Groundwork devlog

A working line

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Laying out a full line: belts, inserters and the cutter, with the blueprint preview in blue.

The inserter became a little gantry crane. Four legs, a rail with a stop at each end, a trolley running along it and a claw on a line that pays out as it lowers. It goes down, grabs, lifts, rides across, lowers and lets go, one motion after the other. For that I rebuilt the animation system so each moving part can pause and carry on by itself, and hand over to the next part when it reaches the end of its travel.

Inserters

Tue, 22 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Belts move goods along, but something has to put goods onto them and take them off. Today was mostly design, for a piece called the inserter.

The rules I settled on:

The inserter is the only bridge. A belt never feeds straight into a machine or a stockpile. Between stockpile and belt, and between belt and machine, there’s always an inserter. It makes every hand-over visible.
It reaches exactly one tile behind it to pick up and one tile ahead to drop off, in a straight line.
Machines take up to three inputs, from behind, left and right, and give out one product at the front.
Every raw good gets its own input stockpile. A new stockpile starts empty and belongs to whatever arrives first, so wood and iron never mix.

Factory floors also grew to 20 by 20 tiles, because the old floor already felt cramped.

Inside the factory

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The gallery filled up: houses, a farmhouse, a market stall, stockpiles that visibly fill as goods arrive, and the pieces for factories: straight belts, corner belts, a cutter and in and out stockpiles.

A fly-through of the model gallery, 31 models by now.

Then the part I was most looking forward to: stepping inside a factory in 3D. Double-click a factory and you’re on its floor, walls around you, laying belts that bend around corners.

Voxels from code

Sun, 20 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

To go 3D I needed models, and I’m not an artist. So every model in Groundwork is built from small blocks, 16 to a tile, placed by code. A small kit of parts (walls, posts, roofs, wheels, crates) and one fixed palette keep them looking like one set.

The first try at loading voxel models into the 3D test used models from an older game of mine, just to prove the pipeline:

The voxel editor

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Going 3D meant I needed a way to make models. I already had one: my other project, Nimby, has its own voxel model editor. Today Nimby moved to Godot too, the same engine as Groundwork, editor and all.

The voxel editor, with a wizard built from layers: torso, arms, head, hat and cape.

Models are built in layers, and each layer has a connection point it turns around, so an arm can swing or a saw blade can spin without the rest of the model moving. That same idea ended up driving every moving part in Groundwork.

Going 3D

Fri, 18 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Until today Groundwork was a flat, top-down 2D grid with small drawings for buildings. It worked: citizens walked, farms grew, and two days ago I added factory interiors, where you step inside a building and lay out its machines and belts. Yesterday belts learned to be dragged out in one stroke instead of placed tile by tile.

The town as it looked in 2D: fields, a river, a lake and the first workshops.

But every time I pictured the finished game, it wasn’t flat. So I built a quick 3D test to see how it would feel: belts carrying crates and barrels, and a small gantry crane moving goods between them. The pink boxes are stand-ins for models that didn’t exist yet.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Groundwork is a city builder where farms feed people, people work factories, and factories turn raw goods into everything a town needs. You don’t order citizens around one by one: you set up the town and its factories, and people get on with their lives in it.

I’m building it alone, in Godot with C#. This devlog follows it one day of progress at a time.

SilentSoulsSr