reward.

Progression beyond Skilled Worker is temporarily paused while we develop the next social ranks, professions, businesses and political systems. Existing higher-ranked characters keep their status.

Existing-player reward

Eligible players who joined before this update receive:

• 2 GOLD
• 20 Household Provisions

Open Messages, find the Development Team letter and claim the reward.

All previous sessions were closed during deployment, so returning players must sign in again.

Thank you to everyone who tested the game and gave honest feedback. This update exists because you helped us understand where the experience needed to improve.

Play now: https://gildeddominion.com Join Discord: https://discord.gg/BZ3Vu5K9GE

Yesterday I released a major social update for Gilded Dominion.

Gilded Dominion is a persistent browser-based economic RPG set in an alternate version of Reconstruction-era America. The long-term vision has always been bigger than simply earning money and climbing through social ranks. I want players to build identities, relationships, rivalries and eventually communities inside the same living economy.

This update is an important step toward that goal.

What’s new

Player Profiles have become the center of the social experience. Players can now:

• Publish posts directly from their profiles
• View posts on other Public Profiles
• Add and manage friends from the profile page
• Like or unlike posts through clear controls
• Join compact comment discussions
• Open a private conversation directly through the MESSAGE button

The messaging system has also been reorganized into one unified inbox. Conversations with other players, Samuel Reed and the Development Team now appear together and are ordered by their latest activity.

I also corrected several navigation and interface problems. The main header, Discord access and navigation now remain stable while moving through profiles and other social pages.

Why this update matters

Gilded Dominion is designed around multiple characters, businesses, property, production and a player-driven economy. But systems alone do not create a persistent world—the players do.

Profiles, friendships, posts and private conversations create the foundation for future alliances, business negotiations, political discussions, rivalries and community events.

The game is still in ALPHA, and many planned systems are not implemented yet. I am building it carefully, testing each major update with real players and using their feedback to decide what needs improvement next.

The update is now live and passed 1,215 automated tests with zero failures.

Play the Alpha: https://gildeddominion.com

Join our Discord and help shape development: https://discord.gg/BZ3Vu5K9GE

This has been one of the most difficult updates I've worked on for Gilded Dominion so far — but also one of the most satisfying.

The biggest piece of this update was the creation of a new State Market Maker: a bot that can actually participate in the game's marketplace and trade resources owned by the State.

This was important to me because I didn't want to solve the Alpha's low-player economy by simply spawning fake resources whenever somebody needed them. The State has resources, the market has supply and demand, and the Market Maker operates within that economy. The long-term goal remains the same: an economy increasingly driven and controlled by the players themselves.

Building this turned out to be much more complicated than I initially expected. There were a lot of economic rules, safeguards, edge cases, transaction logic, testing and reconciliation involved.

And this time I want to openly mention something else: AI played a serious role in the development process.

I've used AI as a development tool before, but this was probably one of the first times where I really felt how powerful the combination can become when you already know exactly what system you want to build.

I designed the rules, challenged the results, tested the behavior, rejected solutions that didn't fit the game, changed the architecture and kept iterating. AI helped me work through implementation, analysis, testing and problems at a speed that would have been extremely difficult for me to achieve alone.

Honestly, it was a very enjoyable experience.

Some of the work represented in these recent updates could easily have occupied me for weeks. Instead, I was able to push through an enormous amount of it in only a few very intense days.

Not because I pressed a button and a game appeared.

Quite the opposite.

There were moments where I had to think harder about the economy and architecture than ever before — because suddenly I had the ability to execute ideas almost as quickly as I could develop them.

Alongside the Market Maker, the latest development work has also continued improving the Town and marketplace systems, player identity and social features, onboarding, account systems, UI behavior and the underlying economic infrastructure.

Gilded Dominion is still an Alpha. There are still rough edges, missing systems and plenty of things I want to rebuild or improve.

But this update felt different.

For the first time, I could really see what becomes possible when one developer with a very specific vision can combine his own decisions and persistence with AI as a serious development tool.

A few weeks of work compressed into a few days.

And somehow, instead of making development feel less personal, it made me enjoy building Gilded Dominion even more.

Back to work. There is still a Dominion to build.

Development Update — Stability, Economy, Workshops & Character Management (AI TEXT GENERATED) 

The last few days were mostly about fixing the parts of Gilded Dominion that players actually feel every minute they play.

I spent a lot of time digging into performance and stability first. One of the biggest problems was a false Maintenance screen that could appear even when maintenance was actually OFF. The cause ended up being a combination of server-side policy mismatch handling and the frontend treating every HTTP 503 like intentional maintenance.

That also helped explain some of the 10–12 second delays players were seeing. After the stabilization work, some of the slowest routes dropped from around 11 seconds to well under half a second.

I also started cleaning up how much data the game asks from the server. Gilded Dominion is my first serious online project, and Alpha has taught me a lot about how important request frequency, projections, database traffic and browser-side reuse really are.

Another big area was Businesses and Workshops.

Production now has proper structured errors instead of generic “Action not completed” messages. If a lease is expired, material is missing, Energy is insufficient, or the wrong operator is involved, the game now tells you the real reason.

I also simplified the Business flow. Production is now focused on producing goods, while Marketplace trading stays where it belongs.

Under the hood, workshop custody was rebuilt as well. Materials waiting to be used in production are now separated from finished goods waiting to be collected. Older ambiguous Alpha stock was preserved instead of being guessed or rewritten, so no player property was lost.

One important economy change also came out of this work: I removed the old Merchant Supply shortcut from Businesses.

Workshops can no longer create production inputs from an infinite NPC source. Materials now come from real owned stock or through Marketplace orders backed by players or the State Market Maker.

That means a business is not guaranteed to always be profitable or even able to produce immediately. If the market price is bad or supply is scarce, that becomes part of the strategy.

The Marketplace itself also received an important correction. A State trade used to invalidate the whole visible quote ladder after a single fill, making it look like all offers disappeared. State quotes are now rebuilt atomically after settlement so the market remains usable immediately after a trade.

Workshop operators also no longer require constant global character switching. If Amanda is assigned as the operator, Business actions can execute through Amanda while another character remains selected globally. This is a small change on paper, but it matters a lot once an account grows to 20+ characters.

Which leads to the next major area I’m working on: Character Command Center.

One of my active Alpha testers now manages around 20 characters, and that exposed a very clear problem: managing many people should become a strategy challenge, not a clicking challenge.

I’m rebuilding the Command Center into a more visual, playable management tool. The goal is to quickly see who is working, studying, ready, idle or blocked, issue limited Work/Education orders, use group selection safely, and reduce unnecessary navigation between characters.

I’m also removing a lot of the “computer-generated admin panel” feeling from this area. Less walls of text, fewer giant forms, more visual state, clear ✓ / ✕ eligibility, timers, progress and direct actions.

One example: bulk Work planning is being redesigned so Laborers and Citizens are separated by valid job groups before orders are issued. The game should never let you blindly assign an incompatible plan to five people and then tell you afterward that they are all blocked.

Overall, these last days were less about adding flashy new systems and more about strengthening the foundation:

• performance and stability
• false Maintenance fixes
• faster server reads
• better workshop UX
• structured gameplay errors
• safer production custody
• real Marketplace-backed business supply
• State Market fixes
• explicit workshop operator actions
• large-roster character management

Alpha continues to do exactly what I hoped it would do: expose the things that look fine with one character but become painful with 10, 20 or more.

There is still a lot to build, but the game is becoming more stable, more coherent, and much closer to the economy/strategy world I originally wanted.

Thanks to everyone who keeps testing, breaking systems, finding bottlenecks and sending honest feedback. A lot of these changes exist because of that.