Devlog
How the games are built.
Systems, bugs and the decisions behind them. 15 posts so far.
From Ashes to Orbit
Oct 3, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
The planet is home: rewriting the goal
Traders kept landing and leaving, which made an escape ending make no sense. So the rocket became a rescue.
Oct 1, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
Six regions in one scene
The home map and five outposts all simulate at once. Getting there meant rethinking the grid, the scenery and the minimap.
Sep 30, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
Saving a colony by replaying it
The save system loads a fresh scene and replays the colony onto it. Two traps along the way: corridors that placed themselves, and XP awarded twice.
Sep 30, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
The ladder to orbit: a goal that explains every chain
A five-stage launch programme, a 27-node research tree and a late economy built backwards from the rocket, so every production chain has a reason to exist.
Sep 18, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
One task system for one unit or fifty
Why the lone survivor on day one already runs on the job queue the whole colony uses later.
Sep 15, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
The bug that sealed colonists inside their own base
Colonists kept getting trapped in rooms with open doors. The cause was a navigation mesh that quietly baked the buildings into the floor. Three fixes, and a test that failed first.
Sep 13, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
Power is just connectivity
No wires, no cable tool. Buildings that touch share a grid, a grid is live only with a running generator, and a lot of strategy falls out of that one rule.
Sep 12, 2026From Ashes to Orbit
A resource economy that runs out on purpose
Hand-placed scrap is finite, so I made the running-out the point: three resource tiers, and a first machine with an unmistakable job.
Hollow Ward
Nov 1, 2026Hollow Ward
Teaching the player to hide
Floor one has to teach surviving a threat without a fight. A walker that never attacks, a locker with a louvred view, and a failure that costs nothing.
Oct 30, 2026Hollow Ward
Prompts that follow your hands
Keyboard and controller both work all the time, and on-screen prompts switch to whichever you touched last.
Oct 30, 2026Hollow Ward
Verifying what the camera sees
I build Hollow Ward with an AI coding assistant that cannot see the editor. The lesson of phase one: never call something right from a thumbnail, and measure when orientation is ambiguous.
Oct 29, 2026Hollow Ward
A crawler with no animations
The crawler model arrived rigged but with no animation clips and numbered bones. So the gait is code: legs found by geometry, a tripod walk, and a scare that never fires twice.
Oct 27, 2026Hollow Ward
Health without a HUD
No bar, no number. Damage darkens the edges of the view, slows you down, and shows up as a heartbeat in the inventory.
Oct 24, 2026Hollow Ward
Saving the whole ward
How autosaves restore every door, drawer and puzzle, and why the save system got its own assembly.
Oct 22, 2026Hollow Ward
Designing puzzles for someone who loves logic
Hollow Ward is built for one specific player. The rules every puzzle follows, how the symbol language teaches itself, and the keycard puzzle as a worked example.