⬠ Built in the open
Cradleward is an idle space-trading game, and it is being built in public. This page is what changed, when, and why — including the things that were built and then taken straight back out, which are usually the more interesting entries.
It is kept by hand from the project's design journal. The housekeeping commits are not here; a change earns a line when a player would notice it.
Today Cradleward is a single-player alpha that runs entirely in a browser tab and saves to that browser. Nothing is public to play yet.
The claim that an explorer earns their keep by enabling the rest of the fleet was finally measured, and it collapsed. A free, perfect, galaxy-wide map is worth eleven percent to a trader; solving their routing alone is worth exactly zero — a trader wants about three good boards, and finds them by itself in three flights. So the career has to pay from its own ledger, and the rest of the day was spent making it.
Every find of a tier used to pay the same figure, so "pick which site" had nothing to pick on. Finds are poor, standard or rich now — a closed set, priced on the callout before you commit, with a real downside: a quarter of finds pay less. There is still no roll to buy.
The design said thread chains would emerge on their own. Measured: the longest chain anywhere in the galaxy was two hops, and the second hop paid worse than the first. A trail now escalates hop over hop and always ends; Astrometrics is the trail skill, and training it roughly doubles what a trail is worth.
A find paid the same in the safest space and the deepest while the death odds ran fifteen to one apart, so the deep was a losing bet at every tier — the fiction exactly inverted. Space itself carries a price now, rising with the band. The first measurement said the change was enormous, and the measurement was fiction: the test bot had flown to the Cradle and farmed it.
We aren't balancing this around the Cradle. The Cradle has no content.— the designer
With the balance target named, exploration's base pay was raised until the career reached parity with trade where the game actually happens — 0.98 of a trader's hour, at zero deaths. And the measuring exposed that the fringe currently sells a risk premium the simulation never charges. Recorded, not silently fixed.
Insurance used to cover exactly one kind of mission, and none of the deaths players actually die. There is an insurance office at the home station now: cover any berthed hull for a term, and the payout arrives through the one funnel every death in the game passes through — with a deductible, because death should still sting.
Lethality right now is unavoidable, so we need a way to insure hulls so death is not so punishing.— the designer
The simulation already churns — lanes move, sites lapse, a killed clan's lair burns — and every bit of it moves invisibly, so the world reads as a statistical field rather than a place. The living galaxy was pulled forward on the roadmap: bodies first, then voices, then heat, then the antagonist, each layer built only if the one before leaves the feeling unmet.
I'm ready for the universe to feel alive — something the player wants to be a part of.— the designer
All three slices of the first layer, in one day. A reported clan's nest is drawn where the bounty board stakes it. The scanner ring becomes a danger sense — hostile contacts light up while a ship of yours is close enough to ping them, and vanish when you look away. And the lanes carry ambient traffic: convoys where the volume really flows, patrols making the core's safety visible, none of it rolling any new odds against you.
"Fly through the core at your own risk" read in play as no gate at all — a day-one hull could point itself at the Cradle and go. The centre is shut now, behind hidden gate mouths: an explorer picks up a signal, surveys it, and the reward is a door that was otherwise not visible. Leaving is never blocked, so being trapped inside is structurally impossible. Old saves migrate — their maps forget the Deep, and any fleet parked inside comes home.
Surveys used to pay only when the data was hauled back to a port. Measured over a rested hour, that return leg was a tax levied on exploration alone — and specifically on short sittings, which is how the game says it expects to be played. A survey pays on the spot now, and whatever was riding in old saves pays out on load. It was also the career's only jeopardy, and that question is now open on purpose.
Every item in the game has a volume now, and a hold is a manifest: several stacks sharing one room, each claiming its share. Mixed cargo is real — a drill tops up the space that is left, a circuit stop sells everything it consumes. Enabling it surfaced a drill that transmuted cargo and a mixed hold pirates could not see, neither of which would ever have reported itself.
Logistics granted a percentage of hold per rank, and a percentage cannot move a small integer: on the starter hulls, five hull-and-cargo pairs gained nothing at any rank. It is a flat room per rank now, worth proportionally most exactly where space is scarce. The lesson is filed: check every new bonus against the smallest hull and the bulkiest good, never the average case.
Modules were the last noun in the game with no drawing — two ASCII initials, four of the twelve colliding. They have marks now, drawn from the stat they move; the rack became a rig strip; the twelve bespoke catalog cards became ranked picker rows, free first.
The whole hull and module UX feels horribly out of place in our fancy new interface.— the designer
Found while comparing two modules: the description pane sized itself to the selection, so the rows being compared slid out from under a thumb that had not moved. Now a game-wide rule: any surface whose size depends on what is selected is reserved to its largest case, because selecting is comparing, and a comparison needs the ground to hold still.
Survey and re-survey were the last verbs still charging a tap to reveal their facts — a card that was a preview and one button. Both now state their costs on the callout itself, and their tiles are the go. There is no survey form left in the client.
A day of playtest reports against the new-player ladder. The first-trade rung pointed at a ranked board that is structurally empty for a fresh clone; a trail mark survived the tap that satisfied it, reading as "do it again"; a free hull was quoted at 8,000 credits in four places, with the button disabled over a price nobody was going to pay; and the first rung said "port", a word the map deliberately withholds. All of it reworked, with the shop verbs held visibly shut — never hidden — until the ladder is ready for them.
The question under every other page finally got asked out loud, and the answer turned out not to need inventing — only deciding. It was already scattered across the game's own name, the welcome's rumor, and the centre of the generated map. Two braided chases: operate deeper, with capability measured in geography rather than in a number; and find out what the vats actually made you. Power gets you there. Truth is why you go.
What's the point? What's the hook? What's the chase that keeps players coming back every day?— the designer
The endgame's first two slices. A gold mark now sits at the centre of the galaxy from the first minute you play, visible long before it is survivable. A six-rung board tracks how deep you have actually stood, and the last rung is the Cradle, witnessed.
The horizon mark's first day, and its first casualty: the designer flew straight at it, died in the deep bands, and the screen went dark. The warnings had all been there — loss odds on every commit, threat flags on the map, a tinted band — and had been flown past without registering. Danger had been stated and not felt. Two answers were written the same afternoon.
I thought it was a bug, but then I realized I died.— the designer
Death used to be a line in a log nobody was reading. Now it stops everything: one card, and the camera walks home to the vat by itself. The vat drains. Something that remembers being you opens its eyes. And a route that leaves survivable space now says so, in words, before you commit to it.
A thread arrived, correctly, in total silence — the payoff landed nowhere the player was looking. That produced a rule (every consequence of a player action lands where the player will see it without going looking) and, the same day, four things to satisfy it: a discovery marker for the feed, a single-headline strip at phone width, standing signals on the boards, and tone on the chronicle lines that matter.
Come back after a day away and the first thing on screen is what resolved while you were gone, worst first. A quiet span still boots quietly — the digest only speaks above routine.
Three separate rows on every flight commit had been telling the same story three different ways. They collapsed into one line that wears its own arithmetic.
Risk, loss risk, crossing — three different things trying to tell the same story.— the designer
The duration knob is retired. A drilling operation runs until the rock is done, and the rock decides when that is.
Regrowing fields are gone. A seam stays until it is stripped bare, then the slot sits empty for a while and fresh rock appears on a different hex — waiting to be overflown, because finds are earned and only losses are told. "Empty this seam" stopped being a fiction the refill undoes.
I'm not sure I'm sold on them being static that regenerate.— the designer
A playtest save explained the "re-survey is broken" report: the intel round was atomic, so breaking one off at stop four threw away the three boards already in hand. A tour now banks every stop it actually made, however it ends — and the button that ends one says what it costs.
A NOTE tile on the map: five topic chips, an optional line of text, and the context attached automatically — the day, the wallet, the hull, the hex. What rides along is stated on the card, because an alpha that promised no telemetry does not get to attach a state dump silently. Alpha scaffolding; it leaves with the alpha.
Exploration's worst unsolved problem was "where do I explore next," and three candidate answers were standing: sell intel, decay rumor with distance, score dark space for richness. All three were killed with one line, because all three shared a shape — they solved exploration by making it read like trade. Worse, scoring dark space tells you what is behind the door before you open it, and opening doors is the game.
What went in instead: a worked find sometimes yields a thread, a pointer at one specific live site somewhere else. The derelict's log names where the convoy was headed. Follow it. No new verb, no new panel — a thread is intel, plus a reason to fly.
That doesn't sound like fun.— the designer, on all three
Three skills that aim the trail, so a player who wants their threads to lead toward a fight can train for that instead of hoping.
The old loop had you sweep a system looking for your target. Gone — along with the span, the search roll, and the retainer. The contract names its target, because the fiction says it already should have.
No "sweep the system" or "find the target" — the person at the port has already done that job.— the designer
Surveying used to ask you how long to spend. The knob is gone, on the strength of one question nobody could answer.
You don't partially mine, or partially trade, or partially hunt. Why would you partially explore?— the designer
A clone with no ship can ride along in a shipmate's hull as a passenger. It costs nothing, and it dies with the hull.
Death no longer burns the library. What a clone bought survives it; what a clone learned is still on the clock.
The skill tree stopped being a tree. It is a map now — a hex lattice with named provinces, lit by career, with the training queue running along the bottom as a strip you can drag.
Clones used to roll aptitudes when they came out of the vat, and that reel was removed on purpose. Clones are still not interchangeable — but by what they were taught, never by what they rolled. A slot machine plus a credit card is gacha, and the seventh pillar says no.
Twenty-one phone screens were drawn from scratch, outside the game, purely to ask what the thing ought to look like. Then the game was bent to them: the page became the map, hulls became vector tokens, tiles went flat-top with rim light, and the entire galaxy moved into one continuous zoomable coordinate space instead of two views.
I'd rather fit the game into the mockups than degrade the mockups into the poorly built prototype.— the designer
The 128-pixel hull sprites built the previous week were replaced by vector marks that survive being 14 pixels tall. The six-direction turntable rig that rendered them was retired the same day.
A thorough survey resolves into a claim somebody else can work — an expiring vein, a lair with a name on it. Never new permanent geography. Exploration stopped being tap-a-blip-collect-credits and started being the career that supplies the other four.
It was the only loop in the game with a completion state — chart everything and you are done forever. Fixed with three pieces: sites that spawn, age and expire so the content renews; a resolve axis trading width against depth; and a survey doctrine that biases what you notice, never what is out there. The doctrine is free to change, survives death, and is not for sale.
A chain is the mastery form of a single run. Plot a loop, close it, and it runs laps unattended — but the laps are trained for, not bought. The first playtest said circuits felt too powerful, which is how they ended up behind a skill.
The fleet screen became a crew screen. The vats became somewhere you physically go, with a verb on the hex: DECANT. And the player names every clone that comes out of one — no name, no decant.
Buy a hull, and it sat in a shipyard you were not standing in, with no way to reach it. The shipyard sells a flight home now. The follow-up was worse: the grant that guarantees you are never shipless was checking whether you owned a hull instead of whether you could reach one, so an account could still lock itself solid. Both closed.
Career trees over one shared chart, with engrams — the higher tiers — bought outright with credits at academies rather than waited out. Ranks are keys, and there are no dead ranks: every one of them unlocks something or it does not exist.
The twenty-four yard hulls went into the game behind earned commercial standing, with request boards to earn it on. The four yards stopped being an art direction and became something you grind.
The old encounter ladder modelled a robbery: they catch you, they take the cargo, and on a bad enough day they take you. Now, if a hull can shoot back, it does — a three-stage exchange rather than a skim. An unarmed hull comes out of the new code bit-for-bit identical to the old. There is one exception, and it is the deep, where guns buy nothing at all.
Both halves of the phrase were wrong. A restored backup is self-evidently the same file — and whether the thing that wakes up is still you is the question the whole game is about. The word was answering it, in the wrong direction, before the player could feel it. It is an imprint now.
The last five of them became chips, boards and candidate rows. A dropdown is a list that hides itself and then asks you to aim at it.
The fleet works one field together. Drilling is a standing operation, collecting is a rendezvous, and the two came apart so a miner never has to stop working because its hold filled up.
Every place you had to choose a destination from a list, you now choose it from candidate rows that frame themselves on the chart. Pick something in another system and the map zooms out to show you where you just agreed to send someone.
A welcome screen, a briefing chain derived from what you have actually done rather than from a checklist of flags, a seven-rung milestone ladder, and a graduation to close the bracket.
Named for the dead megastructure at the centre of the galaxy: the forge where cloning was born, the source of the technology every clone in the game runs on, and the place the story is walking toward. Cradleward is a heading. It states the destination and the question at the same time.
This site went up the same afternoon, about four hours after the name did.
Four shipbuilding yards with four incompatible opinions about what a ship is for, and twenty-four hulls to argue it — six roles each, one palette each. Role is the silhouette; the yard is everything else.
Tilt, depth, a sky behind the fringe, and the fleet finally drawn doing its job instead of sitting still as squares.
Fields derived from the seed of the system that holds them, a fringe mineral worth crossing for, and duration as the exposure you are actually paying for.
Every credit that enters or leaves the account now passes through one choke point, with a test asserting the books balance. It caught things immediately.
Prices rot, because the world moves while you are not looking — convoys arbitrage, ports run a cycle. Old intel does not lie to you; it widens into a range and admits it. Narrowing that range is something you buy reach for, and it is one of the more satisfying things in the game to spend on.
The galaxy was regenerated from scratch: three nation cores on a contested ring, arms reaching outward from each, and a shared deep at the centre that will kill you. Everything valuable is priced by how far in it sits.
Risk stopped being something you learn afterwards. Every dispatch form leads with what it might cost you. Whether that actually works got answered on 1 August, and the answer was no.
The map used to be handed to you. Now it is flown. Every hex you know about, you or one of yours went and looked at.
A piloting mode with a charge meter went in, and came straight back out again the next morning. Flying anywhere already reveals what you pass — that was the entire feature, and it turned out not to need a mode, a meter, or a second way to move.
One design document, twenty-one versions deep, was split into a wiki with a hard line drawn through it: decided design on one side, proposals on the other, and nothing crosses without somebody deciding. Unglamorous, and everything since has been built on it.
Real-time training that runs whether or not you are watching, progress that banks properly, a hard cap on the clone bay — and an encounter ladder whose top rung takes the hull and the clone inside it.
The prototype's several screens were thrown out for a single one. The current goal is that directing the whole fleet is about ninety percent map interaction.
A design document, a deterministic simulation core, and a browser prototype you could actually sit down and play. The game had no name for another fifteen days.