There is no public build of this game. No download, no wishlist link, no release window. I'm telling you that up front so the rest of this reads honestly. World-Hive: Leukosia is a real-time strategy game I'm building alone, on weekends, from scratch in Godot 4. This is devlog 00, the first entry in building it in public.
HJB CodeForge exists to ship its own SaaS products, and that work pays the bills. Leukosia is the thing I make when the SaaS work is done for the day. It's a passion project, not a revenue line, and I want to be clear about that before I get into the part I'm genuinely excited about. The concept is good, and the systems pull against each other in ways that are genuinely hard to balance.
Why I'm building this
The honest answer is that I love the genre and I wanted to understand it from the inside. You can play a thousand hours of RTS and still not know why one unit feels responsive and another feels like wading through mud, or why one faction is a joy and another is a chore. The only way to learn that is to build it badly, then build it less badly, then keep going.
Godot 4 is the right tool for a solo developer who wants control without a publisher's roadmap dictating the work. I own the whole stack. I can chase a strange idea for three weekends and throw it out if it doesn't hold up. No committee, no scope creep imposed from outside. That creative freedom is the whole point of a side project, and it's why this one gets to be weird.
Three factions, and why I refused to mirror them
Leukosia has three factions. The Meridian Hegemony are alt-history steampunk colonial humans, landing their 4th Pioneer Vanguard on a world that isn't theirs. The Vaelori are ancient luminous aliens. And the third faction is the planet itself, which I'll come back to, because it's the idea the whole game hangs on.
The factions are asymmetric. Not asymmetric in the lazy sense where one side gets a reskinned tank with a different hat. They're balanced through opposite expression of similar capabilities. Where one faction solves a problem with brute industrial output, another solves the same problem with something slower and stranger that pays off differently. Same job, opposite method.
That is much harder to balance than mirror factions, and I knew that going in. Mirror factions are safe because the math is symmetrical. Genuine asymmetry means every matchup is its own tuning problem, and a buff to one side ripples everywhere. I took that on deliberately. A faction you've never quite played before is worth ten that feel like a palette swap.
The planet fights back, and it doesn't care if you're peaceful
Here is the idea I'm proudest of. The third faction is the Leukosia Swarm, the living planet's own immune response. It's AI-only, with no human player, and it works on one rule that changes how the entire game is played.
The Swarm treats presence as the infection. Not the damage you deal. Not how aggressive you are. Just the fact that invaders are there, occupying ground that isn't theirs. Most strategy games punish you for fighting. Leukosia punishes you for existing. The more invader presence builds up on the map, the more biomatter the Swarm spawns from its veins to purge it. The further the invaders spread, the more the planet wakes. Stay contained and it stirs less. That single rule turns map control from a pure advantage into a constant cost you have to weigh.
In most RTS games, expansion is free until someone stops you. In Leukosia, expansion is the thing that summons the enemy. Presence on the map is what draws the planet's response. That one inversion reframes every decision on the board.
One resource, shared by everyone
There's a single shared resource called Fungus. It's a continuous field across the map, in the lineage of Tiberium and Spice for anyone who grew up on those games. One resource keeps the economy legible and the conflict sharp. You're not managing five spreadsheets of materials. You're fighting over the same ground everyone else wants, and that ties straight back into the presence mechanic. The richest ground is contested ground, contested ground is crowded ground, and crowded ground is exactly what the planet reacts to. The systems pull against each other on purpose.
What's actually done
I want to be precise here, because build-in-public only works if the status is real. Here's where Leukosia stands today:
- The MVP is code-complete across the early milestones, M0 through M6. The core loop runs.
- The canonical world and lore are locked at version 1.0. The factions, the planet, the rules of the fiction are settled and not drifting week to week.
- Art and asset production is in progress. The pipeline recently moved toward 3D, which is its own deep rabbit hole and probably a devlog of its own.
- There is no public release and no public build. None of this is playable by anyone but me yet.
Where it's going, honestly
I'm not going to promise you a date, because I don't have one and a solo weekend project doesn't get to make those promises. Platforms like Windows, Linux, and an Itch.io page are planned, not committed. Treat them as direction, not a contract. The next stretch is the art pass. The pipeline just moved to 3D, so the work is getting units and buildings to look as deliberate as the systems behind them already feel.
If the idea of a planet that treats presence as an infection is the kind of thing you'd want to watch take shape, follow along on the HJB CodeForge product lineup page. There's nothing to buy and nothing to download. Just the work, in the open, one devlog at a time. See you in 01.
