Xanadu is the destination of the Matchyverse™ — but it also started as a world-sim concept I hatched years ago. Here’s how it grew.
When I was living with my folks, I started building a massive “whole world” simulator. I made a custom 3D engine from scratch with no deadline and no clear finish line. It was inspired by Dwarf Fortress, and I worked on it constantly: adding features, messing with terrain algorithms, and learning the hard way what actually makes a game fun.
I spent months implementing multi-threaded pathfinding on a huge terrain grid so citizens could do tasks and navigate complex environments. In hindsight, spending a few days giving citizens expressive faces would’ve made the game feel alive faster than super-advanced pathfinding ever could.
The big pathfinding hiccup was this: if there was no valid route between a citizen and the target, the search could flood the entire grid and hang the game. Most games cap or abandon the search. I didn’t want to — because what if a path existed and I just didn’t find it?
So I built a highly optimized A* heuristic. It helped when paths existed, but not when they didn’t. Eventually I moved pathing onto another thread: if a citizen can’t find a path, they “think” for a few seconds, but the game keeps running. That ended up being a surprisingly solid solution — and it led to some wild pathing behavior, like in this example:
Back then, the project was called Mayor Max. My dad pushed to rename it XANADU, based on the poem Kubla Khan: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree.” The name fit: Xanadu was always meant to be an eternal work in progress — a hedonistic, playful simulation that could keep expanding.
The terrain system started as a strict voxel grid, but that felt restrictive — and Minecraft had already planted that flag. A friend of mine, Ryan, kept sending me tech talks (which I usually critique because talks are often condescending, boring, or both). But one got stuck in my head: Marching Cubes.
Here’s the math-heavy talk if you’re into that kind of thing:
Like Homer seeing the Clown College billboard, I couldn’t unsee it. So I built marching-cubes terrain in Unity with editing tools — and suddenly Xanadu’s terrain system made sense.
At the same time, I had multiplayer racing physics tech from Speedway Heroes. Suddenly the pieces started aligning: pathfinding citizens, smooth terrain, and movement that could jump and slide around hills. The planets aligned, and Xanadu crystallized into something real.
