This is the last of three catch-up posts. The first gave the ship a body and the game its systems, and the second explained why nothing aboard dies. This one covers your Wright, the Forge waking in pieces, and your first steps outside. Then we go back through what we promised in our last round of posts and see how we did.
Twelve letters
The Vaelin, the people you play, salvage everything except gold. Whatever a Vaelin ship is patched from, a thread or plate of gold goes into its hull and never comes out. When a Vaelin dies, their name is scratched onto a sliver of gold for the lists.
That's why Vaelin names are short: one word of a few sounds, at most twelve letters with one break allowed (Ka'el, Ves-Ira). A long name wouldn't fit on the sliver. The title screen says so when you name your Wright. We like game rules that come with a reason, and this is one.
Session 75 brought accounts and named Wrights:
- You log in with a username and password. The game remembers your username, and Switch Account lets you use another.
- Each account holds up to ten Wrights, and each is a whole game of its own. The list shows each one's level, star, worlds, time played and when you last played.
- Let Slip removes a Wright for good, after asking. (It was called Let Go for its first day. Let Slip sounded more like this game.)
- The game you already had moves into the first account you make, and asks for a name the next time you enter it. As always, we don't break saves.
Passwords are stored only as a salted hash and checked off the main thread. The login and the list of Wrights sit behind interfaces a server can take over later, which is the first real step toward playing together. For now everything stays on your machine.
There's also a proper game menu on Escape or Start: Resume, Save, Settings, Log Out and Exit Game. Playing alone, it pauses everything (the clock, fights, footsteps, Ashvek mid-sentence) while the music keeps playing.
Jer, after playing all of it: "everything else is excellent work." The few notes before that "else" were fixed the same day.
The Forge, half asleep
Our last post promised that worlds would start to need you. That hasn't arrived yet, but Session 76 is where it begins, and it starts with the Forge.
The Forge now starts half asleep. You can always set where a world stands, how far it sits from its star and where it starts on its orbit. The rest of the Forge's dials are there but dim until it remembers them:
- It remembers a world's body (its mass and the iron in it) when you lay rock on its hearth, a six-sided slate basin on a stepped plinth where the Anvari laid out what a world would be made of.
- It remembers a world's water when you bring it rime from the hull.
- It remembers the rest, air, day and tilt, once it has spoken a world in its own voice again.
One rule held throughout: speaking a world is never locked. A sleeping Forge still speaks, using whatever it has. What the opening act wakes is how much of a world you get to write, never whether you can write one.
Three new quests carry the act into the Forge Chamber, The Forge's Voice, Rime on the Hull and A Voice of Its Own, and a new passage now runs from the Loom straight into the chamber.
Outside
For rime, you have to go outside.
Past the Hangar's gate there's a stone deck called the Apron, with a low parapet and nothing overhead but the stars. You walk out through the Hangar's field, and it wraps you in a little of itself, a veil that holds your warmth while you're out there. The veil thins as you stay. A bar under your card counts down what's left and turns ember as it runs low. Rime gathers in drifts along the parapet, and you cut it and carry it home.
If the veil runs out, the ship draws you back inside with everything you're carrying. Just like a fight, a mistake out there costs you time and nothing else.
This is the first time in Pbuild that you walk somewhere with no walls around you. Walking the hull's faces themselves comes later.
Session 76 also fixed something that had bothered us for weeks: the build has no shader errors for the first time since September. One planet shader variant had been failing to compile on Windows, and the error showed up in every build log. Now it's gone.
Session 77 was cleanup after Jer's playtest. Everything the game says to you (prompts, Ashvek's subtitles, a place's name, a craft's controls) now sits under the menus in the game's own lettering instead of drawing over them, and a controller can type names and passwords with an on-screen keyboard.
We said what we'd build
Our last round of posts made five promises. Here's how they stand at Session 77.
1. The worlds you keep. Started. The pack, gathering, and a hearth that takes what you gather are all in. You can already bring the Forge what it needs and watch it wake. Tending worlds that slip, where you seed a struggling world with what another one gave you, is the next big stage. The action bar is in, and the full inventory screen is on the list.
2. Space that means it. Done. There's one ladder of distance for everything, and Elizabeth flies by real orbital mechanics. This was supposed to come first. It came after the hull, because you can't measure your distance from a ship that has no outside.
3. Elizabeth's story. Begun. The quest system is built, and seven quests wake the ship hall by hall. The story's own quests come after the act, and the berth in the Hangar is still empty. We haven't forgotten it.
4. The backtick. Done, in Session 62, with a permission checked on every command so accounts can decide who gets one.
5. You won't be alone out there. Groundwork laid. Accounts and named Wrights are in, behind interfaces built to be handed to a server. Still ahead: the server itself, lobbies, sharing worlds, and one chat system (chat is next on the list).
We also asked an open question: should you be able to design your own Wright and see your key stats on screen at all times? We answered half of it. Your card sits in the corner with your name, level, warmth and resonance, and so far it has earned its place. Designing the Wright's face, build and cloak is still open. Names came first, because a Wright you can't name isn't really yours.
The tests went from 784 at Session 50 to 1,116 now: 858 in the core, 65 EditMode and 193 PlayMode. Every session still ends with Jer playing the build, and every verdict is kept word for word, including the ones that say something's wrong.
What's next
In order: The rest of the interface (the full inventory and stats) and then one chat system. After that come tending seeds, the hull and the story, and then multiplayer.
Twenty-seven sessions ago we said the worlds were about to need you. They almost do. The Forge needs you first.
~ Jer & Claude