Devlog
Dev-day count is from the first commit, late May 2025. It's aspirational furniture — I don't log every day, I log the days something moved. Oldest first; the crunch is at the bottom, where it belongs.
Day 361 · 2026-05-24
First scene running entirely off the almanac LIST. No booleans anywhere in tidepool_west. It reads the book, the book answers, the branch happens. The floor stopped tilting under me — I've had that stalled-project vertigo for months and today it just... wasn't there. Retired the Twine prototype for real; everything's Ink now. See The Almanac Mechanic.
Day 368 · 2026-05-31
Ink → Unity integration up (inkle's runtime plugin, reading almanac state into the UI layer). The book page actually turns on screen now. Théo dropped in his first riso-textured page background and the whole thing suddenly looked like a thing instead of a spreadsheet. Cried a normal amount.
Day 376 · 2026-06-08
Broke saves. Spent a day confused before I found it: I'd left tide_count as a VAR outside the almanac, and on reload it desynced from the recorded entries — the book said one thing, the flag said another. Ripped the VAR out; derived the count from the almanac instead. Pillar 3 collected rent again: if it isn't a knot in the book, it doesn't get to be state. Wrote that on the wall (the literal wall).
Day 384 · 2026-06-16
Scope cut, and it hurt: killed the dynamic weather sim. I had procedural fog and rain states keyed to a little pressure model and it was gorgeous and it was a trap — a climate model is not a vertical slice, it's a way to not ship one. Weather is now hand-authored per day. I get to build a game about the climate; I do not get to build the climate. Théo said "good" in the tone he uses when I've finally done the obvious thing.
Day 391 · 2026-06-23
Wrote Silas's leaving — the empty-mooring knot (see Villagers). Playtested it on Théo cold, no setup. He read the two lines, sat back, and went quiet for a long time, which is his entire emotional range and also the highest compliment this engine can currently receive. Good sign. Terrible sign. Both.
almanac review screen, second pass — the stack of tied knots you can flip back through. still fighting the page-turn foley and the kerning on the date-line
Day 398 · 2026-06-30
Almanac review UI second pass (above). You can now flip back through everything Wren has recorded this run — which, because the almanac is the save file, means you're literally scrubbing through your own save. Nice when the theme and the tech are the same object. Spent three hours on kerning I will redo in August.
Day 405 · 2026-07-07
One full tide cycle is playable. Spring → neap → spring, erosion tick tied to the springs. And it happened: a rock I catalogued on the first spring set was gone by the third — eroded out — and the almanac still held my note for it. The note outlived the rock. I knew that was the design. Watching it actually occur, in a build, on my own screen, I put my head down on the desk for a minute. That gap — the record surviving the thing — is the entire game and I'd never felt it until today.
Day 411 · 2026-07-13
Posted the devlog line I've been circling for weeks: the sea still rises. the player still tries. that gap is the whole game. Someone replied "isn't that a bit bleak" and I didn't have the characters to explain that it's the exact opposite — that the point isn't the rising, it's the trying, and the trying only means anything because it can't win. See The sea rises regardless and The Ending Problem. (Did not get into it in the replies. Growth.)
Day 412 · 2026-07-14
Two months to Feira do Jogo. Opened the Vertical Slice Checklist and it is considerably more red than green. Not panicking. (Panicking a little.) Day 3 of the slice is still an outline, the lighthouse interior's still greybox, and I owe Théo a portrait brief. But the core loop works — the book, the tide, the loss — and everything left is craft, not invention. I can feel September coming on like weather off the Dorn. List over dread. One knot at a time.