Hi everyone,
After years in browser strategy games, I kept hitting the same three walls:
- The player who started three years ago beats you. Not because they’re smarter, but because they’ve been accumulating purchased upgrades since before you joined. Skill is irrelevant. Time-in-wallet wins.
- The top guild spent more this month. It’s listed as “comfort features” in the store. It’s a competitive advantage. Everyone knows it. The game pretends it isn’t.
- Skip a day and you come back to ruin. The game doesn’t reward good decisions. It rewards being online when no one else is.
So I started building a different kind of game. Not to fix one of those problems. To design around all three from the ground up.
What is SeedLord?
SeedLord is a real-time browser economy game. No direct barony combat. No pay-to-win. Every world resets after 120 days. No one enters with accumulated power over you. Your titles carry over. Not your stats.
The core loop isn’t war. It’s trade, diplomacy, and reading the economy better than everyone else. Five moves, roughly:
- Your seed. Your power. At world start you receive a unique seed and choose one of 7 specializations. What you produce naturally, you produce better than anyone else. No one starts with the same hand.
- Produce. Trade. Fund the war. Production -> marketplace -> Gold -> troops and upgrades. The market isn’t the end goal. It’s the fuel.
- Zones are won before you enter them. Spies reveal enemy moves, intercepted messengers shift alliances, diplomatic reputation opens deals no army could force. When an Event Zone appears, unique and unrepeatable resources appear. Those with the right information arrive prepared. Everyone else improvises.
- Accumulate Gold and Sigils. Win the world. Sigils are earned only by controlling Zones. They can’t be bought or traded. Hit both thresholds and you unlock the closing ceremony and a permanent Hall of Fame title.
- Conquer worlds. Stay in history. Titles earned are recorded permanently. Your name, your world, forever.
Multiple worlds run simultaneously. You can participate in more than one at a time. Each is completely separate. Nothing transfers between them.
The Seed mechanic
Every barony gets a unique seed that determines what it naturally produces. The economy is designed so that everyone is someone else’s dependency. You’re not just a player. You’re a supply chain node someone else is counting on.
7 Specializations — each a different game
Each one comes with exclusive mechanics no other role can access. Not just a stat bonus, but a fundamentally different way of playing:
- Farmer — the only specialization that produces Food in structural quantities. Without you, armies can’t train or recover. You come out of the gate with more Gold than most. Ideal if you want to play twice a day and still matter.
- Herbalist — the potions you craft don’t exist anywhere else. Every serious baron needs them. You set the price.
- Wizard — the only one who can decode intercepted messages and foresee where Event Zones will appear before anyone else. Those who keep you close win earlier.
- Blacksmith — no building scales without your components. You’re the bottleneck for every barony that wants to grow. Universal demand, no exceptions.
- Lumberjack — baronies without large warehouses are forced to sell immediately. You sell when you want. Market timing is your real product.
- Rancher — breeds Horses (permanent messenger speed boosts, troop deployment acceleration) and produces Luxury Goods for diplomacy. Logistical and diplomatic leverage others have to buy from you.
- General — every hour of zone control is worth more for you, and your troops hit harder. You produce nothing commercially. You buy everything from the market, which makes you the primary customer keeping the whole economy moving.
The game also tells you which specializations are missing in your cluster when you join. Because the whole thing only works if all seven are represented.
Why no PvP?
Conflict exists, but it plays out in neutral shared zones and on open roads between clusters. Spies can disrupt your production or intercept a messenger, but no one can march on your barony or eliminate you from the map. You can’t be bullied out of your kingdom. Competition is economic and strategic, fought on terrain everyone can reach.
The monetization rule (written before the first line of code)
“Real money purchases cosmetics and comfort features only. It cannot buy resources, troops, production speed, or any advantage that interacts with other players competitively.”
What you can buy: cosmetic barony skins, cosmetic taunts to send rivals, extra marketplace listing slots, extended price history charts. What you can never buy: Gold, Sigils, troops, production acceleration. Ever.
Every monetization decision is discussed publicly before it ships. If the community flags something as P2W, it doesn’t ship. Full stop. There’s a reporting mechanism and everything gets addressed publicly. This loop stays open for the full life of the game.
Where we are
We’re in pre-alpha. No launch date yet and that’s intentional. We want to build this game together with the community before locking anything in. Mechanics, balance, systems all of it is open for real input. This isn’t a feedback form that disappears into a void. If something sounds broken or you’ve seen this idea fail before, that conversation shapes what gets built.
More details on how the world works, the full specialization breakdown are all available here didn’t want to turn this post into a wall of text: go.seedlord.com
Everyone who reserves their seed before alpha opens gets permanently recorded as a Founding Lord in the Hall of Fame — visible to every player in every future world. That title is earned once. It’s the only moment to get it.
Happy to answer anything here too.
quack@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Did you use as much AI to write the game as you did this pitch?
seedlord_com@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
BEEP BOOP BUP - variable not found. Rebooting human mode.
Ok jokes aside, let me actually answer this properly. I’ve been a developer for years before AI existed as a mainstream tool, so the foundation isn’t going anywhere. Do I use it? Absolutely. Do I depend on it to think for me? No. There’s a pretty big difference between using AI as a companion that speeds up your workflow and blindly letting it generate a game for you. One requires you to already know what you’re doing. The other just produces slop.
The reality is: AI is only as useful as the person driving it. If you don’t have a clear vision, strong technical knowledge, and the ability to catch mistakes, you’ll end up with hallucinations dressed up as features and believe me, those are always lurking. You still need to understand every system, every design decision, every line of code. AI doesn’t replace that. It just means I can get from point A to point B faster without sacrificing quality.
Now, the pitch specifically? Yeah, I’ll be fully honest here AI was genuinely a huge help with that. Not because it invented the ideas. Every mechanic, every design pillar, every dependency between specializations that came from months of thinking, designing, and iterating in my head. But translating all of that into something structured, readable, and coherent for people who aren’t inside my brain? That’s where AI earned its keep. It helped me formalize things I was taking for granted and present them in a way that actually makes sense to someone reading it cold.
So yes, AI helped write the pitch. No, AI isn’t building the game. There’s your answer.
knuk@piefed.ca 1 day ago
AI generated text generates distrust, and I generally view it as a form of disrespect, a waste of time imposed onto others.
If you’re unable to go without it, at least write the text yourself and use it to see if anything is missing or unclear, without rephrasing. Ideally don’t use it at all. You say it’s helpful but all it has done is deviate the conversation and alienate an audience.
kingofras@lemmy.world 1 day ago
How low does your self confidence have to be you couldn’t even write this yourself?
You probably had a high adoption audience here, some of whom would have been good beta testers. All they need is for you to treat them with respect.
To paraphrase you to you: the dev is only as good as how well they know when to use LLM and when to just be human.