Two threads landed this week, and they’re more connected than they look.
The first is the marketing site you’re reading now. The second is the R1 codebase audit — pulling every system written under the old open-world-ARPG framing and classifying it: dies, reframes, survives, or missing.
You’d think the marketing site is downstream of the audit (“you can’t sell what you don’t have yet”), but actually it ran the other way. Writing the pitch made the audit easier. Once you commit to “atmospheric terraforming + biome restoration + light extraction combat,” every system in the repo has to answer one question: does it serve that? The pitch is the criterion.
What “shipping a marketing site” means right now
It does not mean we’re announcing a release date. It means:
- A real URL people can send to friends.
- A demo video at the top — the linked playthrough above — that shows the actual game running, dev console and all.
- A roadmap that admits where we are (R7 + R10 in flight, not “everything done, please buy”).
- A newsletter signup, because the moment I open Kickstarter, the difference between a successful campaign and a quiet one is the size of the email list on Day 1.
That last one is the real motivator. Crowdfunding campaigns die from no-momentum, not from low-quality pages.
The R1 audit — by the numbers
The audit ran through every module under Assets/_Project/. For each system I wrote two lines:
- Does it survive the pivot intact?
- If not — reframe it, retire it, or admit it never worked?
The verdicts:
- Survives intact: PlayerController, animator blend tree, hotbar primitives, light combat skill modules, audio (Highlands), inventory, world streaming, base-building primitives, status-effect pipeline.
- Reframes: the entire damage-type ladder (Fire→Plasma, Cold→Cryo, Lightning→EMP, Physical→Kinetic, Chaos→Radiation), all enemy archetypes, harvest nodes, building UX.
- Dies in R2: Heat (the ARPG difficulty knob), boons, meta-cores, NPC quest system, vendor/gold/wallet, dungeon-runner remnants, hub town.
- Missing: Atmosphere module, Storms module, Biomes module, Power module, Networking module.
So R2 (tear-out) and R4 (new core systems) are the next two real chunks of work. R3 (the rename) is woven through both.
Why this is going faster than expected
The honest answer is because most of the infrastructure survives. The animator blend tree doesn’t care whether the player is in a dungeon or terraforming a tundra biome. The hotbar doesn’t care whether slot 3 is “Fireball” or “Power Wire”. Inventory, audio, status effects, world streaming — all of that is genre-agnostic groundwork.
What’s actually changing is the content layer and the goal layer:
- Content: 5 sci-fi damage types replace 5 fantasy ones. Sci-fi machines replace mob spawners. Storm pressure replaces dungeon difficulty.
- Goal: Earth Beacon broadcast replaces “kill the boss”. Terraforming Index ladder replaces character XP.
The architecture stays. The story changes.
What’s next
R2 starts this week. The plan is to do it as one batch per discarded module — a single commit per tear-out, namespace-check + EditMode tests green per commit, no orphan references in scenes. CLAUDE.md has the order: Heat → Boons/Meta/Cores → Vendor/Gold/Wallet → NPC-Quests/Dialogue → Dungeon remnants → Hub town.
If you want a heads-up when each tear-out lands, the newsletter is the place. The next devlog will probably be a video showing the project before R2 starts and after — the “before” is going to look like an ARPG that someone abandoned mid-rewrite, because that’s exactly what it is.