After ~a year of evenings, my solo hobby remake of a 1991 German DOS strategy game runs in the browser — sharing progress + what kicked my butt
Hi all! I'm a solo hobby dev. My project, PC Kaiser, is a remake of an obscure German DOS strategy game from 1991, set in the Holy Roman Empire from the year 1001. You lead one of 30 dynasties through the centuries — building, marriage, succession, war and intrigue, all the way to the imperial crown.
The thing I kept chasing was emergent storytelling: I wanted every ruler's story to write itself instead of feeling scripted. So deaths, marriages, inheritance and assassinations all feed into each other. The payoff is moments I didn't plan — an heir dies young, a daughter married into another house suddenly inherits a foreign realm, the emperor gets assassinated mid-election and the whole game tilts. When playtesters started telling ME stories from their games, that's when it clicked.
A few things that were harder than expected:
- Succession/inheritance edge cases. Bloodlines, captured rulers, multi-realm dynasties... I've written more tests for "who inherits what when X dies" than for anything else.
- Balancing AI difficulty across a 0–10 scale without the AI either going bankrupt or steamrolling the player.
- Getting a desktop pygame game to run in the browser (via pygbag/WebAssembly) — lots of small gotchas with fonts, file paths and audio.
It's not 1.0 yet and I develop it continuously. There's a free browser demo if you want to poke at it (desktop, mouse + keyboard; it's in German but has an English wiki via F1).
Trailer: https://youtu.be/hQ9ZGeKXck8
Demo: https://grobi85.itch.io/pc-kaiser-demo
Curious how others here handle emergent-systems balance — do you lean on heavy playtesting, or try to model it up front? Happy to answer anything about the project.