(I just realized the last time I made anything for this site was 2011)

It's a work in progress right now, but boy howdy have I bit off more than I can chew.

Working Title is CRUDE: Oil and Gas Production Simulator (really rolls off the tongue). You can just call it CRUDE

At this point it's more of an love letter to oil and gas industry than a game.

CRUDE simulates oilfield operations at a level of technical fidelity most games in the genre don't bother with. The player manages well sites: drilling, completing, and producing from ESP and rod-pump wells, while managing a surface processing facility that separates oil, water, and gas, routes fluids through vessels, and exports via LACT unit.

The Reservoir Physics

The production model uses Vogel's IPR equation to describe the relationship between bottomhole flowing pressure and flow rate:

q = qmax · (1 - 0.2·(Pwf/Pr) - 0.8·(Pwf/Pr)²)

Where qmax = PI × Pr × 0.82. This is the standard two-phase inflow performance relationship. Every well has a reservoir pressure Pr that depletes over time as fluid is withdrawn, and a productivity index PI set at drill time based on zone type and drilling accuracy. Reservoir pressure can recover when injection wells are online. The boost is proportional to injection rate and a simple volumetric balance term.

Bubble point pressure Pb is tracked separately. When Pwf < Pb, gas begins breaking out of solution. Free gas fraction rises, which causes ESP wear to accelerate and can trigger gas lock if the casing fluid level drops too low.

The ESP pump model interpolates against H-Q and efficiency curves stored as lookup tables per pump type. Affinity laws scale head and flow with frequency:

H ∝ (Hz/BaseHz)²
Q ∝ (Hz/BaseHz)

Power is derived from the operating point on the efficiency curve. Scale buildup degrades head, corrosion degrades efficiency. Both progress at rates modulated by chemical inhibitor dosing.

The Drilling Minigame

The drill bit is a physics object with velocity, momentum, and gravity and the player navigates it using arrow keys. The player sees a fog-of-war circle centered on the bit, there are options to purchase geology surveys to increase this fog of war to make finding the oil sands easier.

Hard rocks are placed procedurally at drill time and stored in the site's reservoir object so they're consistent across re-drills into the same zone. Gas pockets deflect the bit on contact. Fault lines are instant-kill (collapsed well bore). The bit's path is recorded as a series of points and stored on the well object for later use in collision detection against new wellbores drilled on the same site. If you really want to hurt the ingame wallet you can drill into a good well you already drilled and kill two wells at once!

Drill accuracy feeds into the completed well's PI. A clean, straight well into the middle of the oil sand gets full PI; a tortuous path that barely clips the edge gets a fraction. The well path is realistically modeled so that deviation off the TVD (true vertical depth) adds more production tubing to the well and makes it more expensive to complete.

The Facility System

The facility is a drag-and-drop graph. Vessels are nodes; pipes are edges. Each vessel has typed ports... oil, water, gas (with respective ins and outs). and connections are only valid when port fluid types match. There are pumps, valves, and manifolds. So if you are carrying wet oil in your oil shipment tank you can recirculate it back through the FWKO/Heater Treater to dry it out before shipping to the customer.

Physics ticks once per game frame and walks the graph in topological order. Each vessel computes its fill level, overflow behavior, and outflow based on valve positions. The FWKO (Free Water Knockout) tracks oil and water volumes separately, calculates a retention time based on throughput, and derives BS&W from a separation efficiency model that depends on demulsifier dosing, retention time, and whether fouling has occurred. (Proud of this one)

The water leg flows to a clarifier. The oil leg flows to a stock tank. The LACT (Lease Automatic Custody Transfer) unit triggers automatically when the tank reaches a high setpoint and stops at a low setpoint.

Note: I just set up a simple facility here (and then dumped a bunch of other objects on screen to show them off).

Upgrades Menu

What's Not Realistic

The economics are elementary at best. There's no decline curve analysis, no well interference model beyond a simple pressure-boost term, no lift optimization, no regulatory compliance system beyond H₂S fines. The market prices follow a random walk with light drift. Water disposal cost is a flat $/bbl trucking rate until you drill your first injection well.

The facility is also simplified. There's no gas handling beyond tracking free gas fraction at the wellhead. No compression, no vapor recovery, no system for gas at all yet.

I hope to add a lot more features but scope creep is real and at some point I have to focus on making this "game" "fun".

Where It Is Now

The current build is the sixth major version. Earlier versions were called Iron Barrel before renaming to CRUDE somewhere around v5. The drilling minigame has gone through three complete rewrites. The facility started as a fixed layout and became a drag-and-drop graph in v4. Injection wells were added in the most recent sessions.

Where I Hope it Goes

I honestly don't know. I started this as a simple "what if" in my free time, I have been working in oil and gas since 2012 (Remember at the top of the post when I said I hadn't made anything since 2011 for NG) and there's a big gap in the simulator-game-world of actual industry games. Here's what I have planned for it (Most of this is to make it more game-like and less I-Should-Be-Getting-Paid-To-Play-This).

• Difficulty modes: Easy modes keep the reservoir physics to a static value, shit's cheaper, more sandbox-y, hardest mode is full realism, wells fail, tanks run over, you get environmental fines, etc.
• Field map: Instead of one abstract field, you're on a grid. Wells have X/Y coordinates. Pressure interference between nearby wells is modeled. Spacing decisions matter.
• Early, Mid, Late Game Progression: Early game is tight margins, fighting for every barrel. Midgame is Production Engineering, optimizing wells for stability or maxing production. Late game is a field manager idle role, hiring crews? idk.
• I have some upgrades in the game already, and more planned (SEE ABOVE screenshot) this is where I'm hoping the actual gameplay loop sits comfortably in)
• Crisis Events: Like any good sim, sometimes shit just goes wrong. I have modeled in wells scaling up and failing (and then you work them over and get them back online) but that's about it. I'm imagining economy crashes and busts (oil goes to $30, or $150/bbl)... Random failures in your facility... power outages, wells leaking and getting fines...
• Graphics: This is a big one, I suck at art. I am hoping to put some level of polish on this to make it appealing.

Final Thoughts

I can upload working builds of this and have y'all test it for me if you want, let me know what works and what doesn't.

For this version, a Newgrounds upload is really the only home for it, however... If the NG release goes well... Maybe a 3D Unity/Unreal redo, more indepth Steam release? That would be sick and unrealistic.

Let me know what you think.