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.
