The City Of Gold is ambitious enough that poor sequencing could become its greatest risk. Our development philosophy is designed to protect the project from that risk: define boundaries, build one coherent checkpoint, verify it, document it, and only then continue.
Durable systems over demonstrations
A feature is not complete because it appears in a screenshot. Persistence, permissions, failure states, migrations, accessibility, and maintainability determine whether it can remain part of the project.
We prefer a smaller working foundation to a broad collection of disconnected prototypes. This is why messaging was removed, Shop was deferred, and Institution persistence is waiting for approved identity and ownership rules.
The current community milestone
The immediate roadmap is focused on making the community platform feel active and production-ready. Blog refinement comes first, followed by Forum refinement, roles and permissions, moderation tools, and deeper official publishing integration.
The Blog is not a separate content system. Developer Blog threads own article titles and bodies; the Blog provides a richer reading presentation and a direct path back to discussion.
Institutions and the world
After the community platform, the Institution foundation will begin with requirements rather than tables. Military, Religious, and Civic Institutions need clear lifecycle, leadership, membership, invitation, application, departure, dissolution, moderation, and audit rules.
Houses, cities, regions, faith, economy, territory, map, and lore will grow under the World umbrella in similarly focused phases.
Production readiness
The current application is pre-production. Authentication uses revocable server-side sessions with secure cookies, recovery, verification, CSRF protection, and shared rate limits. PostgreSQL is the sole database runtime; local uploads must still move behind managed object storage before public deployment. Accessibility, localization, SEO, external monitoring, privacy, and retention work remain required.
These are not secondary concerns. A persistent project is only credible when it can protect accounts, recover data, explain privileged actions, and operate predictably.
A roadmap that can change honestly
Priorities will evolve as the project learns. Documentation records those changes so a new checkpoint begins from current truth rather than memory. What should not change casually are the core boundaries: Forum ownership of community content, server-side authorization, no duplicate News system, and the separation between website and game client.
The long-term destination remains a living MMORPG shaped by politics, trade, faith, conflict, and legacy. The roadmap is the disciplined route that keeps that ambition buildable.