The Lands beyond the rainbow have kept no single crown since the accord broke centuries ago, it remains divided into five constantly warring noble realms.

You are the king of one of these realms, living on one of three periods of the Mazurian Age where total conquest and unification were the only solution.

Play online at https://js13kgames.com/games/horns-of-dominion

Final day, so I focused on UX polish and balancing starting with refining the texts on the onboarding, which demanded BYTES that I had to seek by rewriting labels and removing superfluous info, but it wasn’t enough… in the end managed to squeeze it by further digging into the property mangling, barely.

Still there were some improvements to do in the game flow, since the idea for the competitive aspect was to finish in as less days as possible a specific scenario, I added the name of the scenario to the victory screen.

Then came some gameplay rounds which showed difficulty was a bit too high, so lowered the quantity of armies amassed by the AI. Used the simulation harness to improve the chances of the player having a possibility to win.

Wrapped up and sent my entry. It was a very interesting experience to develop this using Claude, at moments I felt the need to vet every change against the time-consuming mass simulations was overkill, and also maybe the quest for perfect balance was actually damaging the game and making it feel bland and predictable, but it was interesting to include that as tooling that I would otherwise have not considered on doing.

There may be a director’s cut version of the game with some balancing and onboarding improvements, and definitively learned a lot for the future project, Aureliano.