Devlogs
What got built, why, and what broke on the way.
Running write-ups from my projects — technical, honest about the bugs, with screenshots.
Latest posts
Co-op becomes a party: shared hideout, rift proposals and co-op realities
Co-op stopped being a single run: friends meet in the host's hideout, anyone proposes a Rift or an Altered Reality with a 30 second popup, and the replication layer was split out so the same code carries a tier-20 reality.
Four friends in the Rift: co-op, join codes and attacking our own host
How the Survival Rift became playable with up to four players: snapshot replication, UPnP and join codes, a security review that found a save-wiping bug, a rebuilt join screen, and a shared level-up round with a countdown.
Quests that teach the town one station at a time
Six tutorial quests unlock by themselves, mark their station in the world, explain it before it opens, pay out on turn-in and live in a log on J. Built on a pure rules class fed by a small event bus.
A Rift with a shape: keystones, rerolls, gem shop and cash-out
A run of owner-driven polish: cursors, loot key, town walks that don't get stuck, a town map, a Rift level-up cadence with per-card rerolls and pending items, instant tooltips, Odran's gem shop and a Colossus cash-out decision.
Generated caverns, spawn budgets and cascading drops
Realities stopped being rooms linked by corridors and became steered cellular-automata caverns with one-piece rock walls and real liquids; spawning moved to Poisson-disk packs and a Rift director; item rarity became a cascade.
Too much damage, too many explosions, and a passive tree that grew up
Monsters now scale from a measured reference character and a time-to-kill target, a benchmark found that voxel crumbles (not explosions) caused the frame drop when packs die, and the passive tree grew from 92 to 339 nodes.
Crafting orbs, a merchant, and a hideout that became a town
Nine original crafting orbs, Odran the trader, the Artificer's forge, item art, and an empty hideout room that turned into a walled town with an edit mode, a shop and a HUD that explains itself.
No campaign: realities, persistent characters and six milestones in a night
The survivor run worked, so the next question was where the game really lives. We pivoted to a map-style endgame: Mirror shards open Altered Realities, characters persist with a passive tree, gems and ascendancies, and a new character learns it all in a short introduction.
Voxels, anime heroes, a launcher and a HUD you can rearrange
In one day the game got a voxel HD-2D presentation under an unchanged 2D simulation, anime-style characters at double resolution, a renamed repo with a self-updating launcher, flasks and a HUD the player can drag and resize.
It's a game now: the survivor run
Until last night, ARPG Game was a very well-tested sandbox: a mage, some training dummies, a fireball with forks, an affix system, a grid inventory. Every system was there; nothing to do with them. This post is about…
A feature can be provably correct and completely dead
The last post ended with equipping working but no screen to do it from — auto-equip-on-pickup, a bridge explicitly labelled as scaffolding, standing in for the grid inventory that didn't exist yet. This post is that…
Two tests that passed while describing the wrong game
The last post shipped the drop pipeline with currency alone, deliberately: prove the seam with gold piles before building anything equipment-shaped on top of it. This one is the payoff — base items, the affix system,…
Designing loot for a filter that doesn't exist yet
The last post ended with a fireball that could fork, pierce, and fan into a spread. This one is a step sideways rather than forward: before a single item can drop, something has to decide what a "item" even is — and…
A red octagon learns to walk
This is the first devlog for ARPG Game, a 2D top-down action RPG in Godot 4.1.1 built in C#/.NET. Before this session the repo had nothing but scaffolding — and the interesting part was everything that went wrong while trying to see it work.
Fireball, four dummies, and the seams that made forking cheap
The last post left off with a shape that could walk around a grey rectangle. This one is the direct sequel: that shape can now cast a projectile skill, the projectile can hit things, the things can die, and the skill…