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California Trail

California Trail

Android Volume Early dev

Oregon Trail, except the frontier is the 405 and the oxen are tires.

The rent notice arrives and the number is impossible. A family loads everything it owns into a rusted minivan and drives eight hundred miles south from Humboldt County to a cousin's spare room in San Diego. California Trail plays The Oregon Trail straight, beat for beat, with the freeway as the frontier and the 405 at four in the afternoon as the river you have to ford. Affectionate parody with real teeth: the warmth is aimed at the family, the bite at rent, water policy, wildfire season and gig work. The family is never the joke.

In development

Dev log //

A trail-journey game in early development. Most entries are systems groundwork, the parts that have to exist before the travel loop can be tuned.

Commits
53
Days w/ changes
6
Started
25 JUL 2026
  • Complete phases 0-5: fixes, art, minigames, meta, QA, release prep
  • Phase 2: pay the tier, and stop a frame hitch losing the game
  • Phase 2 round three: skill now beats spam in all five
  • Phase 2 round two: a fix I claimed had never applied
  • Phase 2 fixes: three games were unreachable and all five were mashable
  • Phase 2: five minigames, and a skip that cannot cost you a run
  • Music: cali1 and cali2 at half volume
  • Phase 1: art and audio, all but the music files
  • Phase 1 part 1: a cast, and provenance you can check with a command
  • Phase 0: the bugs the device found
  • Reorganise the roadmap: bugs first, art second
  • 6.4: two half-fixes finished, and three tests that could not fail
  • Remove GitHub Actions; the checks are manual now
  • 6.4 adversarial pass: four more, and my back-press diagnosis was wrong
  • 6.4 Sessions B-E: findings, and the five-run driver
  • 6.4 Session B/C: the run was never saved while you played
  • 6.4: the screen never read what broke
  • 6.3: a playtest protocol, and two stale notes that would have shrunk it
  • 6.2 complete: the simulator had never fired an event
  • 6.2: illness damage was the lever. 4 of 8 targets, from 0
  • 6.2: the win rate is the target, and illness incidence is now an exhausted lever
  • 6.2: illness made lethal, and two of the eight targets cannot both be met
  • 6.2: the van was stopping for lack of fuel, and it was the sim's driver
  • 6.2: split the day count, and found a third of the trip covers no miles
  • Phase 6.1 pulled forward: an economy simulator, which immediately proved 2.8 wrong
  • Phase 2.8: six vehicles, breakdowns, range anxiety - and one gate left open
  • Phase 2.7: seven occupations, and the discovery that five of them were unplayable
  • Phase 2.6: the Fork, and four things only a measuring test could find
  • Phase 2.5: The Merge, and a number that means what it says
  • Phase 2.4: death, epitaphs, and stones you actually drive past
  • Phase 2.3: illnesses that progress, recover, kill and get treated
  • Phase 2.2: the other 41 events, and a sweep that was passing them blind
  • Phase 2.1: the event engine
  • 5.3b: the van crosses the screen as it crosses the segment
  • Titanium palette, smooth driving, and the trail map
  • Phase 1.8: the shell, and the exit-gate sweep that found the game was unwinnable
  • Phase 1.7: arrival, endings, score
  • Phase 1.6: the party
  • Phase 1.5: stores
  • Roadside scenery: per-biome props in the travel band

Showing the 40 most recent of 49 logged changes.

Every line above is a real commit from this app's repository, on the date it was made. Build chores and merge commits are filtered out.