The Devlog.

In my factory game, your goal is to grow a civilization all the way up to a Type-1. If that term is new to you, Type-1 just means your civilization can use every bit of energy that its home planet has to give, including the weather. To reach power levels of a Type-1 civilization with nothing but the first storm that you unlock in the game, which is the Tornado, you would need over 33 million of these, spinning up at the exact same time, to actually achieve this.

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So, how do you reach these almost impossible-sounding figures for power in the game, with simply our weather? Well, in my game, you will combine every last megawatt that you use from the weather, not only from the wind, but the sun, and other natural forces of the planet in which you land on. Right up until you reach out and grab the power of the star itself.

The whole story of Cosmic Scale is about a civilization that already powers its home world at a Type-1 level of power, and you are expanding this civilization's reach further out into the stars, bringing the technology and knowledge of what your home planet actually achieved while starting from scratch, and rebuilding that infrastructure in a foreign star system. I wanted the power in my game to be a part of that same story. This would be a civilization that has learned to live and work alongside its planet, and coexist in harmony. I also made sure that the weather only ever helps you. A storm passing over your factory will never break a machine, slow down a belt, or hurt your factory setup in any way.

So really when you look at it, there are two ways to handle weather and power when you're building a factory in Cosmic Scale. You can catch the weather naturally that's already out there, or you can make your own. You start each game by placing the HUB, which is a building that helps you out with your early power setup and is some of your main infrastructure for the early game. From there, you can slap down wind turbines that are rated up to 35 megawatts each, which is more power than the biggest wind turbine here on Earth can even produce. Every planet also has its own storms that naturally spawn and roam across the surface, so whenever one happens to interact with these passive generators, they will produce maximum power outputs. That means a Tornado passing through your wind turbines will take every single one of them up to the full 35 megawatt output that they can produce.

Your first Weather Generator will unlock right from the get-go, though it will take you a little while to gather the plates, gears, cables, and concrete needed to build it. Once you place it down, you can open it up and select the option for a Tornado, which your home world's weather is attuned for. Every cycle, it will need ten iron gears and ten cables. It will output up to 300 megawatts of power the entire time that it's running, enhancing any and all wind turbines that are nearby, as an added bonus. To put that into perspective, that's enough power to keep the lights on for roughly a quarter million households across the United States. Every time a storm is created and maintained, you also get a byproduct item as an output, or in the case of our Tornado, a Vortex Charge.

From there, your factory starts to grow and so does your weather. And eventually, once reaching a tier one, you'll unlock an Electrical Storm, which will output up to 900 megawatts of power. Tier two will bring and unlock the Solar Storm. This doubles the storm's power again, up to 1,800 megawatts. Once you reach tier three though, something changes. The next storm on the list of upgrades, the Ash Storm, will actually not be suitable for the planet that you're standing on, and can't form on your home world at all. For the Ash Storm, its unique spawn location is a volcanic planet type. So this is where the weather can start pulling you out into the rest of the star system, chasing that power upgrade, and even larger factory systems and setups.

The Vortex Charge and other unique storm fuels that spawn as byproducts from the unique storm systems that you can produce will become actual fuel for your player's life support systems, your jetpack itself, and flight throughout the galaxy.

From here, this is where your storms start feeding right back into the research and science and progression systems in the game. For example, the Ash Storm's fuel byproduct, the Ember Charge, is what leads you to unlocking the Blizzard, which can only form and be created out on a frozen world, while also requiring you to pull resources from all over the star system just to keep it fed in a logistical puzzle that you won't have encountered up until this point in the game. From there, the Blizzard's own charges will lead you to unlock the Hurricane, which can form back on your home world or out on an acidic world. A Hurricane puts out 12,000 megawatts of power, while its passive counterpart, the Tidal Engine, stands on a shoreline and turns the churn of the sea into power itself.

In the current build, a Hurricane's charges will lead you to unlock the largest storm in the game, a Superstorm, which can only form out on our gas giants. Once it's up and running, a single Superstorm can put out 22 gigawatts all by itself. That puts it right up there with the biggest power station we have anywhere here on planet Earth.

With that kind of power up and running now throughout your entire grid system, you can start building up and into orbit with these massive megastructures that we have planned. I plan to go further into detail on these megastructures in a future devlog, but to give you the abbreviated version here very quickly would be that you build a Space Elevator to get materials off of the planet. This launches infrastructure from your orbit into space to form an Orbital Ring around your planet that upgrades and holds power and will skim resources from the planetary rings. You'll even eventually be able to launch these solar satellites and solar sails out into the galaxy that will beam solar energy back down connecting into your power grid. These will turn out to be these massive solar arrays and eventual Dyson swarms that allow you to harness the power of the star itself.

Seven storms is really just where I'm starting though. Down the road, I'm planning to add more weather systems that are unique and certain planets that can spawn and host these throughout the game, so each new world you reach can bring its own kind of storm along with it. But I'd love to hear from you guys on this one and get your feedback and start up the conversation, so drop a comment, tell me what kind of weather you'd like to see added to the game, whether that's something we get here on Earth, like sandstorms or dust clouds, or a storm that could only ever happen on a foreign world, like diamond rain. You can also find me on Discord and Bluesky.

Chapters: Thirty-three million tornadoes · A factory powered by the weather · Why I left coal and nuclear behind · Catching the wind and the sun · A tornado made from gears and cables · Lightning storms and solar power at midnight · Leaving home on storm fuel · From blizzards to a kilometer-wide superstorm · Megastructures and the road to Type-1 · What storm should come next?

I hope I catch you in the next one. · OakTree Games

There are about four billion galaxies in my factory game, and sadly, nobody will ever get to see all of them, including myself. To put it into perspective, if you were to start one new game every second, throughout the duration of your life, it would take you, give or take, 136 years to see and play all of them.

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This second episode is all about procedural generation, starting from the one seed number every galaxy grows out of and working all the way down to the ground you walk on.

If you've never heard the term procedural generation, stick with me here for a second through my corny acorn and oak tree analogy, but it is a lot like growing an oak tree. You start out with one acorn and the little seed that carries all the information, rules, and how the oak tree grows, where each branch can go, how tall it can get, what shape every leaf can be, and imagine that but on a galactic scale, and that's kind of how my game works, where every star branches off into one, two, or three more systems entirely, growing the planets and the terrain along the way. The unique seed, or ten-digit number, grows an entirely different galaxy every single time.

In Cosmic Scale, a star system's address can really just be seen as directions from its home system, where every star that branches off into one, two, or three other systems can actually become a list of turns and directions that it takes to get there. Kind of like your GPS telling you to take the second right, the first left, then the third right up ahead. Each of those turns you take being a jump from one star to the next. A star system only gets generated once it shows up on your map, or you jump there. So no matter how far you go, there's always somewhere further out that you can explore.

My game uses the same kind of noise that shapes worlds in Minecraft, No Man's Sky, and many other games out there, and that noise is called Perlin noise. It looks a lot like TV static that has been smoothed out into soft, cloudy shapes, and in our game that noise decides where the oceans go, how grassy an area is, and where rocky patches can show up.

The save file never actually writes down a single resource node, where a lake, ocean, planet, or star goes, but it only remembers what you've changed. Like the buildings you've placed, what's in your bags, your research tier for progression in the game, and where you're standing at any given point. Everything else grows right back from that original seed number, every single time that you load in. The seed itself only takes up to four bytes of memory, which is pretty small if you don't know. In one of my saves, I had traveled up to five star systems away from the home planet, and it was still only about 25 kilobytes, which is smaller than a single photo on your phone.

Right now in the game, your mechanized power suit makes every jump between the stars on its own. But one idea I've been working on for the game recently is a new kind of megastructure to go along with the ones we already have and the others we have planned for the game. And I'm calling this a Lagrange gate. In real life, when one body orbits another, like the Earth around the Sun, there are five total spots, which are called Lagrange points, where gravity balances out in between these planetary bodies. So something can actually stay there and travel stable in orbit for a long time along with them. If you know a little bit about space and the JWST, or James Webb Space Telescope, this actually orbits in one of the Lagrange points here in our own solar system, about a million and a half kilometers from Earth. Eventually I'm planning to have you build these big gates and points in between systems to actually hold and traverse these wormholes that you open up and travel between. But none of this is in the game yet, and it would sit right alongside the space elevator, orbital ring, and Dyson swarm that you can already build with other megastructures along the way that I have planned, like solar satellite arrays and how I'm going to tackle even allowing a player to harness a black hole in the first place.

There's a lot of development still to come and ideas to be fleshed out, but megastructures like these are something I'd love to dig into, so please tell me in the comments what you'd like to see in the next episode, whether that's the megastructures, how the weather powers your entire factory, or something else entirely. You can also find me on Discord and Bluesky.

Chapters: One number · An acorn and an oak tree · Directions from home · One seed, about four billion galaxies · Nine kinds of stars · Back down to the planets · Noise, and the biome table · Biomes on a sphere · What the seed puts on the ground · Your save · The plan: Lagrange gates · Your turn

I hope I catch you in the next one. · OakTree Games

My little factory game may have gotten a little out of hand. This is the first episode of my Cosmic Scale devlog series, where I walk through the story behind the game, how it plays right now, and a little about how I got here as a part-time indie dev and a full-time dad and husband.

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It was only a few years ago that I found myself sitting on the other side of the screen, following along with YouTube tutorials, learning about game development, really getting deep down the rabbit hole and algorithm of what YouTube had to offer, and learning I had no idea what I was doing at times, or really many times, to be honest. I got inspired by other solo developers out there with stories in games like Stardew Valley, games like Balatro and Minecraft. I decided to make a fun, small little factory game myself to see if I could build something on my own. Fast forward a few years later, and it may have gotten a little more out of hand, and that little factory game wasn't so little anymore.

That small little factory game is called Cosmic Scale. It's a game where you land in a foreign star system with not much more than some starting resources, all the while building your way up to the heights of a Kardashev Type-1 civilization.

To understand why you're there in the first place, you might need a quick history lesson. So, Kardashev, a Soviet science guy from back in the day, came up with a scale for measuring a civilization by how much energy it can use. Type-1 means harnessing the energy of an entire planet. Later on, another scientist you might be more familiar with, named Carl Sagan, actually put a number to it. That value was 10 petawatts of energy, or about 500 times what humanity uses today. Your character comes from a civilization that's already made it to Type-1 back home, so your goal is to expand to other star systems and galaxies throughout the universe, building massive megastructures, only after establishing your Type-1 technology throughout the system.

Welcome to Veridian IV, your home planet and where every factory starts in the game. You begin farming resources by hand with lasers on an ore node, but this quickly graduates and upgrades to a Miner Mk.1 which overtakes and does that work for you. From there, you can press Q, which accesses your build menu. You can make a selection, and a hologram plan pops up right in your hands, showing exactly where your building will sit on our world grid. Before long, your miners are feeding smelters, your smelters are feeding constructors, and belts are running out across the entire planet.

But a factory this size will need power, which is right where your civilization's story will come back into play. A civilization that has already mastered one planet would want to preserve the next one as they expand out into the galaxy. So taking this into account, how would you generate power in Cosmic Scale? Well, the answer to that would be the weather, which is the key source of your power in our game. Wind turbines and solar panels run off of whatever weather is around them, then Weather Generators take it one step further, creating a storm right on top of themselves, as if they're controlling the sky directly above them, generating massive amounts of power for you.

Of course, all of this sits on a spherical, round planet, which turned into a real puzzle for me, since squares really do not want to fit on a sphere at the end of the day. It took me weeks of finagling, and finally after wrapping the planet in rings of equal squares with a polar cap at each of the poles in a similar style and fashion to that of Dyson Sphere Program, I finally got this to look just as I intended.

Once your home planet fills up though, well, the only way left to expand is up and out into space. Your jetpack will take you from jumping around the planet to flying in between planets to creating wormholes that allow you to travel between entire star systems. Each one of these star systems is grown from the natural world seed that you randomly get when you begin each playthrough. All of it builds back to where your civilization began, wrapping a star in a Dyson swarm until you hit that 10 petawatt Type-1 victory all over again.

Rebuilding from the ground up is something I know a little bit about myself. I'm not only a part-time indie dev, but I'm a full-time dad and husband working in construction during the day. I've spent the last few years teaching myself these skills in Unity, C#, pixel art, as well as a lot of Blender as of late, which I'm trying to get better at each and every day. Cosmic Scale is my passion project that I keep coming back to time and time again. I've probably restarted it a dozen or so times now, and it's just the one that I'm never going to quit until I get it out there.

It wasn't until recently after my wife and I had our son, and we were up late at night, I got to thinking and said, you know, what's a better time than now, I guess, to pick that project back up and port it from a 2D game to a 3D game, and make it from what it used to be on a single planet to a fully 3D galactic adventure. AI tools definitely speed up my development as well, but I am the one who finalizes everything that goes into my game.

Cosmic Scale is going to be my first commercial game release going to Steam, so over the next few weeks, I'll be digging deeper into everything you saw today. Tell me in the YouTube comments or on Discord which part you'd want to see first.

Chapters: Intro · Where you come from · Landing day · Weather is your power · A round planet, then the stars · Who's building it · One ring at a time

If you're a dad, a dev, or anyone chasing a passion in whatever hours you can find in the middle of the night like myself, then I hope this is a little bit of proof that you can build something big too, even if it's just one ring on the tree at a time. · OakTree Games

Saturday turned into a social media day. I sat down to look over a Bluesky post I had planned, and by the end of the night the game had its first video, an announcement thread and a YouTube channel of its own.

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The video is a fly-by of my home system, recorded in the game as one continuous take. It has you flying down close over each world with its weather live (a tornado under an ice world's ring, crystal plains, an acid shore under a lightning storm, an aurora over a lake on my home world, a lava lake under an ash storm) and then out to the star, wrapped in a finished Dyson swarm from my endgame save.

The Unity editor recorded it frame by frame, and it took several attempts but I finally got it to a state I felt happy with posting. The first seamless one turned the camera more than I wanted on the way into each planet and the star, so those turns got eased, and I had it all recorded again a little faster to bring it in under a minute. The music is Starfire by Scott Buckley rising under it so its loudest bars land right on the title card and the OakTree logo.

That night I posted it to Bluesky with a short announcement thread, the first of what I want to be weekly updates there, and opened a YouTube channel where it is the first video. Both are linked from the menu and footer of every page on this site now.

So far the thread has had more likes and reposts than everything I posted there before it combined, so thank you to everyone who watched and shared it. If you want to follow along, the devlog keeps coming here every week, new videos will go up on YouTube, and you can come say hi on Discord! · OakTree Games

In the small hours of Monday, after the last of the rock notes, I signed off the whole ground set in Blender, and by the time I was back at the computer it was in the game. Each planet now grows its ground around you from its own seed, so the cracked rock plates with grass in their seams, the highland moss, the basalt lava and the dunes that take your trail all build themselves as you walk.

I got my hands on it that afternoon and came back with notes: the ground was visibly loading in as I ran, it looked a bit too dark in daylight, and the close grass had a static, fuzzy look to it. Fixes for those went in over the rest of the day, along with the wind I asked for, which now rolls through in gusts, and that evening I called the grass final. It is exactly how I want it to stay, and it is the first piece of the ground I can say that about in the game itself.

On Wednesday I played through everything else that was waiting on me. The sun going out like an eclipse was most likely other planets crossing the star and throwing their shadow across my world, so that got fixed the same evening along with grassy shorelines, some runaway clouds and a trail that never faded, and the ground detail now reaches about three times as far. When I replayed it, that pretty much fixed everything I could find.

I set the shape of progression on Saturday, taking heavy inspiration from Satisfactory, and a long session on Sunday that ran late into the night settled the first four tiers: Cosmic Beginnings, Surface Expansion, Factory Founder and Orbital Reach. A tier opens once everything in the tier below it is researched. I do not want items or machines dropping out of usefulness, so a recipe now appears on every machine that can run it the moment it unlocks, including the ones you started with, and outside of logistics and miners, upgrades come as an overclock dial that research raises, so what you placed early keeps its place. Flight is earned as well, and leaving the planet waits until you have a working refinery. The four tiers went into the game that same night, with the research screen rebuilt as the tabs by tier I wanted.

An automated run walked a new game through Factory Founder with every gate opening where it should, which is a good sign, though nobody has played the new progression yet, me included. A real run is next, and if this month's playtests are anything to go by, it will send a few things back.

Blender had most of my week again, and early on I finally locked in the design for the armor, which was the piece I had been missing. It comes down to curved shapes broken into flat, angled panels with chamfered edges between them, and it covers the buildings too, so the factory and the suit should end up sharing one look.

The first pieces this week were built from outlines I drew in three views, starting at the collar and the shoulder pad and running down to a shin guard, plus a bicep plate that still needs more work. Then I decided to try modeling the armor myself, and by Friday I had built the facemask, the jaw I had parked last Sunday, the cheeks and the chest plate, which wears the helmet's white and black finish. I also learned, nearly two hundred edges too late, that the bevel setting I had been relying on does nothing unless a Bevel modifier is there to read it, which explained why my edges would never stay sharp.

The weekend went mostly to the ground and the light falling on it. My playtest notes said the surface looked too smooth and that my home world lost its light the further I flew from it. The second one turned out to be the sun aiming itself at the camera, and looking into it showed that the main menu's title lights had stayed on during play in every playtest since that menu went in, lighting the whole world at up to nearly fifty times the strength of the actual sun. The sun and the title lights are both fixed now, and when I checked on Sunday the light seemed right, for now anyway.

The look of the ground moved into Blender, onto flat sample patches for every planet type. By Sunday evening I had signed off for now on the grass, thin tapered blades in bundles of different sizes swaying in the wind, and on the water, which has waves moving across it now. The rock went back for a rework, and I was still giving notes on it past midnight.

Back in the game, a factory now keeps running while you are away in another star system, and when I tried it, it held up as far as I could tell.

So the suit and the new ground both live in Blender for now, and the buildings already showed me how the move into the game tends to go...

Last week I said I would take the trip between star systems myself, and I did. Arriving dropped me straight through the ground and into the middle of the new planet, and the game now sets you down on the surface without having to wait for the ground to load. The same playtest caught the conveyor belts lying on the ground, nearly two meters below the machine ports they connect to, and the digging that followed explained why I still had not seen a freighter fly (a little awkward, given a devlog from last month has "freighters that fly" in its title...). Starting a new game on a fresh seed was destroying every orbital platform, so any freight lane set up afterward pointed at one that no longer existed, and a freighter would not leave until its hold was full.

Three weeks ago I wrote that most of the buildings were still gray boxes. Well, as of this week every item and every building draws a real model, with icons baked from them, and the buildings use the port mouths and the power coil from the machines I had already signed off, after I caught a first pass remaking them from scratch. Most of it still needs a proper sitting from me before it is final.

Then there is the character, which I had parked betting on restart six. Restart six came and went this week, and three more after it, until I stopped asking for generated helmets and traced the outline by hand myself. From there the AI does the measuring and the heavy geometry, working from that outline and the reference images and markup I draw in Blender, and nothing counts as done until I sign it off. The helmet is the most important model I will ever make for this game, so I am taking my time with it, and Friday was the best modeling session on this game so far, detailing it one small section at a time. On Sunday I parked the jaw after five tries until I have better reference for its underside, and the back of the helmet came out of my markup close enough on the first try that it only needed a few edits of my own. That night I signed off the left hand, after posing its fingers and reshaping the palm myself.

The fixes from that first trip are still waiting on my next session to prove them, and the character has yet to set foot in the game, though this is the first week any piece of it has earned my sign-off.

This week the game stopped being one star system. You open the system map, pick another star, and go. The trip takes real time that scales with how far you are traveling, and the world you left comes apart and rebuilds itself around you while you are in transit. Starting a new game also lets you choose which world you land on in the first place. I want to be honest about where this stands, though: the trip works, and I have not yet seen it through a player's eyes, so that is near the top of the weekend list.

The other half of the week went into the game finally explaining itself. Fifty-eight of the hundred and six items were showing up as blank squares in the inventory, and now every one of them draws. Press K on almost anything and the game will tell you where a steel beam comes from and what it goes into, which is a question it could not answer at all before. You can pin a building, a recipe or a research node, and a strip on the right keeps tracking what you still need to gather for it even after you close the panel and go off to mine something. Research got grouped into a readable tree as well, and you pay for it with science packs that you craft like any other item.

So put together, the game got bigger and easier to understand in the same week, and I did not plan for those two to land together. A factory game lives or dies on whether you can answer "what do I need and where does it come from" without opening a wiki, and until this week mine could not, to be honest.

One note from outside the game: the website grew a 3D layer this week. The game page opens on a planet journey built from the real in-game models, and the home page grows an oak in the background as you scroll. It is at oaktree-games.com if you want a look.

Next week I get to be the first person to actually take the trip properly, and I will tell you how it goes.

I stopped building things this week and actually played the game instead, properly, with a checklist open on one monitor and a notes window on the other. Fifty-three checks the first time through, then another full run after the first round of fixes went in, and between the two of them I came out with a list long enough to keep me busy for a good while.

Now playing your own game is kind of a strange exercise, because you cannot un-know where anything is or how it is meant to work, so you walk right past the things a new player would trip over in the first minute. What it does catch is everything that is broken without saying so, and there was plenty of that: item icons that had never actually been drawn and were showing up as blanks, a weather effect you honestly could not see happening from ground level, and machines that were running perfectly and gave you absolutely no sign that they were doing anything at all.

That last one turned into the most visible fix of the whole week. Machines vent as they work now, and placing or tearing down a building throws up dust where it lands. Nothing about the underlying simulation changed even slightly, and you can stand there now and watch the factory working, which before this week meant checking a number in a panel to confirm it.

Every building in the game has an icon now too, all one hundred and forty-one of them, baked from the real model where a real model exists and from a placeholder shape where one does not. I want that gap to stay visible while I fill it in, because a placeholder icon tells me at a glance exactly which buildings still need art, and something prettier would only hide the list from me.

Eleven separate fixes came out of the first run and went straight back in, and the second run turned up more. I also built a small console into the game for capturing notes as I play, because a good half of what I found was stuff the checklist had never thought to ask about. The third run will turn up more again, and the list is mine to work through... for now, anyway.

I finally got the buildings out of Blender and into the actual game this week, which is the step I had been putting off for a while, because it is the one where you find out whether the thing you signed off on holds up once it is standing on a planet.

Seven models made the crossing. The Power Pole, the Storage Crate and the Constructor each went through a few rounds of revisions before I was happy with them, and every single one needed another pass once I could see it sitting on a real planet surface. The Crate's base became an open trestle so it reads as a structure holding something up off the ground. The Constructor got rebuilt at a completely different footprint with a recessed work well cut into it, so the arm actually has somewhere to work. The Power Pole lost about half of its detailing and gained a proper cable harness that you can read from across the map.

Detail that looks great when you are two feet from a model in Blender turns into mush at the distance a player actually stands from a building, so a good part of this pass went into taking detail away.

The world underneath the buildings got a serious upgrade too. There is a real sun now with proper shadows that hold up both near you and far off (cascaded shadows, if you know the term), so the lit side of a planet reads as actually lit and the line between day and night curves the way it should across a sphere. The terrain carries its own grain per biome now as well, with the fine up-close detail actually working, so when you walk from one biome into the next the ground itself changes under your feet, and the color along with it.

Most of the set is still gray boxes, and I want to be upfront about that, because it would be very easy to post the seven good screenshots and let everyone assume the whole game looks like that. It does not, yet. What I do have now is a pipeline that works end to end, from a Blender file to a thing standing on a planet with the right footprint and the right ports, and the rest of it is going to take time.

Almost all of this week went into a single machine, and I do mean one machine. The Smelter got rebuilt from scratch three separate times before it became something I was willing to sign off on, and the reason it ate that much time is that everything else in the factory now gets derived from it.

Now that part I honestly did not see coming when I started. Once the Smelter finally looked right, the things that made it look right turned into a set of rules I could apply everywhere else: how tall a powered machine stands, where its input and output faces sit and what color they read as, what the lighting does across a shell, and how much surface detail earns its place before the whole thing turns to noise. Twelve machines came off that baseline afterward across a few rounds of revisions, and for the first time they look like they belong to the same factory in the same game.

The player character did not go nearly as well. I am four restarts deep and it is still not right. I tried it as sculpted segments that assemble into a figure, then as a kit of hard-surface parts, then as a generated base that I brought in and reworked by hand, and every single attempt got further along than the last one without ever getting close enough to keep. So that lane is parked for now while I think properly about what the character in this game actually is.

I also spent a day on determinism, which is the rule that says every player's copy of the world has to generate identically from the same seed. Six separate things were breaking it, and none of them would have shown up until two people tried to play together and found their worlds had drifted apart. That is invisible work with nothing to show for it at the end of the day, and the entire multiplayer plan falls over without it, so it was worth the day.

So I have twelve machines I am happy with, and a character I am not happy with yet. We will get there... probably on restart six.

If you had sat down at the 3D port before this week, you would not have heard a thing. Everything I moved across from the 2D version worked the way it was supposed to and made absolutely no noise while doing it, and sitting in front of a factory game where the belts run and the machines cycle in total silence is a pretty strange experience, to be honest, and not one I had accounted for going in.

So audio went in this week. It is all placeholder sound that I synthesized myself so the licensing stays clean, and none of it is final, but the machines hum now, the belts move, and there is an ambience bed underneath the whole world, with the listener riding along on the player so things sound right as you walk around.

Two systems the 3D version had been missing came back as well. The ending exists again, which means the Dyson swarm has to be built, fed and held at ten petawatts before you have actually won anything, and ten petawatts is the real Kardashev Type-1 boundary, so that is where the number comes from. Trade also stopped being a menu you click through. The partner stations are real places sitting out in the system now, and when you accept a contract a freighter actually flies the route to fill it, so you can stand there and watch the orbital economy move.

Weather came back too, and I rebuilt how it works underneath while I was at it. It gets worked out from the clock as the game runs, so nothing has to be stored anywhere, which means a planet you are nowhere near still has weather happening on it, and keeping that true across a whole generated system costs essentially nothing in save size or network traffic. The power ladder reads it properly now as well, so storms feed the machines that need them.

From there the rest of the week went into measuring things, mostly because I built a small hitch detector and it caught something ugly on its very first honest run. Loading a world freezes the game for about seven and a half seconds, and all of it happens inside one single frame, so watching the frame rate counter never showed it to me at all. Most of that is one texture bake that I make the game stop and wait for, on purpose. I know exactly where it lives and I have not touched it yet, because the obvious fix breaks something worse... the player needs solid ground underneath them before their first step or they drop straight through the planet.

For a long time the 2D version of Cosmic Scale ran on an endlessly scrolling procedurally generated world. You could load chunks and continue walking forever which really didn't give way to the planetary feel I wanted for my factory game.

My thoughts and game ideas were being hindered in the 2D version of Cosmic Scale. I wanted planetary systems that actually meant something, and travel between places that felt like travel, and an endgame about wrapping a star that made sense from where the player was standing. An endless flat map gives you all the room in the world and it never gives you anywhere to go and further explore in this endless star system generating game system I was now traveling on the path toward creating.

So this week I stopped adding to the 2D version and instead began porting and recreating this in 3D, mostly to answer one question: could I build something that feels like a galaxy that generates forever, with real planets inside unique solar systems you can actually take full control over in this Type-1 style game?

The easy answer is yes, but not without a lot of hard weeks ahead. Planets in the new version are spherical with various moons, rings, gas giants you can only hover above and so on. You can walk all the way around one and arrive back where you started with accurate gravity and camera/player controls. The game also scales into new branching pathways with entirely procedurally generated and spawning planets, stars, and unique system layouts that all adhere within a set bound of rules we can now toggle and play with to fine tune this moving forward.

Most of this week's work went into feeling out the initial system spawning for the solar system, planet traversal feel, and other elements to make sure that what we are generating truly feels like a factory in space where the player can eventually set up networks of logistics and interplanetary and intersystem dynamics for our game to scale with however large the player can imagine building into the universe we are creating. The random seeds were confirmed to be working as intended per some debug logging and testing I did and then we moved from here into the end of the week with the planetary world grid which will probably be worked on and managed until we publish this game. Who knew wrapping a sphere in squares was difficult... a.k.a. impossible.

Infinite Initiative went up in June as a one-week experiment, and the loudest note, including from me every time I played it, was that the cards did too much. One card could deal damage and apply a debuff and buff a stat, all crammed into fine print. So 0.6 tears the card set apart and rebuilds it on one rule, where every card does exactly one thing: it hits, or it blocks, or it poisons, or it heals, or it feeds your combo, and never a paragraph of them at once.

The classes actually came out more distinct this way. When each card is one clear verb, your deck is just the mix of verbs you picked, and that mix is your build, so a Warrior turn reads like a Warrior turn now, while Rogues poison and steal, Bards sing points onto the combo counter, and Barbarians pay in blood. The showy stuff moved into three keywords instead of card text, and with one action per card, the faces finally had room to breathe, with bigger art, one big number, and the combo bonus riding on top instead of buried in a sentence.

The fix I'm happiest about is the quiet one. The game is supposed to get deeper the longer you push, forever, but if you actually charted it, the far runs had been drifting out of reach. That's corrected now, so your rewards scale with the depth the way they always should have and a long run compounds instead of stalling out. A handful of honesty fixes rode along too, where debuffs do what they say instead of scaling into whole-fight locks, your poison respects your shields, and the tutorial can't reach out and overwrite a real save anymore.

Your old saves carry over. If a deck you loved plays differently now, that's the balance pass landing, and it's exactly what I want to hear about, so tell me which card and I'll take a look.

This was my second sit-down-and-actually-play week in a month, and this one ended with nine notes, so the rest of the week went into working down the list.

The biggest note was the horizon. Cosmic Scale bends the world in the distance so it looks like you're standing on a small planet, but the bend was tied to the camera zoom, so if you zoomed in far enough, tiles two squares away would start curving. Worse, nothing actually left when it went over the edge, and buildings would roll past the horizon, flip over, and come sliding back down the sky. I'd been looking at that for weeks and somehow stopped seeing it. Now the ground stays flat around you at every zoom, rolls away once at a fixed distance, and anything past the edge is actually gone. The sun sets right on that line now, and that one little detail goes a long way.

The first hour got a once-over too. A new game starts you at a crafting bench with a sensible starter kit instead of my old test loadout, and you can smelt your first ore right at the bench. Ore sits in the ground now as proper two-by-two patches that visibly run down as you mine them, where before it was floating on top of the terrain. And dying no longer deletes everything you were carrying, since your items scatter as pickups and wait for you, even through a save and load.

Weather got the same pass. You can see the rain fall now, each storm type has its own cloud deck instead of one gray smear, and the machines that harvest storms finally push what they make out onto belts, so the weather economy runs end to end instead of on paper. The sun rises on the left, arcs through noon, and sets on the right, with the sky shifting to match.

Down the list, buttons respond with a little hover-and-click feedback, scrolling is quicker, popups can't hide behind the HUD anymore, and a few systems that were silently switched off (achievement popups, notifications, tutorial highlights, ambient audio) are on. There's a buildable lamp post now, and reaching the ending earns a proper victory moment where before it was a four-second banner.

Infinite Initiative got a quiet fix pass too, with a crash on the game-over screen, an event that paid out gold for nothing, and some accessibility work around reduced motion and screen readers. Those are done and being tested.

Everything above is holding so far, and I'll see what the next playthrough turns up.

Last week's post was all about the sky, with storms you can finally watch and weather on all twelve biomes, and this week was the opposite kind of week, with nothing new to look at. I went through the game one system at a time, from saves to belts to buildings, looking for the quiet bugs that would embarrass me later, and a theme showed up fast: the game had too many ways to eat your items.

Underground belts (the ones that carry items beneath your factory so lines can cross) could drop what was traveling through them when you saved and reloaded, gone without a trace. Demolishing a splitter, the little building that divides one belt into several, did something similar, where the building came back to your inventory but whatever items it was holding at that moment just vanished. Both are fixed now, so you can save mid-flow and load back into the same factory, and tearing down a splitter or a merger hands back what was inside it. A factory game that loses your items isn't much of a factory game.

The strangest find of the sweep came from the art. Most of the buildings are still waiting on their final art, and it turns out a building with no art wasn't being drawn at all, which was 113 of them, placed, powered and working away while being completely invisible. They render with a proper stand-in look now, so you can see the factory you actually built while the real art catches up.

Smaller finds from the same sweep: the production stats screen was listing your top producers by their internal code names instead of their real item names, and the machines that charge energy cells could forget a half-finished charge if you saved at the wrong moment. Both are sorted, as far as my testing can tell.

Infinite Initiative got the same treatment in the margins. Imported save files get checked over properly before they load, you can't re-roll an event by stepping out of the room and walking back in anymore, and a few leftover animations now respect the reduced-motion setting (the one for players who want less movement on screen) like they should have all along.

None of this is going to sell a single copy, but every one of these is a bug somebody would have hit in their first hour with the game, and I would much rather be the one who hits them. Break something I missed and let me know!

Last week was all under-the-hood work on the ending, so this week I actually sat down and played Cosmic Scale like a player, and some of what follows came straight off that playtest list.

The big visible change is weather. Storms already matter mechanically (they feed the machines that make some of the materials on the road to the ending), but on screen, every storm particle drew as a solid square, so rain came down as little blocks. It turns out the effect was never handed a texture, so it drew the default, which is a square. That's fixed at the source now, and each storm type got its own shape on top of it, where rain falls in streaks, snow tumbles sideways, sandstorms get a hard horizontal shear, and hurricanes have an actual eye in the middle. Lightning is a real jagged bolt from cloud to ground now. And weather only ever existed on four of the twelve biomes before this, so all twelve have their own now, and the system that gates the endgame is finally one you can stand there and watch.

Two new buildings went in. The Smart Splitter lets you tell each output which items are allowed down its belt, so sorting a mixed line stops being a timing puzzle, and the Cosmic Collector eats your overflow and pays you back a little in points you can spend. The four trade planets also no longer unlock all at once, since they're staggered across the research tree now, so there's a reason to keep reaching outward.

The playtest also explained why menus kept ballooning and overlapping each other: a saved setting had the interface scale stuck at its maximum. That's untangled now, the HUD panels can collapse out of the way, and opening any full menu hides the rest of the screen clutter until you close it.

Then there's mountains. I took a few runs at them this week, with shaded cliff faces one night and stacked tiers with contour lines the next, and none of it looked right next to the rest of the game. So mountain spawning is off entirely for now, behind a switch I can flip back when I figure out what mountains here should actually be. The world is a little flatter this week, and honestly better for it.

Smaller bits: ARIA, the AI narrator, has a unique line for every one of the 56 achievements now, co-op is wired up for eight players under the hood (which isn't something you can jump into yet), and Infinite Initiative got a quiet round of bug fixes on the side. The playtest list isn't empty, but it's shorter than it was.

After five weeks on Infinite Initiative, this one is back on Cosmic Scale. The side project shipped and settled down, and the whole week went into a question I'd been quietly avoiding: does winning the game actually mean reaching Kardashev Type-1, the thing the pitch promises? Well, until now it didn't, since the victory fired at a number that had nothing to do with it.

A Type-1 civilization runs on about ten petawatts of power, and the game literally couldn't count that high. Power was stored in a number type that tops out around a few billion watts, so I swapped it for a bigger one that can. Pretty dull fix, to be honest, but now there's a Kardashev readout on the HUD that climbs toward 1.00 as you close in, and the ending only triggers once you're genuinely sustaining ten petawatts, where before it fired at some launch count partway up.

In play, that means the Dyson swarm's output is real: it's the number of sails you've launched times how efficient each sail is, and you need both. You launch your way toward ten thousand sails, and you push a research line that multiplies what each sail pulls from the star, up to a thousand times. The swarm decays if you stop feeding it, so early on you're launching just to hold steady, but that same research eventually lets it hold on its own, so a well-built late-game swarm doesn't need a babysitter. Feeding something that size takes more ore than the old miners could move, so there's also a new cluster miner that works a whole patch of nodes at once.

The part I like most is that the win runs through the weather machines from Week 15 now. The final gate item needs cyclone cores, and the new sail research burns cyclone cores and storm essence on top of that, so you can't stumble into the ending anymore, and you climb the power ladder and run the weather chain on purpose.

The week closed with a does-this-actually-work sweep. Saves come back exactly as you left them, with charged batteries, running reactors, half-done crafts, even a finished victory, and the autosave setting finally does what it says. Every achievement fires, ARIA commentary and all. A friend joining mid-session gets your entire factory streamed over instead of just your camera, and nobody can reach into anyone else's stuff. Freighters bring back a planet's full returns now instead of a single item from it.

Five weeks is a long time to be away from the main thing, and it's good to be back.

The combat overhaul went out a couple of days ago, and this is the small follow-up that came from watching people actually play it. Nothing in here changes how the game works, since it's all about making a fight easier to follow while you're in the middle of one.

The big one is relics. They trigger on their own when their condition hits, and until now you'd see the effect happen without always knowing which relic caused it. Watching people play made it obvious the game knew exactly what fired and just never told anybody, so I gave every relic a clear tell the moment it goes off, and now when a fight suddenly tips your way, you can see why.

Sound got some attention too. The biggest scoring hits land on a cymbal crash now, because a hit that big should sound like it, and Act 2 carries a steady clap under the whole fight to keep the pace up. The music also changes with the screen you're on instead of carrying over from wherever you just were.

Two smaller fixes round it out. The Menace counter (the meter on the GM's side that tracks how worked up the enemies get as a fight drags on) now fills and drops in step with what's actually happening, so you can tell why the pressure is climbing instead of the number just moving on its own. And the energy die in the corner got a flat top and a size bump, so you can read your energy at a glance.

It's a small patch, but fights should read clearer from the very first turn, and itch is updated now. If something still feels off, let me know, since you're where the next list comes from!

This update started as a list of small fixes from playtesting and grew into the biggest pass I've done on Infinite Initiative since launch. Two things changed, really: combat now shows you everything it's doing, and difficulty scales the way a roguelike should.

Everything in combat runs on glowing orbs now, and every one of them is real. When a card buffs your stats, orbs fly out to the cards they affect and the numbers go up as each one lands, so nothing happens instantly behind the scenes anymore, and if a number went up, you watched the orb land that made it happen. Attacks burst red orbs off the enemy, sized to how hard you hit, while your combo bonus builds as pink orbs around the counter and fans out into your hand when a card finishes. The enemy side works the same way, where the GM's actions feed his Menace counter, and the longer a fight drags on, the harder his hits get, so stalling costs you.

About those red attack orbs, it turns out they never actually worked before this update. A rendering bug had been repainting every tinted orb in the game gold instead of, you know, the actual color, so if attacks have felt a little flat to you, that was why. Seems fixed for now.

Scaling got a full rework. Enemies used to scale off the best combo you'd hit that run, which meant getting good at the game quietly made every fight harder, and that's gone. Difficulty is pure progression now, where every door steps things up a little and every new stage steps them up a lot, so the early doors are a warm-up and the deep stages will genuinely wall you. The map also forces a few real fights on every path before each boss, so you can't event-hop your way to the end, and cards upgrade five times now instead of once, so long runs have something to chase.

Some quality of life landed too. Hovering a card in your hand blinks the energy it would cost before you commit. Skip actually skips now, since it resolves the rest of your turn instantly instead of lagging the game out fast-forwarding a hundred animations, and Fast Forward is gone entirely, because it never sped up the parts you could actually see. The game also opens fullscreen on your first click, so nobody has to hunt for the tiny expand button on the itch page.

The next update starts with whatever the reports say, so let me know what you run into.

This is the first real update since launch, and most of it went into feel. The systems were already doing the right things under the hood, and the screen just wasn't showing it, so the week went into closing that gap.

Combat resolves one thing at a time now. Every buff, debuff, shield, and combo tick gets its own beat, where orbs spin up around the card, fly to their target, and the number ticks up the moment they land, while before this, effects just piled up and fired over each other. The combo counter visibly charges while a card resolves, showers the rest of your hand, and then the next card slides in, and landing an attack bursts red orbs off the enemy, sized to how hard you hit.

Balance got a real pass too. Enemies used to jump to scary numbers the second you put together one big combo, so now their damage builds over the course of a fight, which means a huge combo makes the next fight ramp up faster instead of one-shotting you at the door.

Every class also got its own way to survive. For the classes built around healing, healing past full health now turns into a shield that fits them, where the Cleric gets an Aegis, the Druid gets Barkskin, the Warlock gets a Soul Shield, and the Bard gets Plot Armor. The Barbarian spends health to forge a Blood Shield that grows the more you bleed, which finally makes that class click.

On the quality of life side, queued cards now lift and drag like the cards in your hand, so you can reorder them or pull one back out. Buff and debuff icons got bigger, the relic tray stays tidy deep into long runs, and hovering a door on the map shows where it leads, with the unreachable ones grayed out. Card art always loads your latest version instead of an old cached one, and the menu can't accidentally bury a run you had going anymore.

It's still just me building this in the evenings, and it's still early days, so if something feels too easy, too punishing, or too busy on screen, let me know! It's out there while it's still changing.

Well, I made a second game and put it online! It's called Infinite Initiative, it's free, and you can play it in your browser right now.

It's a deckbuilding roguelike themed around tabletop game night. You pick one of nine classes, draft a deck, and fight your way down through floors of monsters while a Game Master who's a little too pleased with himself comments on your choices. The name is the joke, since every fight opens with a d20 roll for initiative and the run is infinite, with an endless prestige ladder past your first win.

My favorite part is how a turn works. You queue up your whole turn, commit it, and it all goes off as one escalating combo, with numbers flying and orbs streaming. If you've played Balatro, it's that feeling of setting everything up and watching it pay off. Each class builds the combo differently, so the deck you draft changes how a whole turn plays out.

Fair warning, this is a prototype. It's rough in spots and the balance is a first pass, but a game in front of real players teaches me things in a weekend that I'd never find on my own in another month. It's pay-what-you-want, which mostly means free. If you throw in a tip, thank you, but honestly I'd rather you just play it and tell me what breaks.

Launch night gave me a good bug story. I uploaded the build, opened my own page, and every piece of art was a gray placeholder. Turns out the zip got packed on Windows using backslashes in the folder paths, and itch.io runs on Linux, which read each of those paths as one long filename, so as far as the server knew, there was no art at all. One line in the build script, a re-zip and a re-upload, and the art was back. Works on my machine, as always...

One thing I want to be upfront about is that the card art in Infinite Initiative is AI-generated. That was a deliberate call for a fast side project. For Cosmic Scale the bar is different, where I draw and hand-finish that art myself in Aseprite and every sprite that ships gets my final pass. I'd rather just tell you exactly how I work.

So this was a side quest, a fun one and a finished one, but still a side quest. Cosmic Scale is the game I'm building, and there are twelve biomes of new art sitting in Unity waiting to be wired in, so it's back to it. If you give Infinite Initiative a spin this weekend, let me know how it goes!

I'll be honest up front: most of this week went to a side project instead of Cosmic Scale. It started as a break between art sessions, a little card game I'd poke at on off-nights, and at some point it had nine classes and a few hundred cards and stopped feeling like an experiment. So I let it have the week.

It's a deckbuilding roguelike, meaning you build your deck as you go and a run ends when you do, dressed up as a tabletop game night with dice and a Game Master who has opinions. What I wanted to fix was how a turn goes in most deckbuilders, where you play a card, watch it resolve, play the next one, and nothing ever really builds up. Balatro gets this right, where you spend the whole turn setting up and then watch it all pay off at once. So here you queue up your entire turn of cards, hit commit, and they go off as one chain, where each card feeds the next and a counter climbs and the numbers get silly while the GM heckles you the whole way down.

The dice do real work too. Every fight opens with a d20 roll for initiative, and that roll seeds your combo, so a natural 20 means you start the fight already cooking and a 1 means the GM gets to laugh first. Each of the nine classes builds the combo its own way, where one bleeds itself for fuel, one stacks defense and then turns it into offense, and one just wants to dump its whole hand in a single turn.

I also built it as far from my day-to-day as I could get. Cosmic Scale is a big Unity project, and this is one HTML file with plain JavaScript that runs in your browser, sound and all. That was half the appeal, honestly, since a small thing that just opens and runs is a nice change of pace after months in a big codebase.

It's nearly done. The next step is putting it up as a rough prototype, with the link in the next entry, and then it really is back to biomes.

Memorial Day weekend gave me three days, and I spent nearly all of them in Aseprite, the pixel art program, with Unity barely open, since there were two jobs to do: ground art for the biomes, and animations for the player character.

Every one of the twelve biomes got its own set of ground tiles, four to eight variants each, drawn one at a time, all of them from Grassland through Crystal Plains. The game has been running on white tiles with a color tint for months, and it played fine that way, but every biome looked like the same place with a different filter over it. Now walking from Grassland into Volcanic Highlands should actually look like arriving somewhere new, and I'll know for sure once it's on screen.

The player animations were the bigger lift. The character has shipped with a single static image per direction this whole time, which was fine for testing movement but had no life in it, so now there are eight directions each of idle (hovering, with the jetpack flame trailing behind), walk, and sprint, plus frames for the mining laser, placing buildings, demolition, and the start of an emote set for whenever co-op gets its first hangout moment.

The code to run it all is written too: an animation system that follows the same pattern the game's creatures already use and stays light enough that it won't hurt the frame rate at the 30,000 moving things the game is built to handle, and a tile picker that loads the exact same ground tiles every time you reopen a save, so your world doesn't reshuffle under you. None of it is hooked up yet, though. The old placeholder tiles keep rendering until the new art gets wired in, so nothing broke in the meantime.

Next session is the Unity side, with twelve biome definitions to fill in and one animation setup to drag frames into, and the sprites are sitting there waiting. It was slow weekend work, and honestly the good kind.

This week I sat down and asked the game a hard question: is the build I keep calling feature complete actually feature complete? The honest answer was no. So multiplayer is now actual multiplayer, the weather buildings finally do something, and a bunch of numbers that were quietly wrong got fixed.

Multiplayer first. The co-op from Week 9 turned out to be a lot less finished than I kept telling myself, since you could walk around the same world together, but the host's belts and machines never showed up on your friend's screen. That's rebuilt now. Everything the host builds shows up for everyone, machines, belts, weather and all, and joining works the way you'd expect on Steam, where you make a lobby, your friends see it in their overlay, and they click Join Game, with up to eight players in a world. I also fixed a bug where any player could pull items straight out of anyone else's inventory, and I'm glad nobody was hosting a live game on that one... The itch.io browser build stays single-player.

Second, weather. The site pitches weather control as a headline feature, and until this week the seven weather buildings looked the part but didn't actually do anything, so the weather just happened on its own and nothing you built could start it. Now they're wired into the production chain like everything else. The Tornado Spire produces storm essence and kicks off an actual storm, the Lightning Capacitor turns lightning charge into energy cells at a better rate while a storm is running, the Hurricane Core builds cyclone cores, and so on down the line. My favorite part is the Type-1 Catalyst, the recipe that gates the Dyson swarm endgame, which now requires Cyclone Cores, so you can't finish the game without starting a hurricane on purpose.

Third, balance. I checked my numbers against Satisfactory's and found a few quiet embarrassments, to be honest. The Mk2 and Mk3 miners ran at the same speed as the Mk1, even though their descriptions promised two and four times faster, the nuclear reactor was putting out a fraction of what it should, and fourteen endgame recipes had shipped with empty inputs and outputs, so anyone who got that far would have unlocked buildings that sat there producing nothing. All of that is fixed, along with faster belts at the top end, smarter splitters, drones that actually fly their deliveries instead of teleporting, and a real twelve-step tutorial.

On the home front, the little one's naps and bedtime finally have a rhythm, which means I'm getting two hours most weeknights and more on weekends, and a week like this wasn't possible a month ago.

Next week is art. The systems are in decent shape, so it's time to make them look like a game I'd buy.

The big change this week is that the stone-age starter tool is gone, and a hand-held mining laser took its place. It fills the same role, where you point at a resource node, hold E, and harvest, but the opening hour plays completely differently now, since there is no fuel to find, no charge meter to watch and no stamina bar to run down. You land with the laser and you keep it, and the beam draws as a thin red line from your hand to whatever node you're working on.

The swap came from watching playtesters. Anyone who had ever held a tool like that in another game walked in expecting the same old arc, where you begin in the stone age and slowly earn the cool stuff, and I want Cosmic Scale to read as cosmic from minute one. So the story now is that you landed on this world carrying a piece of advanced technology. The unglamorous half of that job was chasing the old tool out of the site, the codebase, and my bio, and updating every reference to match.

Steam took the rest of the week, and the game talks to it properly now. Your saves back up to Steam's cloud and come back down on whatever machine you sign into, your friends can see which biome you're in from their friends list, and the achievements I built back in Week 10, which until now only unlocked on your own computer, pop through Steam the way you'd expect. The build pipeline also spits out a finished, signed Windows build in one click.

Past that, the game picked up a splash screen, real credits, and a performance monitor that flags any frame taking longer than 16.6 milliseconds, which is the budget you have to stay inside to hold 60 frames per second. It's checklist work, and a real release is mostly made of it.

So the game has an endgame now. Tier 7, Stellar, adds six new items to the game: Plasma Conduit, Stellar Lens, Antimatter Cell, Singularity Core, Dyson Element, and Star Heart, and all of them feed into the Dyson Sphere, which you build as a five-stage project where each stage wraps a little more of the star and unlocks another 5,000 MW of power, split across every grid you've connected. (The power scale got rebuilt later on. Week 22 turned the ending into a real ten petawatts.) Under the hood it runs on the same power system I built back in Week 5, so the coal generator you place in your first hour and the Dyson swarm you finish at hour forty are running on the exact same code, which I'm pretty happy with, to be honest.

From there, the rest of the week went to the other end of the game, the first hour, which is where every factory game loses people. There's a real tutorial now that walks you through mining, smelting, conveyors, research, and power, with a floating instruction and an animated arrow pointing at the exact thing to click next. I set the steps up as data instead of code, so I can reword or reorder them without breaking anything.

Of course, the week's loose ends landed too: screen shake, celebration banners when you hit a milestone, hotkey rebinding, a setting for how often the game autosaves, and a short delay before hover tooltips pop up. Written out like that it isn't much to look at, but once the game is in your hands it turns out to be most of what polished actually means.

This week was mostly about making the game show you what it's doing. Machines used to just sit there whether they were working or not, and now an idle one drifts a little white smoke, a finished craft pops gold sparks, and a jammed machine glows orange, so you can spot a problem from across the factory without clicking on everything to check. Placing a building gives a quick green burst and demolishing gives an orange one, and each biome got its own ambient touch too, with pollen floating through the grassland, sand blowing across the desert, and mist sitting over the wetlands.

Under the hood it's all one shared setup, which mostly matters for future me, because when I add a new building I fill in one slot and its effects just work, with no new code each time.

The other half of the week went to menus. There's a real main menu now (New Game, Continue, Load, Settings, Quit), plus a pause screen, a tech tree view, an inventory grid with drag and drop, an achievements list, and a settings screen with video, audio, controls and accessibility tabs. Everything follows the same rules, where Escape closes whatever's on top, clicking outside a window dismisses it, and only one popup can be open at a time. Save slots show a little screenshot and a timestamp so you can tell them apart.

Menu work is nobody's idea of a fun week, and I won't pretend otherwise. But between the smoke and the settings screen, the project stopped needing me to squint at it, and you can open it now and it's a game, for now anyway.

The game has a day and night cycle now. A full in-game day takes about thirty minutes, which is about the length of a TV episode, and the lighting follows the clock, cold blue at dawn, warm at noon, orange at sunset, and then a moonlit night where the streetlamps and the little LEDs on your machines glow brighter as it gets dark.

Weather came along with it. Rain darkens the sky and leaves the ground looking wet where it lands, and fog cuts your view distance and drains the color out of everything. Storms are the one you'll actually plan around, since a storm can short out unprotected power lines for a few seconds. It's a small risk, but it's enough reason to put a roof over your generators.

The world also got its first creatures. Grass Hoppers wander the grasslands and leave you alone, Stone Beetles up in the mountains ignore you unless you provoke them, and Desert Scorpions hunt you. Each one wanders, notices you, chases, attacks, or backs off depending on its temperament, and spawns are capped per biome, so you'll never wade into a scorpion swarm.

Combat stays light on purpose, because this is a factory game at the end of the day, and I'd rather you spend your attention on the belts. But having something alive out there (a beetle wandering up to your assembler like it's curious, or critters scattering when you plop a smelter down next to them) makes the place feel inhabited. That part I'll take.

ARIA finally got her dialogue this week. She's the game's AI narrator (it stands for Autonomous Resource Integration Assistant), and she's been sitting in the engine, silent, since the very first phase. Now she reacts to what you actually do, whether that's your first mine, your first jammed machine, your first ten belts or your first overheated reactor. The lines are dry on purpose, things like "You've walked so far. Are your legs okay? Do you have legs?"

My honest worry with a narrator is that she wears out her welcome, so she has different lines for the first time something happens and different ones again for the repeats, and her tone shifts through six personality stages as your factory grows. Under the hood it's nothing fancy, just a table that matches game events to pools of lines and picks one. I don't know yet if that's enough to keep her charming without getting chatty.

Achievements went in alongside her, 25 of them, with some hidden until you earn them. One is just called "I Wasn't Going To Mention This One."

The other big chunk of the week was sound. Every biome has its own music that crossfades as you walk between them, and machines make different noises by type, so you can tell a smelter from an assembler with your eyes closed. The conveyor hum rises as the belts fill up, footsteps change with the ground under you, and underneath it all there's birdsong, wind, frogs at night, and ore creaking deep in the mountains. Volume splits four ways in the settings so you can mix it how you like.

For the first time, the game has something to say back when you do something.

Two things landed this week: the game has an actual ending now, and you can play it with friends on the same network.

The ending first. The Space Elevator is the new victory condition, so you deliver ten Space Components to its loading dock and you get an ending sequence. Space Components sit at the top of an eight-tier production tree that starts at basic ore, which means reaching them takes a factory that touches every system in the game, and each tier is gated behind a milestone delivery, so there's no skipping ahead and you have to actually build the whole thing. My first full playthrough took about eighteen hours, give or take, and when the ending finally rolled I didn't reach for the keyboard for a while.

The second piece is local co-op, up to four players over LAN, meaning everyone on the same home network. You host a game and it just shows up in your friend's Join list, so nobody has to type in an IP address. The host's computer runs the real factory and everyone else's actions get checked against it, which keeps all four games agreeing on what's where. And if you play solo, the multiplayer code never even loads, so single-player runs exactly like it did before, no slower.

Playing together over the internet can come later. For cousin sleepovers and weekend co-op, LAN is exactly the right fit.

Start a new game now and it lays out a world of its own, with grasslands, desert, wetlands and rocky mountains, and the mountains and water each get placed by their own pass so they end up where they ought to be.

Under the hood it's Perlin noise, which is a standard technique for taking pure random static, like an old TV with no signal, and smoothing it into something natural-looking. The generator builds a moisture map and a temperature map, and where those two land decides which biome you're standing in.

The world loads in small squares called chunks that stream in ahead of you and unload behind you, and every world comes from a seed, so the same seed gives you the same world every single time. That matters for co-op, where everyone has to generate the same map, and it matters for me, because reproducing a bug in a world I can't recreate is miserable.

The first time I hit play and watched a forest blend into grassland and grassland blend into desert, all from one seed with the mountain ranges in the right places, I just sat there for a minute. The world felt real, like it existed before I got there.

So it's four biomes for now. The full set, twelve of them with resources locked to specific biomes, comes in a later content phase, but the foundation under all of it seems solid now.

Place an auto-miner on a resource node now and it mines by itself, stashing what it digs up until a belt carries it away. Once that belt is connected, the factory runs without you while you go explore, and after weeks of busy-clicking this is the first time it has felt productive to me.

I also finally fixed the mountain and water colliders, which are the invisible walls that are supposed to stop you from walking into a mountain or a lake. Well, they weren't stopping anything. You could stroll straight through both, and it had been that way for an embarrassingly long time before I caught it... While I was in there, anything in the foreground that blocks your view of your character now fades out, so you can never lose yourself behind a tree.

The other half of the week went to the save system, which I wanted solid before the game got any bigger. The short version is that anything in the game that needs remembering registers itself with the save manager, and it all gets written out together. Items and buildings save under a permanent ID each, so I can rename and rework things for months and your old saves will still load.

Autosaves are written the careful way too, to a temporary file first, and only swapped in once it's fully on disk, so if the game crashes mid-save your last good save stays untouched.

It's not glamorous work, but skipping the save system early is the number one way I've watched indie projects die.

You can research now. There's a real tech tree in the game, where each node costs items, needs the ones before it, and unlocks new buildings and recipes when you finish it. It starts small, but it's set up to grow into all eight tiers as the rest of the content lands, and since adding a node on my end is just dropping a file into a folder, growing it should be the easy part.

The building placer got a quality of life pass too. You can click and drag to lay down a whole row of belts, walls or pipes in one motion, and if you drag through a ninety degree turn, the row turns the corner right along with you. It sounds like a small thing until you place your first hundred belts.

What was left of the week went to UI basics. The HUD now shows your power, your build mode and which floor you're on, you can hover over anything and a tooltip gives you its real stats, small popup notifications tell you when something happens, and Escape finally closes whatever panel you have open. It's quiet work, but a HUD that tells you what's happening and panels that close when you tell them to are what everything later gets to stand on.

Two things went in this week: power, and building upward.

Power went in first. You drop a pole, hook up a generator, and everything the pole can reach gets electricity, and the game figures out the network on its own. Each grid balances what it makes against what it uses, and if you ask for more than you've got, the machines all slow down together, so you can watch the shortage happen and fix it while the factory is still running.

The part I like is that the same system should carry all the way to the endgame. The Dyson sphere I'm planning will feed a power bonus into every connected grid with no special handling, because the setup that runs a coal generator at hour one is the same one that runs a Dyson swarm at hour forty. We'll see if that actually holds up, but it's a good sign.

Then came vertical building, which is the feature I've wanted since day one. Foundations let you build a level up, lifts carry items between floors, and holes in the floor drop them back down, and when you're working on a lower floor the upper ones fade out so you can see what you're doing.

It changes the feel of the game more than I expected. From the isometric camera a factory on two floors starts to look like a real structure, and the first one I built that way didn't look like anything I'd seen in the genre. Honestly, that was the first time I felt like my game had something of its own to stand on next to Factorio. Ask me again in a month.

You can build the first machine now, the Crafting Bench. Every recipe is a small data file that says what goes in, what comes out, how long it takes, and which machine can run it, so the bench finds the recipes it knows and lists them in a panel for you. You can also tell what a machine is up to just by looking at it, whether it's idle, working, or backed up because nothing is taking the output away.

From there came conveyor belts. Items ride along tile by tile and sweep around the corners, and belts connect to machines the way you'd hope, where belts feed machines, machines feed belts, and when a machine's input is full the belt behind it just backs up and waits.

Belts also got little arrows flowing along them, so you can tell at a glance which way a line is running. It's a small thing, but it saves a lot of squinting.

By Saturday I could swing a tool at a tree, drop the wood into the bench, watch a recipe finish, and send the result away on a belt. It's not much of a factory yet, but that was the first time this felt like a game to me.

You can pick things up now, and the game knows exactly what you've got. Items, inventory and resource nodes all landed this week, and every item in the game now has a real definition: a name, an icon, a stack size and a category.

The inventory works the way you'd expect, with a grid of slots, drag and drop, shift-click to move a whole stack quickly, and tooltips when you hover over something. None of it is flashy, but it's the kind of stuff you notice right away when it's missing.

Resource nodes are in too. They sit out in the world, and you hold E next to one and it hands you items until it runs dry, then it respawns on a timer. That same E-key press is how you'll interact with anything usable in the world, so right now that means nodes, and later on it'll mean terminals and storage.

Building placement and demolition came right after. When you're placing a building you get a ghost preview (green when the spot is clear, red when something's in the way), and it keeps checking as you move around. Tearing a building down gives part of its cost back, and how much depends on the building, so you can undo a mistake without losing everything you put into it.

So with all of that in, the game has its first real loop, where you walk over to a node and mine something, walk back and place something with it, and then do it all over again. It's simple, but it's there, and everything from here builds on top of it, so hopefully it holds.

You can walk around now. This week was all about the player and the world, so I drew an eight-direction sprite sheet for the player (a set of walking frames for each direction you can face), wrote the movement system to go with it, and set the camera to follow you smoothly.

The honest time-sink was the isometric math. The world is a grid underneath, but everything gets drawn at that classic tilted angle, and the game is constantly converting between the two. The formulas themselves are simple, but every tutorial online uses a slightly different convention, so I fought coordinate spaces for a while before I just picked one, committed to it, and wrote the two conversion functions the whole game will use from here on. The moment those existed, the fighting stopped. Draw order now comes straight from a tile's position and height, so things in front actually draw in front even when the terrain isn't flat, and I set up per-floor visibility early, because building upward is coming eventually and I didn't want to retrofit it later.

From there I drew a handful of grass and dirt tiles and got them rendering as a real isometric grid. The tile shader was the slow part. That's the bit of code that decides how each tile gets drawn on screen, and I wanted distant terrain to bend slightly away from you, like you're standing on a small planet, which is something you don't really see in isometric games, where everything tends to stay flat. The curve is subtle, but it's there.

By Saturday afternoon there were grass tiles, dirt tiles, a horizon with a small bend in it, and a player walking around in the middle of it all. It's not a game yet, but for the first time it looks like the one I'm trying to make.

After years of this game only existing in notebooks, the first commit went in this week. It's an empty Unity project in a new folder on the drive, with a README that has nothing in it yet, but it's real now.

I've wanted to make a game for years, and it kept getting shelved because life was busy. Then a few weeks ago my wife and I had our first child, and I assumed the idea would slide even further back, and it turned out to be the opposite. Once the baby found a rhythm, I started staying up after our son went down, with the laptop on the kitchen table and headphones in, and those late hours have turned out to be the most focused building time I've ever had. Maybe it's knowing exactly how little free time I've got now. Either way, I'm not arguing with it.

So there's nothing to play yet. This week was all groundwork, the kind of stuff every later system is going to sit on. There's a messaging setup so the systems can talk to each other without being wired together directly, which means when you chop a tree, the inventory, the achievements and the sound effects each hear about it on their own. Then there's a simulation clock that ticks ten times a second no matter what your frame rate is doing, and that is what keeps the machines running identically for every player and keeps the save files accurate. A grid system went in for snapping and placement, items and buildings are defined in data files, so adding new content is mostly a matter of filling in a row, and there's one standard way for anything in the game to save and load.

None of it makes for a screenshot, but it's the stuff I'll be glad exists in six months, when I'm trying to get a Dyson sphere to survive a save in a multiplayer session and it just works.

The plan from here is a devlog every week, even when the honest answer to what I built is that I broke things and they're still broken. Here we go.