Devlog — 2026-10-16

The game has a lore, and floors are separate builds. A tower eats worlds. Each level is a dying world kept alive by its boss’s will, reached by a door off an endless spiral stair. Beat the boss and you either preserve its world or free it. Each floor ships as its own build and is handed over live. If the new build fails to start, the old one restarts, so the screen never goes black.
The first floor, the Last Green, stands on simulated geology. The simulation covers 1.2 million years over 16 km of plateau. Placing the rocks as culled instances took the summit’s frame from 154 ms to 19.9 ms. Seven fixes were tried for stripes on the cliffs seen from 1.5 km. None worked, all were reverted, and the cause is still unknown. Granite modeled as jointed columns read as stacked sponges, then as ruins.
Its forest grows back from what the elves left. When the plague came, the elves left 117 ha tilled and 865 old open-grown oaks and beeches. By year 800 the wood holds 33.6k trees over 15 m. The oldest oak is 1,200 years old and 34 m tall.
The fawn and the wolf share one senses layer. The wolf sees a moving player at 60 m and a still one at 21 m. A still player 15 m behind it goes unnoticed for 5 s. The player character’s blink dodges the wolf’s lunge 5 times out of 5 if timed at the end of its crouch. A player who stands still is bitten 5 times out of 5.
The player character became a shadow wraith in under a week. Its single garment of shadow cloth simulates in 9.7 ms a frame on the CPU. The pull request lists 12 attempts that were tried and backed off; gloss read as wet latex. The agent couldn’t judge how it played: its preview browser ran the floor at about 1 fps.
Programs are multiplayer now. std::net keeps a room’s log in order and applies each proposal exactly once, whatever is lost. Browsers join over WebTransport. An idle room costs 85 KiB resident and starts in about 16 µs. Each call’s journal records are flushed to disk before anything the call sends goes out.
A seeded fault model caught a double commit on its first run. The model ran 10,000 times in about 2 s, with thousands of crashes, dropped connections and refusals. If the answer to a peer’s first hello was lost, the peer asked again and got a second id. Its pending proposal was then committed once per id.
Designing the network found a hole in @deterministic. A generic replay function could reach the clock through a trait method and still compile. Every instance reachable from deterministic code is now checked after lowering.
Three rounds of council review hardened the rooms. Reading back a long journal could compact it early: after a second restart, 77,424 of 77,600 entries were left. Any connection could propose as any peer by naming its id. Each fix was reverted in turn to confirm its test fails.
std::pack packs values into as few bits as they allow. A whiteboard edit takes 22 bytes serialized and 3 packed.
The world has sound. The wind used to play one noise in both ears, with a left/right correlation of 1.00. It is now 0.30 in the open and 0.15 under trees. Piano physics improved the top two octaves by ear and made every other key worse, so it applies only from A5 up.
wrela.dev deploys from main. The site is a console with a library of games, including a new platformer, Leapling. Binaryen took the Last Green’s WASM from 12.47 MB to 6.59 MB, with no measurable change in frame time. Checking the optimized build found a bug: two builds from the same source computed different constants. The bug is still open.
The reference docs are a Wrela program, with no HTML or CSS for content. Search, find on the page, selection and screen-reader support are all written in Wrela. The export is 129 pages and 2,690 item records, and two exports are byte-identical. Building the site turned up two compiler bugs, both still open. One frees a temporary string inside assert before the comparison reads it.
A sweep of the whole codebase fixed 105 distinct defects. Suspected bugs that didn’t reproduce were discarded.