From the belt · development notes
Dispatches
What was built, what was measured, what changed. Dated.
Notes from the work, written when the work happened. Some are about the game, some about the world. None of them are marketing. If a dispatch says a thing failed, it failed.
- 2026-11-06 · ProjectA new name for the same warThe old name turned out to be taken, so the game is Salvage War now. What changed, what did not, and the two days it took to get the new address to answer.Read
- 2026-11-03 · ProjectWhy another classic RTS?The question the project started with: can an RTS handle better than the ones we play today? What that means, what is built so far, and what comes next.Read
- 2026-11-03 · DevelopmentEvery click answers in the same frameAn order waits a few ticks before it runs, because lockstep needs it. The click marker, the order line and the acknowledgement answer at once, so you never feel it. The small comforts around it.Read
- 2026-11-03 · DevelopmentThe same battle on every PCOnly the orders travel over the network; every PC fights the whole war. Why there is no floating point in the simulation, why replays come free, and how a hash every tick finds a desync.Read
- 2026-11-02 · DesignThe Fallen StructuresPieces of the Ring that landed whole and never stopped working. Six neutral structures on every map, claimed by whoever walks in and held by whoever keeps the door. What each one does, and why the Orbital Gun Battery takes three engineers.Read
- 2026-10-27 · DevelopmentThe AI levels, side by sideEvery behaviour rule from every level laid out and compared, after a Normal AI beat a Brutal one. It cannot be that Normal beats Brutal. It was. What changed.Read
- 2026-10-25 · DevelopmentThe impact as a volumeA fireball and a dust surge baked as volumes for the impact, and two days lost to a Blender bug before a single frame of smoke existed. The dust is right. The fireball is a dome, not a mushroom. Yet.Read
- 2026-10-23 · StoryHer night, in her wordsImani Wekesa opens the trailer from the yard at the foot of Lift Three, seventeen minutes past five. Why the story starts with her and not with the Ring.Read
- 2026-10-22 · DevelopmentDoes the impact change who wins? Not yet.Four hundred and eighty matches against the gate. At normal field amounts nobody even harvests the craters. With scarce fields the salvage tips matches, but only by distance, and nobody fights over one. What the AI has to learn before the gate passes.Read
- 2026-10-09 · ArtThe land remembers the FallScattered grass and rocks have no love in them. Every crater gets a scorched streak on the same side, so the whole map agrees about where the sky came from.Read
- 2026-10-04 · DesignTwo factions, one skeletonBoth sides fill the same role slots and answer them differently. Why that keeps a C&C player at home in either, and lets one AI play both.Read