No campaign: realities, persistent characters and six milestones in a night

Right after the survivor run came together, the owner changed the direction of the whole game. The core loop would be the map endgame of the loot-driven ARPGs the author has played for years: no campaign, just a hideout, a Mirror, and shards that open harder and harder levels. This post covers the pivot, the night when all six planned milestones landed, and the first round of feedback after the owner actually played it.

The pivot, on paper first

The brief was simple: Mirror Shards (tiers 1 to 20) open Altered Realities: layouts with randomised details, full of normal, magic and rare packs and the odd purple “unique-rare” mini-boss, always ending in a boss that drops loot and more shards. Three base classes: Warrior (becoming Barbarian, Paladin or Samurai), a Dex starter proposed as Rogue (Assassin, Ninja), and a mage proposed as Arcanist (Ascendant, Warlock, Sage).

Nothing was coded at first. The structure, proposed numbers and the open questions went into endgame and classes. The main question was whether character level and build should become persistent (recommended) instead of the survivor run’s per-run cards. The owner said “go ahead with all of them”, and the recommendations became decisions: three portals (the third from tier 15), a persistent character with a shared tree and gems, the Survival Rift kept as a mode, violet unique-rares, tier 1 always free, gold respecs.

Six milestones, one night

• Layouts are room graphs, not ASCII. The first layout was drawn as a text grid like our sprites, and it came out disconnected in two places. Rooms at fixed positions with corridors between them are connected by construction and still recognisable places; packs, pillars and pools land randomly inside. A test rasterises every layout with 40 seeds and checks by BFS that the boss and every pack are reachable.
• A flow field instead of the NavigationServer. One BFS from the player every 0.25 s; each monster steps toward the lower neighbour. It cannot fail to find a path that exists, costs one search for the whole map, makes the boss gate just “these cells are unwalkable”, and avoids the NavigationServer’s shutdown hang.
• Persistent characters. Up to six per profile, level 1 to 70, a 92-node passive tree with three class starts, and skills and supports as gems in a loadout. Skill gems level with their kills; duplicate drops melt into gem XP.
• Classes and ascendancies. Melee arrived, with Combo, Rage and Arcane Charges as class resources. Eight ascendancies of eight nodes each, chosen at an altar after the tier-5 boss; their behaviour nodes hook into a damage-hook registry.
• Content. New tilesets for the Bone Crypt and the Drowned Mirror, three new monsters, and Nereth, the Drowned Reflection: tidal lanes with a gap, a whirlpool whose eye erupts, mirror images firing lane crosses, and Rising Tide, our first inverse telegraph, where everything floods except three lit circles.

The test that “hung” was the game working

EndgameSmokeTest froze right after killing the boss: low CPU, idle main loop, no exception. The exit portal spawns under the boss, and the test had parked the player right there, so the reality finished and changed scene to the hideout, freeing the test node mid-await. We also learned that _ = RunAll() swallows exceptions; the test now wraps itself in try/catch and mirrors every line to a file that the runner reads, because stdout is block-buffered when it isn’t a terminal.

What the bot found

The autoplay bot got a reality mode and reported three things worth fixing: Colossus and Nereth fights took 6 to 8 minutes against about 2 for the Herald (boss life was evened out); melee starters did a quarter to half of the mage’s damage at much more risk (melee skills buffed by about 65 %); and auto-aim happily shot monsters behind walls, or the sleeping boss behind its gate, so it now needs grid line of sight in realities. After that the Warrior cleared 6 of 6 runs up to tier 7, the Rogue 4 of 6 up to tier 5, and the Arcanist reached roughly tier 9 to 13 before gear would be needed.

First feedback from a real player

The owner played the Windows build and left a list. The ones worth telling:

• The passive tree tooltip used to grow a label under the tree and resize the whole panel; nodes now get a floating, clamped tooltip.
• Tooltips through a closed inventory. The grid polled Visible, which is its own flag and stays true while a parent is hidden. IsVisibleInTree() fixed it.
• Whole numbers. Rolls whose range reaches 1 now roll integers.
• Bindings. Six loadout slots bound to LMB, RMB and 1 to 4; an empty LMB keeps click-to-move. The Rift auto-casts everything and has no mana.
• A paper doll and an account-wide stash in a chest in the hideout, with tabs that cost 150 gold and double.

The Threshold

New characters used to appear in the hideout with no idea what to do. They now start in The Threshold, an introduction reality that reuses the real controller in a tutorial mode: fixed small packs, softer monsters, a guide panel that only advances when you’ve done the thing (move, dodge, kill the yard’s pack, pick up and equip a gifted item, clear the cache, kill the guardian, go home). Existing characters skip it, because a missing flag in the save means “done”. Details in tutorial.

Honest leftovers

At this point no human had balanced anything: every number came from a bot that dodges well and never equips gear, so tier 10+ numbers were a floor. There were no boss-specific uniques, and melee skills ignored weapon type. The next post is about the look of the thing, because the owner had opinions.