Hostile Environments
2026-09-23 · REIGN OF VALTHERIN

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.

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REIGN OF VALTHERIN is a pixel-art action RPG built in Unity. This is its first entry here, and it covers the day the castle became a real place.

A castle at 16 pixels a tile

The castle is modelled in three.js and rendered down to 16 pixels a tile, the same pixel size as the hero. A custom projection draws walls at full height above their feet, the way every other tile in the game is drawn. The result is a curtain wall, two drum towers with purple banners, and arched doors in seven swing frames. Each baked sheet is pinned to the exact world spot it was rendered for, so it cannot drift against the terrain.

The knights at the gate share one dialogue graph. Under level 10 they turn you away. At level 10 a knight opens the doors, the door plays its swing frames with a creak and a thud, and then it stops blocking. Behind it is a new area, a columned hall with a red runner and a courtyard, built as one baked backdrop. Its braziers are real fire nodes.

A charge attack that grows with you

With the charge bar full, holding the heavy attack powers up through levels and releasing unleashes it. One charge level is added every five player levels, up to eight.

Movement, in numbers

value
run7.2
sprint10
roll9 tiles, invincible the whole way

Weapons block 75% of a hit. Shields block all of it. Dual wielding has its own paired attack on L1. Walk and run follow how far the stick is tilted, and R3 locks on.

The editor was overwriting the save

The editor and the test runs wrote to the same save slot a player uses. They now use their own folder. Levelling starts at 100 Vestiges for level 2.

Smaller things

  • Every menu and HUD border is a point-filtered pixel frame on the world's 3 px grid.
  • Beasts now face all eight ways. The game's animator was already asking for the four diagonals, and the baker had not been rendering them.
  • Wolf and boar got a longer, higher stride. The spider's palette was lifted two steps so its legs read.
  • 25 stray fences were removed from the village, and invisible rock colliders were removed from the roads.

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