Building history

2026-10-19T00:00:00.000Z

I’ve always been drawn to the corners of history that don’t make the documentaries. Not the battles everyone can name, but the small places where something happened on an ordinary day, and the people who were there and left a letter, a deed or a sworn statement behind.

That is what Irregular Formations is for. I want to make games that let you step into those places and moments: less-mainstream historical events and experiences, rebuilt as closely as the evidence allows.

The heavy lifting

The trouble is the work. Doing a place properly means reading land records, period maps, official reports, memoirs, letters and old newspapers, and checking each one against the others. Then all of it has to become terrain, buildings, people and a day you can play. For one person, that is years of work before a single level exists.

So we built AI pipelines to do the heavy lifting. Agents search the archives, transcribe what they find and turn it into claims, each with its source attached and an evidence grade: documented, surveyed, typical or invented. They write and test the game’s code. They run the pipelines that build the ground and the buildings. And separate critic agents, which never see how a thing was made, check the work and send it back when it isn’t good enough, which is often.

I’m not going to be coy about any of that. A lot of people are wary of AI in games, and I understand why. My answer is to be specific, so the How we work page sets out exactly what the agents do and what I do. The short version: the machines carry the load, but the passion and the direction come from a person. I choose what we make and what it says about the past, I sign off on the history, and I decide what ships.

There is also a line we don’t cross. There are no AI-generated images on this site, and there won’t be any in our marketing. Every picture here is an archive scan or a frame captured from the game.

What we’re making

The first game is Mosby’s Rangers. It is set in Northern Virginia between 1863 and 1865, in the stretch of farms, woods and rail lines where John S. Mosby’s partisan rangers raided behind Union lines. You plan raids on a turn-based campaign map, then ride them yourself, in real time and first person: several revolvers and no reloading in a fight, a horse you name and can lose, and an enemy that learns from you.

You ride for the Confederacy, in a war it fought to keep slavery, and we treat that seriously rather than romantically. The game is about irregular war and what it cost, and it ends in surrender and disbandment, not victory. I’ve written more about that on About the history. That page stays marked as a draft until a historian and a sensitivity reader have read it.

The first place: Herndon Station

The first place we rebuilt is Herndon Station, a railroad depot in Fairfax County, Virginia, as it was a little after noon on 17 March 1863.

No photograph of the village survives from that time, so everything had to come from the record. The lots came from deeds of the 1850s. The sawmill moved when an 1878 atlas plate put it somewhere other than where we had first placed it, and the village was rebuilt around it. The ground came from modern lidar survey, with the creek and the railroad grade cut back in. The day itself came from the letters, memoirs and reports of the men who were there.

Herndon now rests on 223 claims drawn from 80 sources, and where we had to invent something, the record says so. It will be the first level of the game, and it will be free on Steam.

Next time

That’s the place. The next post is about what happened there: the real raid of 17 March 1863, when Mosby’s men rode into Herndon Station and took the picket of the 1st Vermont Cavalry posted at the mill. I’ll tell it from both sides and from the sources, including the places where they disagree.

Thanks for reading. This is the start.

Marty

Irregular Formations: Journal

Building history

The heavy lifting

What we’re making

The first place: Herndon Station

Next time