1 June 2026 · Diary

Day 24: the end is built

Two weeks since the last devlog. The game has an ending now. All six missions playable end to end, plus an epilogue. Playable on phone or desktop.

The Mission 0 elevator screen. Black background, the number 42 in oxblood at the top, the dark cabin in the middle, a small subtitle that reads 'Hello.' — Mission 0. The elevator starts at 42. The first word the AI speaks to you is "Hello."

Mission 5 and Mission 6

Mission 5 is the part where the game says what it is actually arguing. It is a Pentagon weapons-AI facility. Real placards on the walls about Project Maven, data-center water draw, the human leaving the decision loop. The narrator does not boast about any of it. It explains. The game is not "AI is evil." The game is "AI is banal, fast, scalable, and quietly removes the human."

Mission 6 is the finale. One long corridor that de-renders around the player as the AI dissolves. There is a long held moment in the middle where the AI loses the thread, and then a warm grace speech, and then it dies on a slowing heartbeat. Then a short morning epilogue with the same voice on a kitchen radio. The whole arc is structurally there. The art and audio polish on the finale comes next.

Mission 3 of Pull the Plug, the pylon-climb zone. Dark purple skyline, a tall lattice pylon in the middle of the frame, transmission cables stretched across the top, glowing cyan capacitor accents along the platforms. — Mission 3, the pylon climb. The looming master pylon is the destination, visible from the first zone.

Mission 1 got most of its art replaced

It is the first mission a new player sees, and it had the most placeholder art still in it. Bespoke data-center screens, server walls with proper depth, a real finale where pulling the disconnect triggers a small collapse cascade. It reads as a place now instead of a tutorial.

Mission 4 stopped killing you for being rescued

Mission 4 is the orbit one with zero-G. A handful of long-standing bugs got fixed: the jump arc finally fits the gravity, the camera follows through the final zone, and a missing checkpoint was breaking a death loop. It is playable end to end now without dev shortcuts.

The first real playtest

My girlfriend sat down on the couch with a controller and played the first three missions. She had not seen any of it before. She had fun. That is the only test that mattered this fortnight.

A first-person view of the couch: hands on a PlayStation 5 controller connected to a MacBook by a teal cable. On the screen, Mission 2 of Pull the Plug — the dark cave with the SURFACE marker label at the top, the player on a platform near rising water. A children's book sits on the couch beside them. — The first playtest. Controller, couch, somebody who has not been staring at the code for three weeks.

What's next

A real end-to-end playtest of all six missions in one sitting, with a notebook in my lap. The polish queue for Mission 6 (bespoke crystal core, storm overlay, heartbeat audio) is the obvious next move. Then it is mostly tuning.