First contact with the Woods
On 14 October the Forbidden Woods existed as generator rules that passed 500 layouts outside the engine. Now the Woods were compiled, their content was built and the game was built twice. The Watch Mode AI then spent 57 minutes in the Woods over three runs, with no deaths, and found real bugs, all fixed the same day:
- The Woods had no trees at all. The renderer had no tree list for a generated region.
- The AI kept leaving the Woods to visit the blacksmith.
- It reused the last Woods' walking map in a freshly generated one.
- A spell changed a list while the game was still reading it, which threw an error in the middle of a fight.
A separate balance fix came from a request that day: a random Woods could put both boss clearings in the south and leave the north empty. The generator now places one in the north half and one in the south, whatever layout is rolled.
In the best run the AI beat the first boss in 27 seconds, then got stuck for 12 minutes on the way to the second. That is the next thing to fix. Every new Woods also still costs one long frame, 3 to 27 seconds, which is on the fix list.
What the Woods hold now
Each of the four bands has its own creatures, from wolves and boars at the edge to briar wolves and fungus-crowned spiders in the heart. Four named elites stand in every Woods, picked from a pool of eight. There are campers with their own quests, wearing six new approved character sheets, a ferryman who sells painted canoes and bait while two locals paddle and fish on the lake, a wandering trader, four shrines with blessings, and a catalogue page that fills in as you find things.
Fast runs need their own rules
The AI test player runs at 20 times normal speed, and that exposed a bug the normal game never would. At that speed Nora's arrows could fly straight through enemies between two frames, and the check meant to catch this never fired. The fix judges by game speed, and an arrow that is moving too fast to track now lands at once.
The headless test launcher got a similar lesson in silence. It now refuses every sound before it starts, mutes the listener every frame, builds no pool of sound voices and writes proof of all three in its log. A claim of silence is only worth something if the log shows it.
Reachability, checked in numbers
A new volcanic region the size of the starting valley was also written that day. From the arrival point 23,496 walkable tiles are reachable, and without its two bridges and a cooled ford a lava river cuts off the whole south half. A test now asserts that. Ice and water magic can cool patches of dangerous ground for a few seconds.
Growth for the party
Two companions now learn something new every five levels up to 95, thirteen fire spells for one and thirteen frost and ice spells for the other, and every spell gets stronger the more it is used, over eight ranks. They also wear armour in three slots, head, body and charm. The hero's weapons grow along the same lines: ten weapon types, eight levels each and 70 new moves, with boss drops that the blacksmith forges in to raise the limit. The quest in the balloon valley became a wreck hunt across a field almost five times bigger.
All of this is written and the whole project type-checks clean across 700 source files, but most of it has not run in the game yet. More than 300 new automated tests were written that day and none has run.
Art
Sixteen spell icons were redrawn with distinct shapes and their established element colours, so healing, wind, lightning and resonance read apart at 64 and 32 pixels, and the owner approved them. Six camper costumes (cook, scout, woodcutter, herbalist, traveller and keeper) are in the library as 168 frames. Three new trees for the Woods passed review and were approved.
One test went the other way. The first generated creature animation tests failed visual review for direction, movement and design consistency, and no sheet was installed. Seven full animation sheets are now explicit scope, so the completion estimate went down: it reflects added unfinished work, not removal of finished work.