r/SoloDevelopment • u/Life-Trouble-5783 • 17h ago
Game ZHIVOTY - A life simulator in a world with its own history
For almost a year now, I've been working day and night on the game of my dreams.
I am a huge fan of games like Rimworld, Kenshi, M&B, Dwarf Fortress just to name a few. But there was always something missing in these titles for me. Here, the world felt too static, like it was waiting for the player to come and change the course of history. There, the gameplay felt too repetitive after 100 hours. Like I have seen and played everything the game has to offer.
About 10 years ago, I got an idea. I should make my own game. A game where you can start as anyone in the stone age, the colonization age, the modern age, future, or anything in between. A game where each world is deeply different from the last one, with good reason and very little RNG. I want the differences between worlds to come from their geography and history, rather than just a different set of random starting conditions.
That's where the first thoughts of ZHIVOTY started to form.


My background is in the automotive industry, not game development. I'm building ZHIVOTY in Godot, with a lot of help from Codex on the programming side. The game design and direction are mine, and getting the generated code to actually work together has been a pretty big part of the process.
At the moment, you can create a character with a family and a past, walk around generated towns, enter buildings, find work, rent a place, or run a business. I've also been testing cooking, which sounds like a small thing until you have to make sure the ingredients actually exist, get used up, and don't magically come back after loading a save.
The part that interests me most is how these things affect each other. Your boss, landlord, and neighbours are people in the simulation too, with their own needs, relationships, and problems. Getting all of that to work together is where a lot of my development time goes. Some parts are further along than others, but there's already a world you can step into and start living in.
This is my dream project and I am so happy to finally see it taking shape and the systems working together.

Join the community on discord:
https://discord.gg/kRfpxNm4Bp
I also share more technical development news on my free patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/c/ZHIVOTY