This is something of a milestone. Today I implemented “Crucible” mode, where you can just play and play until you die. You still gain XP and levels, so you’ll be able to grind if that’s all you want to do—you don’t have to slog through the scripted campaign.

The Crucible generates waves of enemies of increasing difficulty. The reason I’m excited about this is that it finally allowed me to just play the game nonstop and tweak the flow of things. I still have some holes in the rhythm, but more or less it’s starting to get more “zen.” Specifically, I spent some time refactoring the battle formulas to make them “pop” more.

The most exciting thing of all is that I was able to capture several minutes of gameplay where almost nothing major went wrong. This is actually a pretty huge milestone; 50,000+ lines of code all working in general agreement with each other. This means development will only get easier and progress faster!