AEON

Every world starts as empty land and exactly two people. There is no scripted spawning: population grows only through birth, tribes form when kin-groups settle fertile land, and empires emerge organically from there — with procedural names, heraldry that ennobles with rank, and dynasties that pass power by blood succession. A 'Chronicle of Ages' records the history the world writes for itself: first city, first mine, first war, living legends chronicled on death.

The design principle that reshaped the whole project is causality over spectacle. Midway through, the sim felt hollow — 'there is no real reason why anything is happening' — so everything was rebuilt around cause and effect. When a performance win abstracted the population to 100k statistical souls, it severed the link between events and people, and I reverted it: integrity over raw scale. The current goal is turning a deep simulation into an actual game — a resource economy, meaningful stakes, and an endgame where a civilization ascends to the stars.

Wars end through exhaustion, treaties, and annexation rather than running forever. Village limits, loyalty and rebellion, tech diffusion, and imperial decadence form negative-feedback loops so no empire dominates permanently. Sixteen resources drive scarcity, trade routes, and wars; faiths spread, schism, and fight holy wars; seasons and climate cause famines and migrations; disasters chain causally — a plague follows the war that crowded the refugees into one city.

No engine, no runtime dependencies — an Electron shell around hand-written HTML5 Canvas 2D and a from-scratch WebGL2 instanced renderer that draws entire crowds in a single draw call. Audio is fully synthesized with the Web Audio API (no audio files). Terrain is procedurally baked with dual-grid coastline smoothing; portraits, skylines, and coats of arms are procedural SVG that evolve with era and rank. 6,687 lines of simulation across 17 modules.