Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Development of Tactical RPG game using the GaaS + Live Ops model

Inspired by the series of games from Larian Studios, I realized that I have a clear direction and a plan for how I would develop a scalable game with regular updates.

I appreciate the studio’s implementation and the sheer volume of work they’ve put in - that’s exactly what I wanted to draw inspiration from first and foremost: scaling development, parallelization, and defined areas of responsibility.
I’ve already laid the foundation with data-driven design; what one developer can do, any other developer can do as well, and they can expand the game - this is precisely what will allow it to grow continuously.
The goal is to scale departments and establish clear boundaries.
Everyone works in parallel and sees the interim results; a unified sandbox with real-time updates allows everyone to test what they’re working on, and in my opinion, testing is the most important thing - it will minimize errors.

Important milestones in the game will be recorded below to serve as a sort of changelog.

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We’ve successfully set up a CI build with automated tests and changes pulled in via Git, so any employee can access the latest data.
This makes it possible to commit changes to the dev environment and receive them in real time after a test has been successfully completed,
allowing us to continue working on new features. No one has to wait for anyone else; everyone works with what’s available, and everyone from any department
has the opportunity to view the interim results.

An important note: the development focuses not so much on the game itself, but on the tools used to develop it.
In other words, I’m giving full priority to how and by whom the content will be created, so the primary focus is on the tools for developing the game itself.

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- Rust and the Bevy engine are used as the foundation for writing low-level code.
- The Tauri content editor is described in detail; absolutely all entities are visible and fully editable.
- Git is used for version control, and LFS for streaming large data sets.
- A custom-built world generator ensures a consistent ecosystem; the generator already includes terrain calculation, interaction zones, object placement, and pre-rendering of potential paths the character will traverse.
- Data as the source of truth—nothing is made up or hidden; the code is self-documenting and reusable. The CLI integrates with development tools, allowing for agent-based development on top of the game and more efficient world-building.


The toolkit is the foundation for creating and scaling the game; without a community, I won’t be able to build anything truly worthwhile, which is why the focus is specifically on convenience and simplifying development.

After completing the entity editor, I moved on to the world editor

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- I developed a high-level world editor that describes the physical world, featuring elevation maps, cross-sections for caves, and structures represented as data rather than hard-coded elements.
- Full CLI + MCP support to quickly develop terrain and generate large numbers of structures, rather than placing them manually
- The idea was to provide an easy way to place objects and create terrain so that any modder could easily expand the world, create a cave, and design their own custom city—without any knowledge of level design—simply by bringing their ideas to life. Combined with AI, this will provide a significant boost and allow modders to release their locations much faster.
- Validators ensure the world’s consistency; the world itself will be seamless and free of preloads, offering a continuous experience in a fully open world.
- The world is fully deterministic, allowing you to expand it without fear of breaking previous locations.
- Locations are described by specifications; this simultaneously documents and places objects. The point is not to build a location manually, but to create a composition and establish physical and logical transitions. Any manual placement increases development time and requires additional training for the developer on how to do it correctly.

I'm continuing to work on the world editor for all edge cases and create a user-friendly editor that will work with AI.