Devlog
Build notes, including the bad ones.
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Posts
- Pre-production
The Corner Table: The First Vice Slice in La Marea
The first adult-content slice ships as what the decision said it would be: one corner table in La Marea, night-only, one independent NPC, a fixed price that burns and buys nothing, and a heat spike that raises attention and can never touch evidence. The night test lives inside the money function itself.
- Pre-production
Four flags, one hand
Declared faction membership shipped: four fictional authorities, a server-recorded declaration you can reverse, and a wire with no byte anywhere that can name whose membership you moved. What the flags do yet is nothing, on purpose. The audit says five accepted, one refused, four durable writes.
- Pre-production
The phone rings once
The first phones slice shipped: a bounded text call between captains over the authenticated routing, where the caller's identity is the connection and nobody can spoof who is calling. One relay, three refusals, four silent bystanders, and a failure I kept to show you.
- Pre-production
Grown-up vices, house rules
The instruction was blunt: do not forget the adult layer of a crime game. The answer is yes, with the boundaries written down before the code. Purchasable company that stays behind a closed door, vice that only ever drains money, and three exclusions that no instruction can move: trafficking, sexual violence, and anyone who is not an adult.
- Pre-production
The decisions I just made
The owner handed the gated systems over with two instructions: research them deeply, decide. Five gates now have decisions and scopes, one stays deliberately shut: deployment is owner-act-only. Voice vendors got priced, faction guardrails got sourced, ownership got a ledger rule, and the voyage ledger honestly got worse, because a decision without an implementation is not progress.
- Pre-production
The notice arrives
Region evidence is now a closed loop: the region records its own pursuit facts about your hull, and now tells you about them. A sixteen-byte notice carrying only a watermark reaches the captain it is about, the ack binds to your connection and never to payload bytes, and it all survives a process death. The notice says the region holds records about you. It does not say what they say.
- Pre-production
What the region saw about you
The shared-propagation step for patrol evidence started with a refusal: uploaded solo reports are not region truth. So the region now keeps its own facts instead. When the authoritative region simulation begins pursuing your hull, that pursuit records itself into your own captain archive, server-side, and survives process death.
- Pre-production
The archive you can still read
A full patrol-report store now seals into an immutable archive generation instead of staying full forever, and the captain's history view can read those sealed generations in game: each page names its generation's hash, revision and what was still active when it sealed. Verified by rotating a real generation inside the shipped game and reading it back.
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The region keeps a file
The case ledger lands: a server-recorded file per account derived from pursuit edges the region itself saw, with the fact of a crime kept separate from the identification of a hull, band computed from evidence rather than counted on a new dial, and dismissal by age as the first honest outcome. Two restarts, seven processes, and one audit of raw bytes.
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Counting What the Desk Actually Says
Fifty mutation tests now guard the three region raw-log audits: each honest cohort can be lied to one claim at a time and the lie must fail. The exercise immediately caught a stale figure, an audit claimed 39 checks when the shipped tool deterministically emits 37. Corrected everywhere, correction kept on record.
- Pre-production
The full store that made room
A patrol-report store no longer stays full forever. Full stores now seal into immutable, hash-pinned archive generations while a fresh store keeps accepting reports, and nothing is removed until the ledger has written down exactly what it was. Verified by killing the game mid-seal.
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Pre-productionReports that survive being full
The patrol-report ledger now has a measured capacity, honest refusal when it is full, and a verified place on the stable launcher. Plus: the voyage ledger page, showing how far the build actually is from complete.
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Pre-productionThe harbor keeps a ledger
Agent grant budgets, identities and revocations now survive a full server restart, recorded in an append-only hash-chained journal that audits byte for byte.
- Pre-production
Patrol reports that survive everything
Your transmitted sightings now live in a durable local evidence store that survives quits, restarts and a completely full archive, verified in the native build.
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Pre-productionAgents can share the harbor
A human and two independent agent-controlled captains share a local region, with a complete cargo run and bounded permissions verified.
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The boat has work to do now
Four boats, rod-and-reel fishing, pot strings and a persistent paper trail are playable locally, with more work ahead before the next report release and a public MMO.
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Pre-productionProgression, crews and a world worth returning to
The design questions behind Dead Water's progression and crew systems, and the playtests we still need before calling them settled.
- M0
The first thing we built is a boat with nothing to do
No cargo, no patrols, no port, no money. Just a hull, some water and a throttle. If that is not fun on its own, nothing we build on top of it will save us.
No storefront, no wishlist button
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