Thornweld

A settlement-survival game for phones, running on a game engine I built first.

Type: Mobile game · Android
Engine: Copperworks (my own, C++)
Role: Game design, art direction, AI-directed build
Status: In development · started Oct 2026

The game

Five survivors reach an abandoned outpost at the edge of a dark forest. Keep them fed, sheltered and alive, and turn the outpost into a town.

Players build and upgrade, assign jobs, farm, send expeditions into the wilds, take in newcomers at the gate, and get through nights, raids and sickness. It plays offline, in landscape, and is designed for a phone first.

By the numbers

149automated tests, all passing

1,776sprites rendered from 3D models

1engine, written from scratch for it

The settlement at night with lit windows — A full day and night cycle: windows light up, lanterns flicker, smoke drifts.

Expedition map with regions to explore — Expeditions: pick a region and a team, send them out, read their report.

A family of survivors asking to join the settlement — Visitors arrive with a story; you decide who gets a bed.

Research tree — A research tree that unlocks buildings and skills.

Close-up of the headquarters building — Buildings modeled in 3D, then rendered into sprites with their own shadows.

What's in it

Building, upgrades and jobs for every survivor
Farming, storage, hunger, thirst and morale
Expeditions to a world map, with reports and finds
Visitors at the gate, raids, sickness and medicine
A secrets-and-discoveries journal, and companions that hatch from eggs
Seasonal events, autosave with backups, and in-game problem reports sent to my server

How it's made

Art. Buildings, survivors and scenery are built as 3D models in Blender scripts and rendered from an isometric camera into sprite sheets with separate shadows, then packed into texture atlases. I set the visual target and review the art.

Code. The game is written in C++ on Copperworks, my own engine. I plan each feature in phases, direct an AI coding agent (Claude Code) to build it, and approve it only after the tests pass and I've seen screenshots of every screen at phone sizes.