The alpha night that almost made me quit

First: it didn't open

Black screen. The login fields wouldn't accept typing. I clicked, waited, reloaded, waited again.

The cause was small and specific in an almost comic way: a single interface image was taking too long to arrive, and the game waited for it before drawing any screen at all. Until it landed there was no login, no button, nothing. One icon file was keeping the entire game from existing.

Then it opened — and nothing moved

The character stood still. My creature stood still. The wild creatures spawned in front of me and stood still too. Nothing walked, nothing attacked, nothing collided with anything. I walked through a fence. I walked through a boulder.

Combat was happening — the server resolved it correctly, the numbers went up, I gained experience — but you couldn't see it. It was a spreadsheet running behind a pretty backdrop.

I wrote to the team, in these words: "this isn't a game".

The menus looked like a website. An ugly one.

Every screen had fields stretched to full width, text at the same size everywhere, three scrollbars competing inside one window. A dropdown holding the number "50" was six hundred pixels wide.

It wasn't ugly by accident. It was ugly because it had been built as a form, not as a game interface. Each screen solved "the server needs these fields" instead of "the player needs this decision". I was browsing, not playing.

The items were drawings on a sheet of paper

I opened the bag and saw illustrations. Pretty, well made, consistent with the art direction — and completely without volume. A flask drawn on a page, not a flask.

It took me a while to understand why, and the answer is a good one: the game's fiction is an Order that catalogues creatures. Field notebook, archivist, registry. Someone took that literally and drew the items as scientific plates — and a scientific plate is flat, on white paper, without a shadow. The theme had beaten the object.

The screens talked to me as if I were the programmer

This one stung the most, because it took me the longest to see.

The healing screen said healing was free "per paragraph 38". The shop explained that "the market is where price emerges", with the document reference in brackets. The creature sheet informed me that "the server validates vigour and inputs". The notebook showed a rate of 0.02487% and the words NOT CALIBRATED, without explaining what any of it meant.

Every one of those sentences is true. And every one was written for whoever built the system, not for whoever sits down to play.

And the things that only show up by playing

A short list from a single session:

• Every fragment that dropped belonged to the same elemental class. The other twelve simply did not exist in the world — and the reason was one value not passed between two functions.
• I couldn't find how to sell a creature. The feature existed, but it lived on one screen; and the screen that actually said "Sell" only listed something else. The interface was teaching me the opposite of the truth.
• A "Complete" button showed up green and enabled on a quest that could not be completed. Clicking it returned an error.
• Delivered quests kept their "Go to objective" button — which opened a screen and abandoned me there, without saying what to do.
• The cave and the future regions were clickable, and answered "no permission". The same sentence for three different situations.
• Each creature took eight seconds to fall. With a frozen screen, eight seconds is an eternity.

The diagnosis, which only came later

I spent a good while thinking this was a list of oversights. It wasn't. There was a single cause, and it's interesting enough to be worth telling.

We implemented the fiction as a form instead of as an atmosphere. The game is about an Order that studies and catalogues — and we made the player fill in the Order's paperwork instead of being the hunter the Order equipped. The field notebook became an actual statistical report. The item became a herbarium plate. The screens explained methodology.

None of that is the concept's fault. The concept is right, and it stays. The mistake was treating the theme as shape rather than as climate.

What we did about it

Nearly everything you look at has been remade, or is being remade.

Various assets went back to the drawing board — items stop being illustrations and become objects, with weight and shadow, things you pick up. The menus were redesigned from scratch, denser and smaller, with one main decision per screen instead of ten scattered around. Whole systems changed behaviour. The tutorial was rewritten end to end and became a continuous sequence that opens each screen while it explains, instead of prompts appearing at random.

And the combat rhythm was fully recalibrated — not just the number that bothered me, but the entire economic chain that depended on it, because moving one point and not the others would have produced a game that feels better and is worse.

Why I'm telling you this

Because the alternative is a trailer.

I could have waited three weeks, recorded thirty seconds of the parts that work and posted it over good music. It would probably have worked better in the short run.

But I'd rather that whoever arrives here knows how this game is made. It's made by someone who opened the first playable build, saw everything broken, wrote "this isn't a game" — and the next day sent it back to be remade, instead of letting it slide.

I'm not building this to ship fast. I'm building it to be good. One bad night is the price, and it's cheap.

The alpha is still closed, and there's plenty left to fix. When it opens, you'll find a game that has already been looked at that harshly — several times.