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I've been spending a slightly unreasonable amount of development time lately on something that started with: "The ground needs grass."

This is Icon: Voidfall, the RTS I've been building for about three months now, and one of the things I've really wanted to improve is how much the battlefield itself reacts to what's happening on it.

So naturally, adding grass escalated.

The grass is procedurally generated across the playable NavMesh and GPU instanced rather than being placed as authored objects. It reacts to units moving through it, clears underneath structures, dies around the spreading Malignance used by the Arafel faction, responds to wind and lighting, and eventually regrows when temporary damage to the environment disappears.

Then I added Twisters.

They're neutral environmental actors that wander the NavMesh and physically affect the match. They'll tear paths through the grass, damage structures, pick up smaller units, throw larger ones around, uproot resource trees, scatter their logs, and leave temporary scars through Malignance.

Wildlife and neutral Kobolds will actually recognize one approaching and attempt to get the hell out of its way.

There's also a match mutator called Tempest that turns these things loose during normal games.

And because apparently none of this had become complicated enough yet, I added fire.

Fire spreads through the grass with an intentionally irregular front, chars the ground behind it, produces smoke, can ignite units caught in its path, temporarily sets structures and trees visually ablaze, and eventually burns itself out. The grass then slowly grows back into the scar.

The fun part for me has been trying to do all of this without turning environmental simulation into the most expensive system in an RTS that's already expected to handle hundreds of units.

A lot of what you're seeing here is shader driven, bounded, pooled, or represented through compact world-space data rather than trying to simulate every individual blade of grass or particle as an object.

There are still plenty of rough edges, and fire in particular is currently offline-only while I work out the host-authoritative world-event path it needs for multiplayer.

But this is getting much closer to what I want the world of Voidfall to feel like.

The battlefield isn't just scenery underneath the RTS anymore. It's slowly becoming another participant in the match.

Anyway, here's roughly four minutes of me abusing the environment in the name of game development.

Happy to get into the technical weeds on any of it if anyone is interested.

About three months ago, we started work on Icon: Voidfall, originally as our submission to the RTS'99 Game Jam.

1 Dev, 1 Artist, 1 Composer.

The idea was deliberately a little unreasonable: build an old-school asymmetric RTS where the two factions don't just have different units, but fundamentally different identities and ways of interacting with the map.

On one side is the Arx Imperium, a crumbling feudal mana-punk civilization trying to hold itself together.

On the other is Arafel, The Dark, an entity from beyond reality that spreads across the world through living corruption and turns the things it consumes into weapons.

The game jam gave us a deadline and an excuse to finally prove out the idea.

Then something happened that I don't think we entirely expected.

The project just kept gaining momentum.

What was supposed to be a game jam build started becoming a real RTS.

Three months in, we now have both playable factions, base building, economy and resource systems, research, asymmetric faction mechanics, multiplayer, formations, an original soundtrack, our own strategic AI system called CogSys, and most recently a replay/theatre system that can even produce gameplay data CogSys can learn from.

There's still an enormous amount to build.

The game is in Alpha, balance is a moving target, some systems are still finding their final form, and there are plenty of rough edges. We're not pretending otherwise.

But the point where this stopped feeling like a prototype and started feeling like a game we absolutely have to finish came surprisingly quickly.

So that's what we're doing. We're taking Icon: Voidfall forward as a full title.

I've included a short comparison showing where the project started during the jam and where it is today. I thought this community in particular might appreciate seeing how much can happen once a prototype gets its hooks into you and refuses to die.

For anyone interested in actually getting their hands on it, we also have a free Early Alpha demo available on Steam. We're actively using feedback and replay data from players as we continue development.

We're also beginning conversations with publishers and slowly looking at growing the team, but right now our focus is pretty simple:

Make the best RTS we can, keep putting it in front of players, and keep improving it.

Happy to answer questions about the game, Unity, multiplayer, CogSys, the replay system, what survived the game jam, what absolutely did not survive the game jam, or any of the questionable decisions involved in deciding to build an RTS in 2026.