Dev Diaries: We’re keeping it 100% When Issues Start to Compound.

We’re keeping it 100% real with you guys today: this past week was a wild Game dev with a team of adults who have real adult lives means sometimes things hit a wall.

And when issues start to compound, it sometimes felt like Mark  had to turn into a human pretzel just to keep things moving. If you've ever built anything creative, you know that sinking feeling in your gut where you look at your work and just want to burn the whole thing to the ground. But after stepping back and taking a breather, we realized the core wasn't the problem. We just waited too long to integrate our work, and a mountain of compounding bugs was hiding the fun. Here is what actually got built, what we learned, and where the game sits today:

What’s New in the Build:

• Node-Based Level Generation (Shoutout Mark  ): Mark built out a brand new node system for generating rooms, making world layouts way smoother and more dynamic.

• Environment Set Dressing Pass (Shoutout Emmalie  ): We let Emmalie go crazy this week and she absolutely killed it. Rooms now have tons of detail and fun little storytelling secrets for the eagle-eyed player to discover.

• Hot Bar Crafting (Shoutout Marco ): We originally built crafting stations where you could combine weapons into wacky, Dead Rising-style combo weapons. But during playtests, stopping to find a bench completely killed the momentum. Marco moved crafting straight to the hot bar so you can combine weapons on the fly without stopping the action.

• UI/UX Polish (Shoutout John Dee ): John’s been refining the interface and HUD to make moment-to-moment play feel way cleaner.

• Better Item Spawning (Shoutout : Loot and resources are now properly populating all around the map.

• VO Integration @Will  hopped into the recording booth and provided a few voice lines for two of the characters waiting to give you upgrades and quests in the game's safe room hub. We'll show those off to you guys soon, don't you worry.

This is definitely how we feel after this weekend….