Deep in the Trenches: The Road to the v0.1 Demo

For the last three weeks, we have been living in the trenches. If you have been wondering why things went quiet, it is because we have been pulling 14 to 16 hour days, back to back, grinding through the final push to get 72 Seconds into your hands.

The transition from building an engine to shipping a playable game is a different kind of hell. It is not just about writing code anymore. It is about fighting with cross platform compatibility, debugging build pipelines, and trying to keep my sanity while my brain switches between C++ memory management and CSS styling.

The Grunt Work

We spent a massive amount of time on the alien race, how they look, how they behave, and how they attack. We also worked on scaling the extraction mode so the enemies get harder as you progress. We added randomized unit spawning too, so you aren't just fighting the same shit over and over again.

We built the main menu background from scratch in Blender. We are not artists, just a few months of tinkering, but it has that "programmer trying to make art" kind of magic. We unified the UI, switched to our new orange and pinkish color scheme, and added a loading screen. It was not strictly necessary, but it looks cool, so it stays.

We tried to optimize the file size by compressing assets, but that was a mistake. It made the quality look like garbage, so we had to revert it.

The biggest hurdle was platform support. When we tried to build for Windows, our shaders died because they were written for OpenGL. We had to rip them out. We tried to rewrite the texture system to generate team colors on the fly, but that caused a massive spike in RAM usage on both Windows and Linux. It was unacceptable. We decided to just kill team colors for the demo release. There was no time to figure out a proper cross-platform solution with Direct3D, Metal, and Vulkan.

Then there was the Fog of War. We spent days building a snapshot system so the game remembers what buildings and resources looked like even after you leave an area. If a building gets destroyed while you aren't looking, it shows up as a ghost. It makes the game feel smart, but getting the performance right while tracking all that state was a headache.

We also spent a huge chunk of time on civilian AI. We finally fixed a bug where civilians were teleporting across the map because we were removing them from a list while the game was still trying to loop through it. Rookie mistake, but those are the ones that keep you up until 4 AM.

And lots and lots of more smalls adjustments we had to make to the game to make it feel good, you wouldn't believe how much it actually takes to finish and polish up a game.

Last but not least HUGE amount of PLAYTESTING and having lots of fun with it.

The Final Sprint

The last few days were pure, raw effort. We spent six hours straight trying to install Windows on a Corebooted Thinkpad just to test the build in a real environment. We fought with the HUD alignment, fixed the jagged selection rings, and balanced the alien factions so the early game actually feels like a survival challenge.

We also built the whole website from scratch in Go. We thought it would take a few hours, but tweaking the roadmap and the mobile layouts turned into a full-time job.

Why we are doing this

We know there will be bugs. The extraction mode is hard. The balance is definitely going to need your feedback. But that is the point. We are not backed by a publisher and we do not have a PR team. It is just us, our code, and you guys. We need to know if the simulation holds up when you push it to its limits.

The bunker doors are almost open. We are stress-testing the final systems now, so keep a close watch on these logs. The first build is coming your way soon.

Thank you for the support. Let's get to work.