2026 · APR 28
Systems / The Wrought
Wiring up the cost ledger.
Shipping the first pass on the Wrought system this week. Five powers, all hooked into the existing survival pipeline so that nothing lives in a parallel "magic resource" world. Burn warms you and damages your skin. Sense improves perception and degrades your eyes. Read pulls fragments from corpses and gives you a migraine. Every activation spends from a Psyche pool — and overdrawing into the reserve permanently shrinks it. The most rewarding moment so far: watching a player at the late stage of Rustblight have to actually think about whether to use Suppress or take the hit and fight visible.
wrought
survival
design
2026 · APR 14
Visuals / Shaders
Toon lighting and the cold palette.
Phase one of the visual pipeline went in: color grading volume, SSAO, and the toon ramp shader. The single biggest shift was replacing URP/Lit's smooth PBR falloff with a four-band ramp. The world reads as illustrated now, not rendered. Snow looks like snow. Shadows look painted. The cold palette is now enforced at the post-processing layer, which means every screenshot has the same temperature even before art passes. Edge outlines next.
visuals
shaders
URP
2026 · MAR 30
Simulation / World
The world keeps running while you're dead.
Spent the past sprint making the calendar real. Faction goals tick on a global clock; settlements rise and fall on a schedule the player isn't part of. Most importantly: the calendar continues during pawn-death, between save loads, and during the recovery mission. Your second pawn doesn't start in a world frozen at the moment of death. They start in a world that has moved on without them. The first time I tested a long succession gap and walked back to find the old mech half-buried with someone else's tracks around it, I knew the system was working.
simulation
factions
succession
2026 · MAR 12
Architecture / Core
Interaction system: enrich, don't type-check.
One of the patterns I'm most proud of: nothing in the UI layer asks if (entity is Lootable). Components describe their own interactions through a small interface, and the UI just renders whatever they declare. Adding a new interaction never requires editing UI code. Adding a new component never requires editing the interaction service. Open/Closed in practice, on a system that's grown by an order of magnitude since the first prototype and still hasn't needed a rewrite.
architecture
SOLID
unity