Project Netherworld

I’ve officially restarted development on a dark fantasy idle RPG project I put on hold a long time ago.

For now, I’m calling it:

Project Netherworld.

Originally, this was supposed to be “just another idle game”.

But the deeper I got into it, the more I realized I didn’t actually want to make a typical incremental game built around numbers going up endlessly.

I wanted to build a world.

A dead one.

A world filled with wandering souls, endless ghost roads, forgotten gods, and systems slowly collapsing under their own weight.

You play as an “Enlightener” — a being capable of guiding souls through the Netherworld, expanding territory, harvesting resources, building structures, and reshaping the order of the dead.

The game has been through multiple versions already.

And honestly, most of them failed.

Not technically.

Not mechanically.

They failed because they felt like disconnected systems glued together.

Lots of features.

No soul.

So over the past few months, I started rebuilding almost everything from scratch:

- the soul system

- the ghost road system

- reincarnation

- world progression

- resource loops

- combat structure

- long-term scaling

The goal now is much clearer:

I want the game to feel like you’re raising a dark fantasy civilization over an absurdly long period of time.

Not just optimizing numbers.

One thing that has always bothered me is how shallow most idle games become after the first few hours.

The progression keeps going.

The world stops evolving.

I want both to evolve together.

This project is expected to complete its internal testing version in three months, with the final launch date anticipated in October 2026.

I’m going to document the process publicly this time — the systems, the failures, the visual direction, the balancing problems, all of it.

I miss games that feel mysterious.

Maybe this can become one of them.