Devlog
The story of ISP Sim so far, from the first idea in 2022 to the third prototype.
Towers can now route over a town's fibre cables as well as radio links, and a tower with its own line will hand traffic to a neighbour with a faster way out. Fitting an office as a data centre unlocks faster lines into that town, and every office now buys its desk and field slots as it grows.
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Sales was rewritten: free reps pick up the most urgent lead nobody is working, inside their own zone. A new Zones window shows the areas your business covers, and a home dispatch area decides which jobs your crews pick up on their own and which ones need you.
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A new game now starts with no office at all: rent the first one and the business begins there. Applicants come with levels and traits and cost a hire fee, technicians carry their own van stock, and linking a customer and installing their equipment are separate steps you can see in the job list.
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Riverside gained two hand-placed hill sites — Crow Crag above Northgate, with the whole centre in sight, and Heron Tor on the eastern range — each with a dirt track so technicians can actually drive there. The river crossings were rebuilt so bridges sit on real banks instead of trenches.
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Finish a business contract and the customer stays as a key account with a monthly service level agreement. Every hour is judged by its worst building — offline, slow or laggy — against a monthly budget, and going over costs you at month end. They are less forgiving than households, and you can send a specific technician to put a bad install right.
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The interface moved to dockable windows you can tab, reorder and maximise, with a shared layout across the dashboards. This build also brought a marketing panel, equipment cabinets, incidents, service zones and a tutorial for the first hour, plus a pass over the Codex.
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ISP Sim now carries its own help book: 65 illustrated pages and step-by-step slideshows covering tower building, sector aiming, backhaul, customer installs, overlays and outages. The HUD got a pass from tester feedback too — star goals in the top bar, alerts you can filter by kind and topic, and clearer building and equipment panels.
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One day and night passes per in-game month, with lit windows and street lamps after dark, drifting cloud shadows and rain. The roads were rebuilt as proper ribbons with junctions, crossings and sidewalks, and the towns filled in around them: driveways, bus stops, parks, parked cars, pedestrians, birds and livestock.
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A new medium map built from a hand-authored landscape and its 141 roads, with the city generated on top by the same builders as Green Fields: 33 districts, 7 offices, 52 tower sites, 40 farmsteads and about 1,870 buildings. Grand Valley, the large map, is next.
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You can now move a radio to a different tower and the crew handles the take-down, refit and re-aim. The helpdesk books CPE upgrades for customers complaining about slow speeds, marketing shows leads per day and overlap before you place a campaign, and tower slots are colour-coded by what is in them.
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ISP Sim has original music, settings that apply while you play, and a reworked HUD. It also packages as a standalone build with its own branding and a full save of the running game, so testers can play it without the editor.
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Sectors now come in two lines across five tiers — wide Sectors for coverage, narrow Beams for capacity — and backhaul radios in four range bands, from 400 m hops to 6 km long hauls. Behind them sits a 49-node research tree whose nodes unlock on customers, towers, links, staff and completed contracts, plus a new gigabit plan.
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The main menu now looks out over terrain, forests and a denser city instead of an empty backdrop. The foliage work came with a gameplay catch: trees block line of sight, so a stand of pines can cost you a link.
About the game →The main menu now shows a live, connected city behind it. We also finished two full logic audits, sped up traffic, halved how fast satisfaction drains, reworked the research tree and added mast towers.
About the game →Placeholder boxes are gone. The city is rebuilt with a low-poly art pack, and ISP Sim has a main menu, three maps and a three-star goal system. Earn two stars on a map to unlock the next one.
About the game →A single Network Health rating now sums up uptime and congestion over the last 30 days. Marketing campaigns and word of mouth now drive growth, and each customer tracks their own satisfaction.
About the game →Live operations are in: equipment outages, rain fade and fibre cuts, each with a repair lifecycle for your technicians. A profit and loss statement and a reworked notification feed help you keep up.
About the game →Customers now get their own CPE devices, with link speed that falls off over distance. Backhaul capacity also scales with link length, and a new finance and customer dashboard tracks it all over time.
About the game →The whole interface was rebuilt in C++ on a shared component library. It comes with network analytics, traffic graphs and a topology map.
About the game →With the reworked design in hand, we started ISP Sim's third prototype in Unreal Engine 5: towers, sector antennas, line of sight and the first playable simulation loop. This devlog follows it from here.
About the game →Taking what we learned from the first two prototypes, we reworked ISP Sim's design.
About the game →We scrapped the second prototype.
About the game →We scrapped the first design and started work on a second prototype.
About the game →ISP Sim starts as a concept: the first conceptual ideas and early testing.
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