Night is Coming · Chapter 02

Building the Village

Through 2023 we built Night is Coming one piece at a time: a settlement of Slavic-folklore buildings, the resources that feed it, and a heart-of-the-village tower meant to hold the line when the dark comes. These are the concrete things that landed in the build.

Build notes — early Night is Coming reports (2023)

The Spirit Tower at the center

From early on, the Spirit Tower was the building we kept coming back to. It is one of the most important structures in the settlement, so we wanted both the tower and its upgrade tiers to be genuinely good to look at. In the spring we sat down in the art department, gathered references, and reworked it from scratch: first a fresh 2D concept of the tower and its grades, approved internally, then a full 3D model built from that concept and polished against feedback. By early June the model and its revisions were done and handed off for emission setup and integration into the game. The first combat spells for the Spirit Tower had already gone into an earlier build, so the redesign gave a stronger shape to a building the player leans on through the night.

The Spirit Tower 2D concept, laying out the central building across its upgrade tiers.
The Spirit Tower 2D concept, laying out the central building across its upgrade tiers.
The Spirit Tower is one of the key buildings in the game — we wanted the tower and every one of its grades to be worth looking at.

Farms, fields, and the things you gather

A lot of 2023 went into making the village feel like a living economy rather than a checklist. We reworked the farm so the farm building and the fields actually connect: different crops appear in the world, their seeds can be found out on the biome, collected, and then grown on your fields. The development side finished its part of that loop and we passed it to testing. Alongside it we did a broad pass on the small resource and vegetation objects — baskets of harvest, bundles of straw, logs, planks, stone and ore deposits, garden plants — remodeling and optimizing the missing pieces so everything sat under one unified art look. We also touched the buildings around the village: grades and construction for the scientist's building, a 2D concept for the barracks, and a general audit and cleanup of the GUI and HUD.

The Spirit Tower as a finished 3D model, showing its grades from the first small base to the fully upgraded tower.
The Spirit Tower as a finished 3D model, showing its grades from the first small base to the fully upgraded tower.
The Leshy — a forest spirit illustration tied to the night side of the day/night loop.
The Leshy — a forest spirit illustration tied to the night side of the day/night loop.

Biomes, threats, and steady builds

The world grew biome by biome. We tuned existing locations — Pinewood, Swamp, Dead Forest, Greenwood, Skyland, including fog-of-war work — and prototyped a new "Mountain Valley" biome to add varied terrain between Swamp and Pinewood and give the map more replayability. By early June the prototype was integrated and being tested in-game via cheats. The night side of the loop took shape too: an audit of the creatures' models to decide what to optimize first, and folklore illustrations like the Leshy and the Miller. Underneath all of it was a steady rhythm — builds landing in Steam and Git through the year (versions like 0.28.07 in January and 0.33.03 by June), a dedicated branch for external testing, and outside playtest feedback we folded back into fixing the things that annoyed players.

What we built