Devlog
140 updates across 17 games. Each one is a write-up of the changes in that game's development log.
Daily studio progress
One post a day covering every game that moved, led by the games with the most work.
Studio progress, October 22
Reign of Valtherin gained 39 new chests, signature boss drops, cleaner combat effects and floor warnings for boss hazards.
Main focus: REIGN OF VALTHERIN
Studio progress, October 19
Mittens the Kittens rebuilt all nine boss fights around one loop, AFTERSHOCK took its short name, and Reign of Valtherin gave every spell its own look.
Main focus: MITTENS THE KITTENS, AFTERSHOCK, REIGN OF VALTHERIN
October 2026
One loop for every boss, cleaner cat poses, and a fresh look at every stage
All nine boss fights now run on one rule you can learn in seconds: four hairballs, a dizzy dog, a stomp on the head, three times. The day also brought two couch co-op fixes, tidier cat animation and a second full review of every stage's backgrounds.
Spells that look like their element, and one line that gave every effect its colour back
Every spell now draws its colours and matter from its element and is cast from a magic circle that shows its power. Projectiles face their flight, enemies react to each blow, and a one-line shader fix ended a bug that had turned every glowing effect flat white.
The game is called AFTERSHOCK
The world map header and the credits now use the game's one name, AFTERSHOCK. The window title and the save location keep the old longer name on purpose, because changing them would move where existing saves live.
Two hard spots eased, achievement icons, and the fastest test run yet
An ice rink corridor and a climb in the vet's waiting room got easier, all 17 achievements got pixel art icons, and the automated test runs posted their fastest full run and best two-cat run.
Gear upgrades that follow your journey, and memories that finally play
Weapon and armour upgrades now need shards found in later lands, memories meant to play underfoot work again, and 1,815 automated tests pass.
A full run with no help, three real bugs, and a shared screen that stopped cutting jumps short
An automated test run cleared the whole game with zero assists for the first time, it turned up three bugs a player could have hit, and couch co-op jumps no longer stop short at the top of the screen.
Water that stops blinking black, canoes you sit in, and companions who wait for a fight
A rounding error on the graphics card made the new animated water flash black; the fix, ripples behind canoes and footsteps, canoes twice the size, one height rule for every villager, and Razor and Blade no longer casting at sleeping animals.
The Woods meet the test player
The generated Forbidden Woods are built and played for the first time by the AI test player, which finds real bugs in under an hour, including arrows that fly through enemies at high speed.
Logged, watched by an AI pilot, and a boss for every silhouette
Void Strike is public as a web build. Its first full day of testing added play logging, a silent AI pilot that runs the whole campaign at 20x speed, and fixes for two bugs that only hours of play exposed.
First real play, tougher bosses, and a stall we are still chasing
The packaged Unreal game was played by a person for the first time, and bosses got a quarter more hit points. The same play log exposed a long stall in stage 2 whose cause is not yet known.
Two cats under the AI, retimed medals, and a bin in 6-2
The hidden AI run can now play with two cats under the real couch-play rules and found a co-op spawn bug; medal times were reset from the AI's own clear times.
Copying the art in was not installing it
Reviewed artwork became real game assets, 577 library entries that grew to 679 after the second batch, after the importer turned out to skip sprite art without saying so. The bosses were also measured against a new size rule.
Silence that is proven in the log
The headless Watch AI is now provably silent after an early version flooded the audio engine with 24,000 errors. The Watch AI also played a 45 minute run on the second route with no stalls.
A safety net that dropped the cat out of the world
A rescue routine meant to free a buried cat was sending a cat that merely touched a wall four units down and out of the level; the day also tightened the AI's helper moves and its fight with the Shop Floor boss.
Every boss is cut in half, and what the reviews caught
Bosses now die cut in half by the hero's own weapon, with a cut face on each half and blood from the split. It passed 116 of 116 forced cuts on 55 boss bodies, and reviews caught a long list of faults along the way, plus a real bug in the combat code. Local only, and not yet played by a person.
A forest that is never the same
A second area is designed as a generated wood that always holds the same things, and the generator is tested on 500 layouts before it has run in the engine; separately, art that passes every technical check is still rejected by a reviewer.
A headless Watch AI, and five faults that were the AI's own
A fast, windowless Watch AI ran ten long runs with no Unity errors, and the logs it left pinned down five faults in the AI's own habits.
A wreck that looks dead, and test numbers that are honest
A burning gunship wreck went through repeated outside reviews, and its glowing core turned out to be the original animation still running at full brightness. A measured safe test speed and cleaner logs followed.
Nine hidden passes of the whole game, and what the log taught
The self-playing mode ran the entire game nine times in a day, each round of fixes measured against the log, and found cat-inside-the-floor bugs that a person would have hit too.
An outside review says no
No new code was built, but an independent review of everything that ships failed the game's art, and the three test failures from 8 October turned out to be a test bug rather than a game bug.
The Watch AI stabilises Leviathan on its first dive
Two small changes took the Watch AI from never stabilising Leviathan unassisted in ten dives to doing it on its first dive in 16 minutes. Controller prompts and a round of bug hunting also went in.
The town now looks like what it is about
Echo Ridge's daylight town read like a cosy farming game, so it was regraded toward a tense late afternoon with colour draining out toward the west. It was written and reviewed by reading only, and nothing from it has been compiled or run.
Twice as smooth, and test pilots that finally die
The Unreal version was measured properly for the first time and runs far smoother on integrated graphics. The test pilot turned out to almost never destroy a capital ship, and two human-like pilots showed where the difficulty sits.
Atomic Acres: Aliens Attack, a sound critic, and difficulty that adapts
The game gets its full title and its first town is renamed. A new tool measures all 545 sound clips and ranks the worst first, a hidden difficulty level now follows how the squad is doing, and the code for grouping scenery into bigger chunks is in but not yet measured.
Saves that survive a crash, a 20x test run, and a hostile art audit
Saves are made crash-safe, the self-playing mode gets a fast hidden run that writes a shared log, and every sprite, tile and background goes through a four-critic check for machine-made art.
Measuring the wrist, and mini bosses that keep their limbs
Weapon wrists folded back 110 degrees on six classes, which only a measurement showed. A wrist limit, a search for the most natural forearm pose and per-class hands fixed it, and mini bosses now keep every limb until almost the last of their life.
A hammer that breaks shields
A second and third companion get their own fighting rules, an optional fire knight gets a room where the weather decides the fight, and a night of written-but-uncompiled work goes through the editor.
Safer saves, teammates that stop getting in the way, and swords drawn the right way round
A round of code that compiles but has not been played. Saves are now written safely, computer-controlled teammates stop pinning the human player, sword swings are drawn on the correct side, and a first reading of a native build mode ran faster than the old one.
A ten foot Serpent, remappable controls, and a sound for every room
The Serpent grows to about 10 ft with his reach scaled to match and his stats untouched. Controls became remappable, gamepad dead zones shrank, and every room in the Church and the Crypt got its own reverb and ambient sounds. All of it compiles and none of it has been played.
Three stars, a starter stash, and a run that could not be used
Leviathan's three stars now follow the design, four station cutscenes are in, new divers start with a small stash, and a Watch AI run was thrown away because the game ran at a quarter of real time.
Night and weather draw faster, and a score dip that was walk speed
Night lighting and weather were the slowest parts of a frame in the Unity port, and both were sped up without changing a single pixel. A 1.6 point drop in the match score turned out to be the comparison, not the drawing.
A game that tests itself, and a ship that fights back harder
The Unreal version became a complete game with menus and saves, then learned to play itself and report what breaks. Its first self-checks found four real save bugs, and a power-based difficulty curve changed how a fully armed ship plays.
Guns and explosions rebuilt in layers, and a 95-minute AI test
Recorded gunfire sounded thin and old, so guns and explosions are now built from layered parts. A code review found upgrades that did nothing and a Weapon Editor that reached 12 of 19 weapons, a 95-minute AI test came back clean, and co-op can now zoom out to keep both players on one screen.
A bug sweep, fairer bosses, and a sound bank with no water in it
Read-only reviews of the menus, Samus, the bosses and every stage turned up stuck states, a boss that could not be beaten after his intro, drowning in silence, and a menu prompt that erased a save.
Thirty-six mini-boss encounters, and hands that close on the handle
Three releases in a day. The new mini bosses went live in all 44 guardian chambers, then in a refreshed roster of 36 encounters, and character hands were rebuilt so they close round their weapons. Phones also went back to normal graphics by default.
Party rules and a full test run
The party system gets its first rules for companions, orders and sending people home, and the full play-test suite runs to the end for the first time, with most of its failures traced to one leftover enemy.
Proving the Unity port plays like the web game, and what the checks found
A frame-by-frame comparison now runs the original web game and the Unity port side by side, and the port matches across all seven levels. The same checks found dead gamepad sticks and a reverb that slowed down once a sound ended, and a scorecard of proven parity was corrected downward.
A Church that failed its own reach check, and body models that were rejected
A full regeneration showed that 23 of the Church's 43 interactables could not be reached, and every cause was real geometry. Elsewhere, the generated body models were imported and honestly rejected for stretched arms and hands.
Sharks that really bite, and a Watch AI that learns to shop
Sharks finally hurt because a hidden god mode setting had been blocking every bite, and the sea gained orcas, eels and a dozen more animals. A three hour Watch AI run then showed it had never bought an upgrade.
A whole game around the stages, and sound that was measured rather than copied
The Unreal version got its full game flow, from the title screen to the high score table, and its complete sound. The web build's compressor was measured and fitted rather than copied, because copying its settings would have come out about 3.5 dB too hard.
Enemies that got wedged, and a scarecrow with a fair warning
The test logs showed chasing enemies pinned on scenery for 10 to 21 seconds. The cause was big alien elites colliding at their full hit size while being drawn small. Also: a one-click AI Watch that visits all five areas, and a scarecrow wind-up you can actually see.
Reading the AI line by line, and sixteen sounds that never played
A code review of the self-playing mode found places it could loop forever, and a check of the sound list found that 20 of the game's sounds were never triggered, so whole mechanics ran in silence.
Five mini bosses get new sculpted bodies
Five newly sculpted, rigged mini-boss bodies now load in normal local play, with entrances and finishers checked in the real game and a lifecycle test for the nasty cases, like a body that arrives after the enemy it replaces. Not deployed.
Teaching the test player to fight
A day of reading the Watch Mode AI's own reports turned up six ways a simulated player gets stuck, from timed rolls to a map that sealed it in for 42 minutes, plus the approved cherry blossom and tent going into the game.
Five body types, proportion controls, and gear that fits the body it was made for
Character creation now supports five named body and head pairs and a width and depth adjustment, and five textured base bodies were generated to fill them. The screenshots still show the old mannequin, and the post says why.
Watch the AI stops following scripts and learns the stages
The mode where the game plays itself for streaming now builds its own map of each stage and plays from that, instead of replaying recorded test scripts.
A seat is not a home
Two bugs this week came from a lookup that answered the wrong question: a test player that mistook a bar seat for a house, and a blur shader that read the wrong size and washed out a whole valley.
People at the Nordic Base, and bugs found by reading
The Nordic Base now has a crew of four with their first jobs, and the game has fifteen trophies. None of it has run yet, but two read-through reviews already caught three real bugs.
A full test pass, bosses beaten with player moves, and warp boxes that take both cats
With all the new art in, every stage and boss was run through by script. It found ten real blockers, and the day also fixed how warp boxes treat a second cat and a cutscene that fired at the wrong door.
When the benchmark fails its own rule
An audit of all 841 installed art files checked a simple brightness rule and found that the game's own reference art breaks it. The same day, 714 automated tests ran with no failures.
Hits leave a colored ripple, and the Unreal game gets its HUD
The Unreal version now has its on-screen display, and enemy hits no longer flash white. A ripple spreads from the exact point of impact and takes the color of the weapon that caused it.
Every required climb becomes a light tap, and the scenery gets fixed by the numbers
A day of difficulty work across Worlds 1 to 8 (closer checkpoints, more hearts, small steps instead of big jumps), a landing fix for thin shelves, and an art pass that finishes the set dressing for every world.
A crypt opening, and the checks that caught what the eye missed
A new game now starts in an unlocked prison cell and works its way out through a key gate, a lever and a boss door. The interesting work was in the checks that found broken geometry, a bot that could not see its enemy, and a boss that hit too hard.
The first compile in days, and the new crew on deck
Days of work had never been compiled. When it finally was, it found one error, in a test. The new crew art is in the game, and every debug log now says what kind of run produced it.
The backgrounds come across, and the glare gets a limiter
All eight stage backdrops now run in Unreal, measured against the browser game at an average difference of 2 to 4 on a 0 to 255 scale. Explosions, animated models and a brightness limiter went in the same day.
A clear middle of the screen, and a Weapon Editor
The HUD moved to the edges so the middle of the screen stays clear, the area title shows once per session, three weapons got proper sounds, and a new Weapon Editor lets anyone fire all 19 weapons and retune their sounds.
A sound editor, boss introductions and warp boxes everywhere
The game gets an in-editor Sound Editor for all 163 sounds, an introduction scene for each boss, warp boxes in every world, and a movement fix so riding Samus plays like running as Mittens.
Tithe, restorations, a last-Keeper-standing mode and fewer, stronger drops
A new currency you can lose and recover, seven restorations for the Cathedral hall, a Showdown mode where the floor closes in, and a loot rework that cuts ordinary drops to a third. All of it is a local draft build with numbers still open.
Counting the trees
A survey of the code and maps found only four painted tree types in the game, and a lookup table that is ignored whenever the authored art pack is present.
Character creation, and a correction on clothed models
The player now starts from a bare body and builds a face and look on a new character creation screen. This also corrects an earlier direction the same day: clothed character models are for NPCs and enemies, not the player.
Frost, fishing and a crew with faces
A third station under the ice with a ceiling that calves, a tiki bar and fishing on the aft deck, real-time seasons, a fully recorded voice cast, and a new crew drawn at twice the pixel density with no outlines.
The rules, rewritten in C++, match every recording
All of Kuro Kishi's game rules now run in C++, and 72 recorded playthroughs replay frame for frame against the browser game. Stage 1 also plays in Unreal Engine for the first time, though it does not yet look like the original.
Bosses that read as bosses, and a leak in the skeletons
Two new monsters built as finales were demoted to elites because they looked like enemies, not bosses. Aliens now die by spinning on the spot, a graphics memory leak was traced to unfreed bone textures, and a sound fix was corrected within the day.
New cats, and the ice that wasn't ice
All five playable cats were rebuilt as 3D models rendered down to pixel art, and the last two worlds now exist. Then a line-by-line read of the code found ice that quit working after the first jump and three stages that could become impossible to finish.
Bigger bosses grew longer arms, and eight new enemy bodies
Making bosses 4 to 8 times a player's height also stretched how far they could hit. Three rounds of measured fixes brought the first guardian's kill rate from 14 of 30 fights back toward where it started, and eight new enemy bodies were rebuilt after a visual pass found about 50 faults.
A bar for new art, and a pipeline that failed without a word
Fences are rebuilt as a baked kit, the dialogue box can play voice clips, the Vale builds in about half the time, and a side-by-side showcase found that new props are painted at a fraction of the density of the houses and trees.
Tuning the Low tier, and a bot that plays overnight
A character level-of-detail bug that made every character draw at full detail is fixed, the Low tier is retuned from measurements, and an unattended overnight run of the AI Watch mode found a crash pattern tied to reloading the Church level.
The same run, every time
Void Engine's simulation now steps at a fixed 60 times a second with seeded randomness, and 72 recorded runs repeat identically. The same day, a trailer render turned up white-out flashes, and the cause was a single charged shot.
Hits that land, and a beam that burns the ground
Gunfire was rebuilt because real recordings sounded thin at ten shots a second, every hit now makes a small explosion, saucers crash out of the sky, and every Tripod Harvester burns a trench with a chasing plasma beam. The graphics presets were rebuilt around measured costs.
Modelled bodies in the game, and a place to spend sigils
The nine modelled characters and ten modelled bosses went from files into the playable build with their own animation. Around them came a ranking screen, a Sigil Altar for permanent upgrades, a map after death, an endless Survival mode, bosses 4 to 8 times a player's height and touch controls.
The pilot that got trapped
Making the Watch AI explore instead of knowing the whole map exposed an event planner still working on the old depth scale, which could drop a solid block across the station and trap any player. Also a ladder fix, a noise rebalance with real shares, and a 1080p bug.
A pilot that plays the whole campaign
Void Engine's Watch Mode now flies with a search over the next second of the fight, and it clears all eight stages with one hit taken in total. An audit of enemy patterns the same day found two bugs, one in an enemy's fire rate and one in boss phase labels.
Every gun fires from its barrel
Shots used to spawn from the middle of the player. Now all 19 pickup weapons fire from their own muzzle, the second player is a new hero, the reverb is gone because it was quietly accumulating, and the split screen came back, rebuilt around how far apart the pair actually are.
No more dithering
The ordered checkerboard shading is gone from the shared art generators, replaced with interpolated colour ramps and smooth opacity. Edges and pixels stay crisp.
Nineteen bodies from one reference sheet
Nine character bodies and ten Mega Boss bodies were generated from reference images and remeshed to about 40,000 and 60,000 triangles. The characters are rigged. None of it is in the playable build yet, and generating an animation turned out to be different from checking one.
Measuring frames without a window
A small tool now measures the church's frame time with no window open, averaged over 150 steady-state frames per shot. Its first baseline was repeatable, and its first batch of experiments could not be trusted because of how console commands were being passed.
One number, not forty
The shaft changed depth again, and the depth scale built the day before meant it was one number to edit. The timing check on the quiet run barely moved.
Aliens got my neighbors
The game pivoted from a folk-horror suburb to a 1950s alien invasion. Saucers lift neighbors in tractor beams, you shoot the beam to drop them, and you escort them to the community center. Along the way: yard collectibles, an indoor pharmacy mission with a reward that cannot be farmed, and the decision to draw no black outlines.
Two out of ten, and a rule we let go of
The six newest character bodies were rejected, rebuilt in code, and still rated 2 out of 10. Those six are moving to sculpted, rigged 3D models, and the game's all-in-code rule is lifted for them. Loot you pick up now survives a death even if the last checkpoint is behind you.
Criticals that cut
Weapons now make a sound when they hit armour, wood and stone. Chance-based critical hits can sever an arm or split a torso, a greatsword critical can run an enemy through, and the bugs along the way were a floating gauntlet, a test fixture that rejected its own mesh, and blood that smoke settings were hiding.
The wrong clock
Six dives with no clean run, and three of them ended in drowning with roughly five to six minutes still on the countdown. The player was watching the wrong clock. Also, how to shorten a shaft without rewriting forty depth thresholds, and why upgrades should add instead of replace.
The bot that found the sealed graveyards
A bot that plays both players found graveyards nobody could walk into, a leak that took 186 loaded geometries to 1,089 over one night, and a diagnostic that was wrong about the game it was watching. Then the "hazy graphics" turned out to be the resolution scaler misreading fast-forward.
Twenty kilometres of Nordschleife
The Nürburgring Nordschleife, built from map data to within 56 metres of its official length. The AI laps it 10 to 23 percent slower than published times, a tree pass took 20 ms to 1-2 ms, and a stray newline in a shader string stopped the build.
Thirty times too strong, and a rating that answers back
A long Watch AI run showed the horde melting in about two seconds, with roughly 30 times more damage than it needed early on. The fix is a threat rating that scales the horde to the party. Along the way, a stuck-still bug was the game's fault, an Enter key fired twice, and a dodge roll arrived with a measured invulnerability window.
Where the church frame time was going
A frame of the church went from 4 to 5 fps to about 14 to 16 on an integrated GPU, and almost none of the gain came from where the first guesses pointed. Also a title screen with no text that tests could not see, a soft-lock in the fog walk, and test runs that were writing High quality into the player's settings.
September 2026
A real track, and a real GPU timer
The first working session of Mpower Racing, a browser racing game. Laguna Seca built from surveyed data, a roster of 124 cars, and a rule that performance work follows measured GPU time, not guesses.
Cuts that follow the blade, and a black screen that hid its error
The slash decides where a body is cut, bigger enemies now go in half, and blood stays in the world instead of on the lens. A shader array that was too short turned the 3D view black, and the only place the error appeared was the game's own log.
Everything from code, and what it broke first
The first full day on The Serpent Lies Still went into a pipeline that generates its own textures, meshes, animation and sound. It produced two crashes with one shape, a material that never compiled, a lint that was wrong, and a balance simulator whose first answer was that the boss fight is far too short.
A painted hero that runs, with no outline
Morrow, the Deep Roots hero, now exists in the Unity build as 806 hand-painted frames across 52 animations. Getting her to run without jitter meant fixing a cape that changed shape every frame and a foot that slid on the ground, and one rule shaped all of it: no black outline, ever.
Simon, seen on his own body
The new Molly and Simon art went into the game, ten sheets turned out to have been cut by the wrong rules, and Simon was seen in a real two-player run. At game size he reads as a striped Mittens.
A load that fell from thirty seconds to eight
Cold load dropped from 27-37 seconds to 7-8, and the horde now holds a median of about 31 fps. A constant hiss under the music was traced to four continuous noise loops and measured one loop at a time. The HUD was redrawn, and both console controller families work.
A village that lives its day
Seventeen villagers now walk a daily routine that is computed from the clock alone, Razor and Blade lost about 112,000 black pixels without a re-render, and the map editor's round trip had a copy that would have overwritten its original.
Molly and Simon, all the way
Molly and Simon now have every sheet Mittens has, drawn on their own bodies, and two more physics queries that could not see triggers are fixed. A squash frame that made Simon shrink on impact got caught by a check.
Drawn entirely by code, and too slow to play
Overwhelm II started today, a horde game where every visual and every sound is generated by code. A full first build stood up in one evening. Its first problem was the frame rate, and the first numbers were taken on a machine that was not idle.
No black lines, but the eyes
Every villager and ten enemies lost their black outlines in a day. The rule that made it work is not "remove the black", it is "give each dark pixel a dark tone of the material it belongs to", and the first try at it turned a moustache into skin.
The Input System was discarding the keys
Automated walks that failed after a camera change turned out to have nothing to do with the camera. The Input System was throwing away the test's key events. Also today: real sun shadows for every character, four kinds of arrow with tracers, and measuring a face before calling it straight.
Clay mannequins, and the head that carries a build
Every boss shared one lighting flaw that no individual drawing caused, and one boss passed her own quality gate while looking like a cream blob. Molly and Simon also started getting bodies of their own.
One Enter, two screens, and a script that always passed
A hero who was always named Wanderer, shops with nothing on the counter, and a compile script that printed "compiles clean" no matter what. Plus the camera zoom, the armour system, and why there is no closer zoom step than 4x.
The castle opens at level ten
A castle rendered at the hero's own pixel size, a gate that only opens for the right level, a charge attack that scales with the character, and a save fix for an editor that was overwriting the player's slot.
The claw that never hit anything
The claw had never struck a single trigger prop, a measurement that said a lift was short was the thing that was wrong, and an importer was quietly flattening sprite sheets. Plus the wet cat, and a sixth world built in a day.
The physics rate was never the one we built for
Every stage was solved at 120 Hz, and the game had been running physics at 50 Hz the whole time. The same day brought sugar you can pour into a floor, a sewer that flows, save files, and a sound-effect fix that was one missing object.
A guard flag that outlives what it guards
A recompile mid-game could freeze Mittens permanently, and the reason was a rule we had written down wrong. Plus a jump test that had been passing an impossible jump for a fortnight, and a background check that measures instead of trusting the eye.
A tornado that takes your ship but not your hull
Void Engine got a desert tornado that grabs the ship without hurting it, a proper boss warning, a stage clock that stops late deaths from dumping a backlog of enemies on you, and the original blue plasma bolts.
Hit feedback that doesn't hide the fight
Void Engine's last environments and bosses are in, and the rest of the day went to making it readable and steady. Opaque white hit flashes became soft pulses, a late boss arrival made animations strobe, and the frame-rate controller turned out never to have been called.
A flash that erased the water
Void Engine, the 3D rebuild of Kuro Kishi, got its menus, upgrade meter and first environments. Two bugs along the way were worth keeping: a damage flash that deleted animated materials, and a checkpoint that skipped a mini-boss.
Bosses that attack
In the Unity port the bosses had phases, HP, hitboxes, sprites and a health bar, but not their attacks. Most of them fired one invented fan, all on a single frame. The real authored attacks are in now, four of them staggered.
The rule was written down wrong
Recompiling mid-play left Mittens standing still for the rest of the session, and three fixes failed because the codebase had the underlying rule wrong in about fourteen comments. Also, the full build now builds every stage.
Thirty-two defects, thirty-two fixes
With the Unity port's task list empty, three independent audits went over it with different questions. They found 32 distinct defects, every one real, including a final-stage checkpoint that dropped the boss and a ship whose shots flew at three quarters of their authored speed.
A regression wearing a fix's clothes
Playtesters said the grass slows you down and the climb through it is too hard. The first diagnosis was wrong at every step, the fix it produced would have broken the level's own safety checks, and it was reverted before it shipped.
A leak that never leaked
The Unity port reaches the end of its list and now builds a 191 MB executable. Along the way a set-piece check failed on all three things it was written to catch, the port found bugs that were in the original all along, and a memory leak turned out to be a naming collision.
A walk that was half a walk
Bruiser's walk cycle turned out to be four frames played twice, and his nose was facing the wrong way. Mittens' eyes went green, the dogs got real lighting, and yarn stopped looking like a hairball.
Title to credits in Unity, and why the levels feel alike
The Unity port now runs from the title screen to the credits, with sound and saves. The key tracker stopped printing chopped variable names, and a measurement pass put numbers on why six of the seven levels feel like one.
A score that fell because it got more honest
The Unity port of Echo Ridge is code-complete, with 77 of 77 modules mapped. Measuring how closely it matches the original is the harder half, and the most useful numbers so far were the ones that went down.
One copy of every number
KURO KISHI now runs in Unity, with enemy paths, fire, formations, power meter, boss phase machines, HUD, sound and a run through all eight stages. The port never restates the game's balance, so a failure can never mean someone mistyped a constant.
A lawn keeps a record
The second world has its mechanic, its art and a first stage you can walk end to end. Every height in it was measured against the real physics rather than derived, and some of the derived ones were wrong. Later the same day the whole world turned out not to be green.
A boss in the wrong body, and a port checked byte for byte
Four reported bugs, three fixed and one that could not be reproduced but can no longer hang. Then the game began its port to Unity, starting with the rasteriser, because the whole game is drawn in code and the port is only right if the pixels are.
Being hungry prevented eating
The previous post ended by asking whether a world that kept collapsing was hard or broken. It was broken, in several places, including a seed that never meant anything and a hunger rule that stopped people from ever going to get food. Then a skin tone ladder, a quadratic slowdown at 10x, and a hunt that never killed anything.
Animations that never played
KURO KISHI reaches 2.0. The campaign is now eight real levels, and the defect sweep behind it found a set-piece that never worked, authored sprites that never appeared, and 60 animations that had never been seen.
Three systems that were written and never ran
MALCONVERGENCE went from a 786-line prototype to a playable first level, and most of the work was discovering that the weapons, the combat effects and the whole material pipeline were finished, compiled and never reached. Plus a blind comparison against the reference art that the game lost, on purpose and in public.
The pixel grid was the mechanism
Character art was rejected twice before it landed, and the second rejection was caused by a bad brief. The fix turned out to be a fixed pixel grid, which also doubled the frame rate. Then a crowd that gated its own corridors, and a tech tree nobody would ever reach the end of.
Detail painted, then erased
Four mini-bosses were the same nine rectangles in different colours, and the sprite helper that should have fixed them was erasing every detail drawn on top. Plus a stage-change crash, hitboxes that grew each time an enemy respawned, and a final stage that opened with 28 seconds of nothing.
Eight operatives, and what "more definition" actually meant
The roster was one body in eight palettes, and is now eight silhouettes you can tell apart with the colour off. A pass that added tones made the characters smoother, the opposite of the note, and the portraits got detail where the figure was flat instead.
A floor nothing was standing on
Every stage had a minimum gap between enemy shots, correctly set, and one of the enemy fire paths had never consulted it. Fixing that turned into a campaign-wide cap of one shot per second, a boss flash that stops erasing the boss, and a death screen that shows you where you died.
Silence, on purpose
The placeholder music is gone so the real tracks can go in, which meant teaching a build guard the difference between "off on purpose" and "the wiring broke". And a playtest put Mittens inside solid geometry twice, in a way that makes the collision sweeps unable to notice.
Nine tracks, a death that lands, and a roster that is drawn
The game had two songs and played one of them across seven biomes. It has nine now, picked by level. A boss death whose payoff was landing 0.15 seconds after the screen it was drawn on had gone is staged properly, and the character select is generated art instead of a 2.27MB painting.
Hearts, and two pads that finally drive two cats
Mittens has a visible health bar at last, the two gamepads finally drive two separate cats, and a ride that could trap you forever now lets go. Three of the day's bugs were the same shape — a write that succeeds and does nothing.
The seat gets taken, and the title burns
Press START on an empty seat and you now join mid-level, beside the lead, with a full set of lives. The painted title screen is gone, replaced by a real biome with a wordmark that is genuinely on fire.
World 1 is a world
Two more stages built, a boss you can now actually reach, and an island overworld that connects all three. Couch co-op went from broken to working along the way.
August 2026
The arcade seat, and eight bosses that would not move
Empty seats now blink INSERT COIN like a cabinet, and after three attempts every boss in the game finally moves during its own fight — the worst freeze dropped from 34 seconds to under one.
Project page added
Deep Roots joins the permanent Hostile Environments project archive, ready for screenshots, footage, build notes, and future devlogs.
Project page added
Overwhelm now has a permanent home inside the Hostile Environments development archive. More build information will be published as development progresses.
Level 2 production begins
Level 2 moves into active production with new environmental depth, encounter planning, and a more defined visual identity.
The town found its name
Echo Ridge locks its modern identity while the failed-town loop, moral paths, and alternate-device structure continue to expand.
Background parallax pass
A focused pass on environmental layering and motion to make scenes feel deeper without sacrificing gameplay readability.
Visual direction locked
The hand-painted city language, level color variation, and non-robot environment presentation are now established.
Consequences can spiral
Interaction outcomes are being designed so good intentions and bad intentions can both trigger unexpected chain reactions.
Level-select visual system
Area art is being structured so each location feels distinct while still belonging to the same painted universe.
Combat and environment pass
Combat pacing, enemy pressure, and background presentation received another coordinated polish pass.
Long-form progression overhaul
Level scaling and formation variety are expanding toward a much larger campaign while keeping high-value blocks sparse.
More gaps, fewer solid rows
Stage layouts are moving toward readable shapes, shot lanes, and satisfying openings instead of constant solid walls.
No updates match that filter.