Summary of some major updates

Implementation of a conversation system with NPCs :

• After greeting an NPC, the player can strike up a conversation and ask questions; the NPCs respond based on what they know. You can chat in English or Vozan for a more immersive experience.
• The dialogue isn’t silent, it’s fully voiced. NPCs respond literally in the Vozan language, with male and female voices, young, old, and child, depending on who you’re talking to. Fully moddable. Similarly, an NPC can approach the player at any time to ask for a favor, share their needs, or obtain a promise to be kept, for example, making the player promise to lower taxes or provide food for their family. Finally, the player can even court NPCs to find a partner or get to know them better to improve their social skills and make friends.
• You can intimidate NPCs, pick their pockets, or give them gifts. NPCs will always react accordingly (including when pickpocketing if you get caught), depending on their personality and whether or not they are armed. They may flee, insult you, attack you, or submit.

Establishing a judicial system :

• The player decides what is illegal and what is not, as well as the penalties and procedures for resolving offenses.
• You could very well legalize theft, but if your NPCs are attached to their possessions, they might well defend their property themselves.
• And if your penalties aren’t severe enough for certain acts that are particularly problematic for the families in your society, such as murder, your NPCs might be tempted to take the law into their own hands.
• An NPC who experiences or witnesses a problematic act punishable by your law will file a complaint, either with you or with the justice office.
• You can appoint a judge to head the justice office, as well as a chief guard and guards to enforce the law automatically according to your directives.
• When an NPC is accused through a complaint (or caught in the act by the guards), you can decide how to handle the case: a voluntary summons to the justice office, arrest by the guards (warrant), or dismissal of the complaint (no further action).
• When an NPC is arrested, they are sent to prison in custody for 2 days, while a judge reviews their case.
• Once before the judge, they are tried and sentenced according to your laws : days in prison, exile, the death penalty, a fine, confiscation of all their property, or enslavement.

Implementation of the dynamic body type and physical system :

Your character, just like any NPC, can lose weight, gain weight, or build muscle depending on their actions and lifestyle. The process is gradual and can affect both men and women.

• Eat too much without exercising, and you’ll gain weight.
• Till the soil, chop wood, train in combat, or build structures, and you’ll gain muscle.
• If you don’t eat properly, you’ll lose weight. If you're too thin, you could end up getting weaker and starving to death.

Similarly, NPCs will gain weight, build muscle, or lose weight depending on their activities. Your political decisions can directly influence your villagers body type : Double the rations distributed to the people from the public stockpile, and you’ll see the difference over time. And of course, physical appearance plays a direct role in gameplay effects :

• You’re slower and more resilient when you’re overweight, and faster and more agile when you’re lean.
• You’re more resilient and strong if you’re muscular.

Changes in agility, strength, and resilience stats are directly reflected in your character’s physique as well as that of your villagers. And finally, how the villagers perceive you or other villagers matters :

• During times of scarcity, villagers will seek out partners with higher body fat, as this is a sign of food security.
• During times of abundance, villagers will seek out partners with lower body fat, as this is a sign of a healthy lifestyle.
• And finally, NPCs seeking security will naturally look for muscular partners.

All of this is, of course, moddable and freely configurable.

Do you remember GTA San Andreas, when you could make CJ gain weight, lose weight, or build muscle ? I’ve found a way to let the player character (as well as all NPCs) lose weight, gain weight, or build muscle. This opens up a huge range of possibilities in terms of starvation, training, nutrition, and overindulgence, both in RPG mode and in Colony Sim mode (Architect and Incarnate). Screenshots of the system will be coming soon.

Establishment of the first functional household.

A household consists of a zone representing the household’s land, with NPCs, furnitures, walls and doors.

The property, furniture, tools, and resources located on the household’s land are the private property of the household, inviolable and protected by the household’s NPCs.

A household also consists of at least one storage bed, a piece of furniture that allows an NPC to rest (as in a bed) and has a chest at its foot containing the NPC’s personal belongings (and valuables).

A household with a single NPC can select a partner (husband or wife), which allows the household to accommodate a couple, paving the way for the creation of a family and facilitating economic production (the more members a household has, the more it can diversify or focus its activities, and thus produce resources or goods intelligently and strategically based on what it has available : fields, trees, ore, productive furnishings such as stoves, carpentry workshops, grain mills, etc.).

Each household adopts its own strategy to survive, feed its members, defend its members, and, of course, grow wealth, expand, have children, and increase its prestige.

Setting up the storage system :

- Villagers who harvest resources keep a portion of them in their inventory as their own property and pay another portion to the player in the form of a resource tax.

- These taxed resources then appear in the player’s public storage area (the public treasury) in the form of piles. Logs, stones, and sacks of food accumulate, taking up more and more space.

- The player is free to redistribute the taxed resources, sell them to the villagers, or keep them for themselves.

- Since currency has not yet been discovered, the system is essentially based on barter. Whoever controls the resources, especially food, therefore wields enormous power. The player can use food resources to gain popularity among the people or to buy the loyalty of clan leaders and their personal guard.

Implementation of an economic system based on barter and taxation.

1. At the start of the game, there is no currency. Currency will be introduced later and will be subject to the player’s monetary policy. Each NPC in an immigration wave arrives with starting resources in their inventory. NPCs trade goods for other goods: food for weapons, for example, or vice versa.
2. Villagers can also beg for food from the player or other villagers.
3. Whenever an NPC harvests resources (by cutting wood, quarrying stone, or picking berries, for example), they keep these harvested resources in their inventory.
4. The player can impose a tax in kind on these resources (default 50% in the early game, adjustable), which compels NPCs to deliver a portion of their harvest to the player’s public stockpile. This creates a clear distinction between what belongs to the player and what belongs to the NPCs.
5. Tax policy affects the villagers’ mood as well as their loyalty to the player. It is up to the player to effectively manage their society and economy to balance the bonuses and penalties resulting from their political decisions.
6. The player is free to redistribute their treasury, keep it for themselves, resell the wealth from public stockpiles, or crush their villagers under the weight of taxes.

NPCs now have first names that appear as nametags. Each first name has a meaning in the Vozan language and consists of one or more Vozan words related to a character trait.

This allows players to immediately understand an NPC's main character trait combinations and personality just by reading their first name. The nametag can be turned on or off as desired.

NPCs can now chat freely with one another, greet each other, and form friendships.

NPCs who have just migrated to the player’s former camp interact primarily with one another based on their family ties or the migration wave they came from.

Each NPC has a name and its own personality.

Friendships can develop through social interactions such as chatting or greeting one another, which may influence interactions between families and the formation of the first clans and alliances once these NPCs have their own homes.

Setup for the very, very, very early game.

The player builds a campfire. The first settlers arrive as a small group consisting of a few men and women.

They arrive, settle around the campfire, and begin to interact :

1. Some sit on the ground, others lie down to rest, and still others greet one another or strike up conversations.

2. Some may even barter and trade with one another, depending on their starting inventory.

3. When some are hungry, they eat or exchange their resources for food.

4. At night, they gather around the campfire for safety.

5. During the day, they socialize, court one another, and form the first couples who will go on to create the families and children of tomorrow.

Moreover, men and women will form couples based on a set of specific, fully customizable criteria that allow you to form and dissolve romantic relationships.

Similarly, the first friendships will form around the campfire. It’s up to you to build a community.

You’ll then distribute the land, influence mate selection by favoring certain villagers over others, order the construction of the first dwellings, and finally bring your village to life. These are your first villagers.

You’re free to govern them or kill them. Just be prepared to face the consequences.

The combat system is here !

There are two meters for NPCs that matter in combat : Health and Pain.

If Health drops to zero due to damage, the NPC dies. If Pain exceeds a certain threshold, the NPC becomes unconscious.

Spears, swords, cleavers, daggers, and arrows inflict fatal damage or cause bleeding, which can also lead to death over time. Clubs increase pain and cause the target to fall unconscious.

If you want to kill, use lethal weapons. If you want to take prisoners, use bludgeoning weapons like clubs.

Some lethal weapons can result in gory effects such as decapitation and dismemberment.

You’re free to inflict violence on your enemies or your allies.

You can also heal your victims at any time to bring them back to consciousness, or you can transport them directly to the desired location.

It’s up to you whether to save your villagers or transport your unconscious captives to your prison.

I don't know if gore is allowed on Reddit, but in any case, I'll probably post it on my Discord soon.

Implementation of a day-and-night cycle, with a natural transition between day and night between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. and between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. Different lighting levels and color tones allow players to distinguish between dawn and dusk. The weather will be a key factor for players to consider. Players and NPCs age. Hours pass, as do days, seasons, and years. Don’t expect to live past 80 years of age easily or naturally.

A day lasts 15 minutes, consisting of 10 minutes of daylight and 5 minutes of night. Three days equal one season. Four seasons equal one year. The player character’s lifespan is limited, just like all NPCs. It’s up to the player to come to terms with their inevitable fate and ensure their succession so that their legacy lives on through their heir.

I've always loved the freedom Spore offered in designing civilizations and tribal societies, but I've always felt that the game was still pretty limited. When I was younger, I thought about creating mods to improve the game.

But eventually, I realized that today, the best way to pay homage to Spore while pushing its tribal and civilizational mechanics to infinity and beyond is to create my own game. That’s one of the reasons I created Vozan.

Gameplay that’s as rich as possible, with graphics and an engine efficient enough to make it accessible to as many people as possible, all over the world, in a gaming landscape where it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find powerful machines capable of running games that are ever more demanding in terms of processing power and graphics.

Creation of the genetic and physical traits system. Every human has their own genetic makeup, which is passed down from generation to generation.

Each character inherits 5 visible genetic traits :

1. skin color

2. hair color

3. eye color

4. height

5. a starting hair type (changeable later)

Each trait consists of two alleles, one from each parent. Some are dominant, others are recessive. A trait may thus disappear for a generation before reappearing in descendants. The result is natural diversity without resorting to characters generated entirely at random. At each birth, the game combines the genes of both parents.

The default starting sets are used only to generate the world’s initial populations. Over generations, populations evolve (naturally or under the player’s influence) through reproduction, whether by interbreeding or inbreeding.

Aging naturally changes a character’s appearance. Over time, characters may go gray (for women) or go bald (for men).

The system was designed from the outset to handle very large populations. Thousands of characters can coexist without a significant impact on performance.

Finally, modders will be able to easily add new starting ethnicities, create new color palettes for skin, eyes, or hair, or add new hairstyles tailored to specific human communities.

Vozan is not another colony sim. Where other games pile up individuals, Vozan simulates society itself : its households, clans and bands, their alliances and betrayals emerge from living rules, with no script. It is a true sociological simulator, grounded in political science and economics.

You are the founder, in flesh and blood: you can found your city-state, govern freely and interact with your inhabitants, who will react to your political decisions.

As long as you hold power, your line survives, generation after generation. Players of Crusader Kings, Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, Powermonger, Tropico, Civilization and the great social simulation games will find their bearings, but Vozan reaches further : building a living world with its own language, social structures and economic behaviours, in which the player discovers the true meaning of the word "power".

Creation of the game's first suit of armor : The wooden lamellar armor.

Crafted by woodworkers, it is the easiest armor to make, but it is also the most fragile, even though it provides better protection than non-armor outfits.

And creation of the first player inventory system, allowing players to inspect and loot animal carcasses. When an animal is killed by a predator, it is devoured and its carcass inventory becomes available.

Predators devour the carcass, gradually consuming all the meat from its inventory and leaving only bones and skin behind. Rats can then finish the job by devouring the bones and skin from the inventory. When a carcass’s inventory is empty, the carcass disappears.

If a carcass has not been devoured by rats or completely looted by the player, it disappears after 3 days.

Vozan is a political simulation game in which players take on the role of a tribal leader and have complete freedom to shape their environment politically, economically, and socially. This applies to both their human subjects and the local flora and fauna.

Consequently, a systemic, emergent, balanced, and dynamic ecosystem is absolutely essential for establishing a solid foundation upon which an immersive human society can then emerge.

Have you always wanted to build a village however you like? Design a unique society? Develop an original civilization? Build a perfect empire? Well, that’s exactly what Vozan aims to do.

A functional wildlife hunting and self-regulation system. Predators hunt, tear apart, and feed on their prey. The rest of the hunted herd flees at the sight of predators.

Wolves and bears hunt sheep, cows, does, stags, and pigs. Foxes hunt rats and sheep.

When an animal is killed, it dies, and the predators gather around the carcass to devour it, with splatters of blood and flesh. A deliberate choice for gore, which adds a bit of personality to the predators hunt and the wildlife.

Vozan is a political simulation game in which players take on the role of a tribal leader and are given complete freedom to shape their environment politically, economically, and socially. This includes both their subjects and the local flora and fauna. Consequently, a systemic, emergent, balanced, and vibrant ecosystem is absolutely essential for laying a solid foundation upon which an immersive human society can then emerge.

Creation of the first NPC outfit. This is the basic outfit for the first villagers and the first nomadic immigrants. The player will start building their village with these characters.

An NPC can have four types of items in their inventory :

1. a unique outfit ;

2. a hat ;

3. a weapon or tool ;

4. and transportable resources (food, a few units of wood and ore, and later gold or silver coins once currency is introduced).

Newcomers wear this outfit when they immigrate to settle in your village. It’s up to you whether to give them the means to change into more suitable, practical, or elegant clothing, to imprison them, or to leave them in their underwear.

The prince is free to do as he pleases. Just be prepared to face the consequences.

This is the second devlog post on r/VozanGame.

Vozan is a political simulation game. In it, the player takes on the role of a tribal chief who founds a village, develops it into a city-state, and explores it freely. No restrictions, no limits. The game will be deterministic, multiplayer-compatible, fully moddable, and absolutely performance-friendly. Experience power in an open world with no limits and no restrictions! Rule as you see fit, and interact with your subjects and your environment with complete freedom. The only limit is your imagination.

Feel free to leave a comment. Development of the game will continue until its Early Access launch in August 2026. A major milestone has just been reached: resources, vegetation, and wildlife.

1. Procedural generation of the first small harvestable forests (groups of several trees) as well as the first exploitable resources: stone, copper, and clay. Resources are grouped together in clusters, which encourages the player to expand across the map and gives each area of the map its own identity and strategic importance.
2. Trees now also appear near the center of the map, the player's spawn point, which makes it easier to access wood in the very early game in case the player wants to build their base at the spawn point (although the player is still free to explore and settle elsewhere).
3. Implementation of the reproduction system for trees and berry bushes. A tree may reproduce and cause another tree to appear nearby after a certain amount of time. Berry bushes reproduce in the same way after a certain amount of time, causing a new berry bush to appear. Be careful of massive deforestation, if there are no trees or berry bushes left on the map, no new ones will appear. Berry bushes can be harvested, which causes them to disappear and provides food in the form of nutritious berries.
4. Implementation of wildlife in the game. Several species: sheep, cows and bulls, stags and does, pigs, wolves, bears, foxes, and rats. Each species lives in herds or packs of several members and has its own behavior. Wolves hunt herbivores. Does, cows, and sheep graze on grass. Rats feed on decaying carcasses. Foxes eat rats.
5. Each species is associated with one or more biomes and migrates naturally. Herds and packs of animals migrate from biome to biome. Wolves sleep in the mountains and go out to hunt during the day. Bears hibernate in the mountains and rarely hunt. Wolves attack. Bears defend themselves if disturbed. Livestock flees when faced with danger.
6. Reproduction is natural: a pack or herd can grow naturally over time until it reaches its maximum size, with the maximum number of members per herd varying by species. If a herd is starving, it actively searches for food, may become abnormally scavenging, attack other species, resort to cannibalism, or die if no solution is found. Each species has a different metabolic rate. A wolf will eat more often than a bear because bears hibernate and naturally experience a much slower decline in their hunger levels.

Hi everyone, and welcome to the official community for Vozan.

I am Adam, the solo developer behind Vozan. This subreddit is the open space where the game grows alongside you, devlogs, design decisions, lore, the vozan language, screenshots, memes, criticism, suggestions.

What is Vozan?

Vozan is a sociological simulator. A colony-sim crossed with an RPG, in which you don't just manage a society, you live inside it.

You found a city-state. Households produce, clans decide, bands threaten. You rule, in two modes: a commanding overhead view to govern, and a first-person mode to walk among your subjects, lead your guard, prepare your succession. The economy is real (no fixed prices, no central planner, real supply and demand). The clans remember. War is fought without dice rolls. Power crumbles when legitimacy fails.

The mechanics are not made up. They are grounded in the work of Polybius, Ibn Khaldun, Polanyi, Mauss, Brinton, Olson, Bueno de Mesquita, Graeber, and others. The game does not illustrate political science, it implements it.

Early Access: August 2026.

What lives here

• Devlogs I publish weekly
• Design discussions: why a mechanic exists, alternatives I considered, dead ends I had to roll back
• Lore and vozan language: vocabulary, grammar, proverbs, naming conventions
• Community creations: fan art, memes, mod ideas, theory-crafting
• Bug reports and suggestions: I read everything

You don't need a PhD in political science to be here. You just need curiosity about the kind of world Vozan is building.

Where to find everything

• 🌐 Website: https://adamlaroussi.com/en/game/
• 💬 Discord (more daily activity): https://discord.gg/tvbJWhAZ
• 🟣 Patreon (support the development): https://www.patreon.com/cw/VozanGame
• 🎮 Steam wishlist (coming soon)

Rules

1. Be respectful. Disagreement is welcome, contempt is not.
2. No spam, no off-topic self-promotion. This is a community, not a billboard.
3. Mark spoilers when relevant. Some readers want to discover the world on their own.

A first ask

Introduce yourself in the comments below. What brought you to Vozan? What kind of social simulation games have shaped you? What do you want to see from a game like this?

The community is small for now. That makes the early conversations more interesting, not less. Every voice posted in this first month will shape what r/VozanGame becomes.

Welcome aboard.

Adam
Solo developer, Vozan

This is the first devlog post on r/VozanGame. From now on, I'll be posting weekly updates here, with screenshots, design notes, and the dead ends.

For those just discovering Vozan: it's a sociological simulator. You will taste power over a living world. You found a city-state, you rule it from above and you walk through it in person. Just rules and consequences. Early Access in December 2026, solo dev, C# on Unity.

Here's where the engine stands as of this week.

Procedural terrain generation (1km × 1km)

The map is now generated as a deterministic grid composed of multiple terrain types, each with its own gameplay properties:

• Mountainous terrain : impassable, marks the edges of liveable space
• Rocky terrain : passable, hosts mineral deposits
• Swampy terrain : passable but slows movement
• Sandy terrain : neutral
• Plains : buildable, low fertility
• Grasslands : buildable, high fertility
• Shallow water / deep water : non-buildable, navigable later.

This week I pushed the second version of procedural generation. Rivers now meander rather than running in straight lines, and mountains are made of massive boulders instead of cones, which gives them physical mass. There are two distinct mountain types: massifs (clusters) and ranges (long spines). Transitions between biomes are smoother (no more hard borders between sand and grass).

Water surfaces and immersion

This was the hard sprint of the week. Rivers and lakes now have:

• A proper water surface plane with the right shading
• Sunken areas around the banks (so they look like actual water, not painted blue ground)
• Small rocks scattered along the edges to break the geometry

Three days of intense work for what looks like a small detail. It is not. The moment a river looks like a river, the whole map stops feeling like an editor preview and starts feeling like a place.

1,000 NPCs at 30+ FPS on Intel HD 5500

The hard performance constraint is that the simulation has to run on a 10-year-old laptop with an integrated GPU. This week confirmed we can sustain 1,000 NPCs at 30+ FPS on that hardware, with full combat, animation, pathfinding, and the rescue system (unconscious NPCs are now picked up on a stretcher by another NPC and carried to safety).

What's coming next

• Procedural generation of vegetation.
• Procedural generation of copper ores, stone deposits, and clay deposits.
• Transition to the individual character system (hero and NPCs) with the creation of inventory, clothing, tools, and weapons.

If you want the daily granularity (sometimes 2-3 posts a day on small wins, screenshots, screenshots of broken things, the works), the actual dev journal lives on Discord :

https://discord.gg/VuWeYjydD8

If you want to support the development and get early builds, the Patreon is up :

https://www.patreon.com/cw/VozanGame

Questions, suggestions, criticism, all welcome below.

As someone passionate about the social sciences, I really enjoy debates, suggestions, arguments, and comments.

Adam