28 DAYS LATER.

At 3:49 AM on 4 August, I couldn't sleep.

This is apparently how you end up making a game.

I wasn't trying to start a game studio. I wasn't working through some carefully prepared design document. I'm not a game developer — I work in marketing and studied graphic design.

I just had an idea for a game I wanted to play.

I wanted the long-term progression and just one more level feeling of an idle game, but in a bleak post-apocalyptic world where the things you were levelling actually helped somebody survive.

So, at 3:49 in the morning, I asked a question.

Could I make something like that?

I wasn't expecting the answer to consume most of the following 28 days.

WHAT IF...?

The earliest version wasn't Still Alive.

It didn't really have a world. It didn't have Ashwick. There wasn't a roadmap to 1.0, a Closed Alpha or a Discord full of people finding increasingly creative ways to break things.

There was just an idea.

Then I started asking questions.

What if you could scavenge different locations?

What if those locations had their own loot?

What if you could fish?

What if you needed somewhere to bring everything home to?

What if that home could improve?

What if there were skills?

What if there was combat?

What if you could trap animals?

What if there were traders, occupations, traits, books, farming, cooking, crafting, equipment and survivors who actually persisted when you closed the browser?

One question became another.

And another.

Somewhere along the way, the project stopped feeling like an experiment and started becoming Still Alive: Idle.

WELCOME TO ASHWICK

Finding the identity of the game was probably the point where everything changed.

It wasn't enough to make a collection of idle-game systems with zombies attached to them. I wanted Still Alive to feel like it happened somewhere.

That somewhere became Ashwick.

A fictional British town a few weeks after everything fell apart.

Terraced houses. A battered high street. Industrial estates. Farms. Woodland. Quiet roads. Abandoned places that used to be completely ordinary.

The apocalypse in Still Alive isn't supposed to be endless explosions and mountains of zombies.

Most of the time, the world has already ended.

You're dealing with what it left behind.

That idea started influencing everything else.

The visual identity became darker and more utilitarian. The humour became dry and distinctly British. Loot started making more sense for the places it came from. Locations began getting histories. People who might never appear directly in front of the survivor started leaving traces behind.

Ashwick stopped being a backdrop.

It started becoming the world I wanted to build.

SO... WHAT ACTUALLY EXISTS AFTER 28 DAYS?

Quite a lot, apparently.

Still Alive is now a real browser-based game.

You create survivors and develop skills. You leave your Base to scavenge locations around Ashwick. You can fish, farm, trap animals, cook, craft, dismantle equipment, trade, read Skill Books and fight the infected.

You collect equipment and supplies, manage your Backpack and Storage, improve your home and slowly become more capable of surviving outside it.

Skills have progression stretching towards Level 99.

The Terraced House has become a place you return to rather than simply another menu.

Fishing has its own locations and progression.

Trapping has different traps, species, catches and carcass processing.

Combat has weapon skills, equipment, healing and infected enemies.

There are survivors with occupations and traits.

There are systems for offline progression and persistent saves because, if I'm asking somebody to spend enough time reaching Level 99, losing their survivor is not an acceptable feature.

And underneath all of that is a growing amount of worldbuilding about Ashwick and what happened there.

Is every one of those systems finished?

Absolutely not.

Some of them are going to change considerably.

But they exist.

And 28 days ago, none of them did.

THE PART WHERE OTHER PEOPLE STARTED PLAYING IT

This might have been the strangest milestone.

At some point, Still Alive became stable enough that giving it to somebody else seemed like a slightly less terrible idea.

So the Closed Alpha began.

There are now actual people playing Still Alive who aren't me.

That changes development more than I expected.

Something that makes perfect sense when you've designed it yourself can be completely baffling when somebody encounters it without explanation.

A button you have pressed 500 times is apparently invisible.

A system you thought was perfectly balanced gets demolished in an afternoon.

A perfectly innocent screwdriver finds a way to duplicate itself.

Testers have already influenced interfaces, balance, progression and the way systems communicate what they're doing.

They've also reinforced something important:

If Still Alive is going to ask people to build survivors over weeks, months and eventually years, they need to trust it.

That means saves matter.

Consistency matters.

Mobile matters.

The boring foundational work matters just as much as adding another shiny system.

Which brings us to what happens next.

I DIDN'T MAKE A FINISHED GAME IN 28 DAYS

This bit matters.

Still Alive isn't finished.

Not remotely.

The fact that something playable exists after 28 days doesn't mean the objective is to sprint towards 1.0 as quickly as possible.

Quite the opposite.

The last few weeks have shown me how many things I want Still Alive to become — and how easy it would be to ruin it by trying to build all of them at once.

So we've now done something the project definitely didn't have at 3:49 AM on 4 August.

We have a roadmap.

Closed Alpha will move through a series of milestones:

Foundations.
Home.
Survival.
The World.
Danger.
The Long Road.

Then Beta.

Then, when the systems have survived everything we can throw at them:

Still Alive 1.0.

The full public roadmap is now available on the website.

It isn't a promise of arbitrary dates.

It's a statement of direction.

ABOUT THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM

Still Alive is being developed with generative AI.

There isn't much point pretending otherwise when the entire thing started with me asking ChatGPT a question at quarter to four in the morning.

I couldn't have attempted this project in the same way without these tools.

I don't come from a programming background. Generative AI has given me a way to take ideas, systems and design decisions and turn them into something I can actually test.

But the process hasn't been:

"Make me a game."

If only.

Most of the last 28 days has been an increasingly ridiculous sequence of decisions.

Why does this system exist?

What should it reward?

How does it interact with everything else?

Is it actually fun?

Is it too complicated?

Is it not complicated enough?

Why has that button moved?

Why does this work perfectly on desktop and explode on a phone?

Why does somebody now own seventeen screwdrivers?

And, more often than anything else:

What if we tried this instead?

AI is part of how Still Alive is being built.

The direction of the game — what belongs, what doesn't, how it should feel, what gets changed and where this is all going — is something I'm figuring out one decision at a time.

I've written more about the tools being used and how I'm approaching them on the AI & Development page because I think being transparent about that is important.

THE ROAD AHEAD

The first milestone on that roadmap is Alpha 0.4 — Foundations.

It's deliberately not the most glamorous update.

Before Still Alive gets bigger, I want to make sure the foundations underneath it deserve to be trusted.

That means reliability.

Saves.

Mobile.

Interfaces.

Clarity.

Balance.

And making sure the systems already in the game work properly before piling another dozen on top.

After that comes Home.

Then Survival.

Then the world gets bigger.

Then more dangerous.

There is a lot I want to build.

Seasons. Weather. Hunger. Food preservation. More of Ashwick. Deeper Bases. More ways to survive. More reasons to prepare before going Out There.

Some ideas will survive testing.

Some won't.

And I'm fairly certain there are systems I haven't even thought of yet.

After all, 28 days ago I hadn't thought of most of the ones already here.

28 DAYS LATER

I still find the whole thing slightly ridiculous.

On 4 August, I couldn't sleep.

At 3:49 AM I asked a question.

Twenty-eight days later, Still Alive has a name, a world, a website, a community, a Closed Alpha, real testers and a roadmap stretching all the way to 1.0.

And I'm still not a game developer.

Although I'm beginning to suspect that excuse is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

This is the first proper Devlog for Still Alive: Idle.

It definitely won't be the last.

There's a long road ahead.

Apparently we're making a game now.