One person is making this
EmuWars is a one-thumb swarm-conquest game about Australia's real 1932 Emu War, built in Godot 4 for iOS and Android. You play the emus, west to east across 26 areas of the continent, taking army outposts off a force that has already lost to you once. It is in development. This page is the honest version of how far along that is.
What the game is
One thumb, no buttons. Drag and the whole mob follows, up to fifty birds moving as one gangly mass with somewhere to be. Emus eat wheat, flatten fences and pick up strays, then stand in a gun post or a grain silo until the capture ring closes and the outpost is theirs. Beaten army kit drops scrap. Scrap buys the upgrade tree, which climbs from an aggressive peck to a captured Lewis gun dragged around on a cart, and the gun jams for the emus at about the rate it jammed for the army. Runs are untimed.
Nothing is for sale. There is no store page, no release date, no pre-order and no account to make.
Why the 1932 Emu War
Because it is on the record, and the good parts did not have to be invented. In November 1932 the Australian military took two Lewis guns and 10,000 rounds into the Western Australian wheatbelt, spent about a month there against something like twenty thousand emus, and withdrew with the birds still eating. The first gun jammed. Someone bolted a gun to a truck, found that emus do around 50 km/h over rough ground and that nobody can aim from a bouncing tray, and gave up on that. Parliament asked questions and the operation ended. A premise that arrives already documented is worth building on, and the game only starts inventing once the history runs out in December 1932.
The full account, and the point where the game leaves the record, is on the history page.
Who is making it
One developer. Design, code, world data and the words on this site come from the same pair of hands. There is no studio and no registered company behind it, and nobody else is owed a credit yet. Made in South Australia.
Art is generated, then corrected by hand against a written style guide before anything ships. The guide fixes the exact hex values, one warm sun from the upper left, an elevated three-quarter camera and a hard 1932 lock on the army side, so nothing turns up carrying a weapon that had not been built yet or standing in a colour louder than the wheat. Generated images that miss it get thrown out rather than quietly patched.
Working in the open, for a project this size, mostly means writing down the state of it in public before there is anything impressive to show. This page and the campaign codex are the current version of that.
The state of it
The campaign is designed across all 26 areas. Each one has its geography, a historical hook, its outposts, its richness numbers, a position on the map and its own newsreel line, and all of that lives in a single data file the codex pages here are generated from. The conquest loop and the three-currency economy are designed and being built. The art pass is deliberately last.
So in the engine, most things are still grey boxes. Placeholder shapes with the right speed and the right collision and no feathers on them. Every illustration on this site is concept art, which is why there are no gameplay screenshots anywhere on it, and why the writing has run a long way ahead of the build. There is no timeline on this page because there is not an honest one to give.