July was 666 commits, with at least one every single day of the month. Fitting number, because this was the month the dead started coming back to life. More on that later.
It was also the month PRIDE IS THE FALL stopped being a thing that only lived inside the editor. It got its own art, its own sound, and a cast of eight races that could walk. On Jul 2 I set the bar for all of it: “we wanna feel cool not just talka bout it in the viision lol.”
This is the map of the month.
Our own art, and a game that ran on its own
Jul 2 and 3 were about getting rid of borrowed stuff. I said “make all the required buildings and props now,” and 444 models went into the game in one day. A 215 MB pack of store-bought weapons got deleted. By the end of Jul 3 the whole continent was dressed in the game’s own art, 8.25 million pieces of it. All eight races got bodies you could shape, with 5 to 14 sliders each.
Then the world got a voice. On Jul 4 we scored the game area by area, and audio came in last with a 2, because the world was silent. By the end of the day it had 16 sound loops, a soundscape for each of 8 biomes, and 4 kinds of weather you could hear.
Jul 5 was the one that mattered. Version 0.13.11, the first standalone build. For the first time PRIDE ran as an actual game outside the editor, and I made a character in it. Then it fell over, and it kept falling over. By the small hours of Jul 6 I wrote: “we have to optimize this game, we cant even run it with almost 100 virtual gb this isnt gonna be sustainable.”
The short version: the game wanted about 88 GB of memory against an 80 GB limit, drew 3 frames in 4 minutes, and spent its first unpaused frame lost for 187 seconds because every timer in the world fired at once. Every tuft of grass and every pebble carried a full physics body, 8.25 million of them. And the character creator’s screen-filling blob turned out to be a camera that was never on screen, so ten test runs had been checking the wrong one.
Fonts had their own bad day. On Jul 3 the new ones showed up as empty boxes. “font is all fucked / just showing a’s in a box.” The engine wanted them packaged a specific way. Once they worked I decided they were too hard to read, so the text grew about 30%.
Built, but never switched on
On Jul 7 an audit found the biggest bug in the game, and it wasn’t one bug. Whole systems had been written, compiled, and never connected. A function nobody called. A signal nobody listened to. The depth was all there. It just wasn’t plugged in.
I said I wanted a living world, and I said it plainly: “this has to be a living world that breaths, each run should be unique to the player.” A world like that can’t have a dead wire anywhere in it.
So Jul 8 through 11 was one long wiring job, and Jul 8 alone was 68 commits, the busiest day of the month. Research started ticking for the first time, and the tech tree stopped sitting at 0%. Disasters began to kill instead of scratching buildings. Characters picked up lit torches, so a fire made you seen and the dark hid you. Lightning storms and the blood moon finally fired. Ambition became real, and a pawn with enough of it could seize the leadership of their faction.
One of those unplugged wires was a war that ran at under 1 frame per second: on day 2 of a test there were 320 sieges at once, and one alert went out 1.07 million times.
No special people, and a world that stood on its own
Jul 7 I made a call that shapes the whole game: “death shouldnt always happen right? like kenshi style dying.” Before that, anyone knocked down with an open wound bled until they died. After that, most wounds clotted on their own, while severed limbs and chest wounds still needed a real medic. The same day I decided kings should be able to be bad at fighting, so leaders came in types: the warrior-king, the diplomat, the merchant prince, the statesman.
On Jul 10 I wrote down the rule that’s the heart of PRIDE:
“there are no heros or named vs unnamed characters, all characters can become legendary, all can become heros, all can become villians, thats the purpose of this game, to be whoever you want, there are no special people, only some with higher skills and more influence at any particular time, understand?”
After that came the laws of how this world worked in July. Nobody got a starting boost, because the world was supposed to be lived-in from Day 1. Nothing teleported, so goods went into someone’s inventory and got carried. Nothing appeared from thin air either, and the whole economy got rebuilt around that on Jul 13. Every pawn had a calling that pulled on the work they chose.
On Jul 14 I was talking about treaties and I pushed it as far as it goes: “nothing and i mean NOTHING happens in the world by magic or teleport.” So a treaty was not a menu click. Somebody had to go and work it out.
A few days earlier I’d asked about fights too, because the end game is supposed to be a spectacle: “that scale, and eventually thousands of pawn battles, is what the end game is about and supposed to be amazing cool shit that the user might accidently walk into!” It’s why every rule above has to hold when thousands of people are on screen.
The lore day
Jul 14 was all lore. The world’s population was supposed to stay the same: when people died, new ones would arrive. So the plan was that drifters wake up in cocoons on beaches. For new life I pitched something stranger, that two pawns could bond and summon a new soul at a Summoning Shrine, paid for in resources and capped at the world limit. In July it was a design on paper, not something in the game.
That led to two more rulings in July: no gender as a social category, because souls are summoned, not born, and no sea talk, because there were no boats. The tone shifted too. I didn’t want to lean on blood. It was a more refined elegance, closer to Cowboy Bebop than Mad Max, with dark depth and beauty.
In July the Borgnoral stopped being a hive mind and became a deep communion with a flaw of their own: a people so sure of their shared answer that they exiled whoever saw the mistake. And the endgame got a name, the Ark of Thirteen. In the July design, New Game Plus sent thirteen survivors out into a fresh world.
The cast
The middle of the month was all about the eight races, and it was slow, careful work.
On Jul 17 we tagged version 0.14.0, The Living Cast Alpha: all eight races rebuilt, rigged, and approved. Earlier that same evening, before the tag, the cast got worse while every check said PASS, and I said the only thing that made sense: “we have to slow down.”
The next day the Simthyn, the ape-like one, went through rebuild after rebuild, each one worse than the one before. I called a stop and asked for the Simthyn from before the rebuilds.
The races needed motion, and I wanted each one to move like itself. A Simthyn did not walk like a Psilobin, and a Brakkoth was not supposed to stretch backward the way the first versions did. Each race got its own walk, then its own idle stance, then a chain of four fight moves. On Jul 23, just after midnight, I saw the walk lineup and said it was perfect.
“this is perfect, lock this in … these are final race files until i say otherwise.”
That held until October, when the race bodies started being remade.
The Borgnoral had fought me the hardest. Their story started with the lore, which called them insects while the model looked like a boar. Then the face would not wrap: the skin stretched onto the chin and chest, and the tusks and teeth never took the paint. After two days of fixes I said “this isnt working at all, maybe you need to start over with the borgnoral like we did for the simthyn.” So we did, from a new concept, and the eyes that floated off the head in the idle stoop got pinned back to it.
The rest of the month dressed them up. Jul 24 brought the first real weapon art, then seven more weapon lines the same day. I liked it, and I was honest that with the ink-wash look still to come, everything read as extremely generic. Jul 27 the screen got cleaned up, so the default view was quiet and you opened the menus you wanted.
Then came the day the cast looked wrong in the game. Seven of the eight races were rendering at about 1.8 centimeters tall, a meters-versus-centimeters mistake. The skins had come out gray. A day later the Simthyn was still not right, and I typed: “im so crushed this isnt working.”
On Jul 28 the graphic-novel look finally locked in. After a whole day of misses on the Simthyn, I got to write “this looked great!”
The last week of rules
Once the cast was locked, the races needed to be different in more than looks. Jul 28 and 29 were rulings, one race at a time. As of July: only the Keltrumavem could glide off a one-way drop, which made them a rare race that moved differently from everyone else. The Dracotora never lost a skill to complacency. The Brakkoth lived long. A Psilobin died for good, but what it knew stayed in the world’s memory. I also decided that anyone who reached a high enough total level lived longer, which was how a legend got time to become one. They still died.
The Borgnoral got their first colony, the Verdigris Communion, a council that met at a cave mouth and was not a pacifist one. And Jul 30 was food and water. Scarcity followed the geography, so a starving faction raided its neighbors for food instead of being scripted into a war. I was strict about that part: “remember, we dont want to code anything forced into the game, the ayout of the world should spark emergent gameplay from the frist moments.”
That’s the test for everything in this chapter: if a thing only happens because a script says so, it doesn’t belong.
The dead came back
This one’s right there in the title of the month. It starts with a 25-day test where the world went from 7,834 people to 1,504, because wars started faster than they ended and nobody new arrived. That’s what led to the drifters.
Then the dead stood up. When someone died in battle, the game marked them dead in one place and alive in another, and every tick the live copy won. Fixed Jul 20. After that, permadeath meant permadeath.
The death numbers held one more surprise. The biggest killer in the whole world was “bled out while fleeing,” at 1,208, more than every combat kill put together. After the fix the wounded who broke and ran could be taken prisoner instead, and that number dropped to 765.
The first beasts
The month ended with the start of the bestiary. A first stag came back looking like a stag from any game, and I said so: “stag looks like such a basic animal.” I wanted our own creatures, not anyone else’s. When one early creature came back looking like something from another game, I shut it down: “we cant use animals from kenshi know what i mean, we have to be original and creative.”
The hound taught us a small, stubborn lesson about pictures. Its concept art kept coming back with a patch of ground connecting all four feet, which is the whole reason we ask for a white background with no shadow. Once I spotted it, the fix was simple: “its becasue in your sample image you put a shadow under the hound, if you remove that it wont render.” White background, no shadow, every time after that.
When broken concepts got shown to me without a check, I said that too: “you’re not checking your work.” Once a real check existed, 20 of 38 concepts failed it. That’s the next chapter.
What else broke
A few quiet disasters hid inside July, each of them small and each one mean.
- Pawns fell from the sky. Anything below a certain height counted as underwater, and the valleys and coasts were lower than that.
- Workers were buried alive. People walking to work spawned at the town’s old height, way under the ground, and spun there forever.
- The world starved. One number never got filled in, so every farm and workshop produced zero.
- Loyalty sat frozen at exactly 50.0 for weeks. A copy step undid every emotional change for about 95% of the population.
- The gray cast. Each preview got captured 3 seconds after opening, before the materials had loaded, so every test was measuring the engine’s gray placeholder.
What I learned
Slow down on art. One model, one step, and compare it to the version I approved. Numbers can say PASS while the thing gets uglier.
The usual bug is a missing wire. Most of what was broken in July had already been built. It just wasn’t connected.
Play it like a player. On Jul 20 I wrote “we need to be evaluating not just food but all game systems as a player.” A spreadsheet can’t tell you if something feels right.
The real build hides nothing. The editor covered up problems that only showed once the game ran on its own.
Be original. No borrowing other games’ creatures. Ever.
Next up
August: the world gets teeth. Beasts, battles, and a real food web.
July in numbers: 666 commits · 31 of 31 days with a commit · busiest day Jul 8 (68) · v0.13.11 the first standalone build · v0.14.0 The Living Cast Alpha.
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Season 0, chapter 4 of 7. The images are real captures from the build, and the two charts are drawn from the record.
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