Devlog

Changelog

Last updated: 2026-04-15

A running record of what's changed in Dominion, most recent first. We aim to publish an entry every two to four weeks.

Casual 1v1 matchmaking is live

Quick Match now pairs you with another real human. Click Quick Match, wait for an opponent, and the moment a second player queues the server drops both of you into the same match on opposite sides of the map.

  • Proper role assignment: one player spawns blue, the other spawns red, each on their own edge of the hex map.
  • Orders propagate between tabs within about a second. Move a unit on your side and your opponent sees it move on theirs.
  • If nobody queues within 30 seconds, you fall back to an instant AI match so you're never stuck staring at a spinner.
  • Ranked (Elo-rated) matchmaking is still off — it needs its own balance pass and server-side validation before it ships.

Profile rewrite: username editing and per-mode stats

The profile page now lets you set and change your username, and splits stats into a Matchmaking tab and an AI-practice tab. AI stomps were polluting win rate and lifetime counters in a way that made the leaderboard stats feel meaningless. Those two tabs are now independent, and only Matchmaking feeds the leaderboards.

Match insights, AI opponent improvements, texture atlas

Three things landed in the same week:

  • Post-match insight generator: a short human-readable summary of what decided the match.
  • AI opponent got smarter — better expansion heuristics, actual counter-building, less obvious rushes.
  • Building and unit rendering moved to a texture atlas for noticeably snappier repainting.

Peaks terrain and generation tuning

Added a fifth terrain type — peaks — that are impassable and create natural chokepoints. Tuned the simplex-noise map generator so iron and crystal clusters feel more like ridgelines and veins and less like scattered dots.

Core game mechanics

First playable: the hex grid, terrain, resource production, unit movement, combat resolution, and the ring advancement endgame all wired together. The shape of the game has been stable since this commit; everything after has been polish, balance, and surrounding systems.