BLACK BOX

TRANSMISSION LOG // ARKWRIGHT

BLACK BOX

Flight recorder from the last factory. Transmissions logged toward launch — 01 MAR 2027.

TRANSMITTING · 12 ENTRIES · EVACUATION MARCH 1, 2027

▸ LATEST TRANSMISSION3 MIN

The Manifest Goes Live

arkwright.acarr.org is up — countdown, story, a 3D Starship you can spin, and a counter that writes real names to a real table.

Pushed the coming-soon site live today: a cinematic hero, a live countdown to launch, a Starship you can spin in the browser, and a souls counter wired to a backend that actually remembers you signed up.

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  1. 3 MIN

    Raising the Ark, Plate by Plate

    Forty-one megabytes of starship, dragged down to half a meg — and the long fight to give it back its engines.

    Tripo gave me a Starship. gltf-transform gave me a Starship a phone could actually load. Neither of them gave me the engines — so I built the thirty-three myself, twice.

    • dev-log
    • 3d
    • optimization
    • narrative
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  2. 2 MIN

    Embers & Scanlines

    Grading a static landing page until it feels like the moment before the horde hits the wall.

    A landing page is just pixels until you grade it. Today I gave the site film grain, a vignette, scanlines, and a slow ash drift — the look of a world that's already ended but hasn't admitted it yet.

    • dev-log
    • web
    • art-direction
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  3. 3 MIN

    A Voice in the Static

    Giving the coming-soon site a sound — and the restraint to keep most of it silent.

    Built an ambient dread loop and a narrator track in ElevenLabs, then locked both behind a button so nothing speaks until you ask it to. Most of the day was cutting sound that didn't earn its place.

    • audio
    • dev-log
    • web
    • elevenlabs
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  4. 2 MIN

    Belts, Smelters, and the Endless Horde

    The factory you build to survive is the same noise that calls the dead to your door.

    Wired up the core loop today — miners to belts to smelters to guns. Every machine that keeps you alive also sings to the horde. That tension is the whole game.

    • dev-log
    • systems
    • factory
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  5. 2 MIN

    Walls Won't Hold Forever

    Tuning the horde until every clear feels stolen, not earned.

    Spent the day teaching the horde to count. Walls, turrets, and a power grid that can't feed all three — the whole point is that it never quite holds.

    • dev-log
    • systems
    • tower-defense
    • balance
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  6. 2 MIN

    The Overnight Foundry

    The machines build while I sleep. Every morning I wake up to a stack of branches and decide which ones live.

    I don't out-build the horde by working harder. I work in shifts that never end. The agents take the night; I take the merge button at dawn.

    • dev-log
    • systems
    • infra
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  7. 2 MIN

    People Popsicles

    The manifest isn't a number on a counter. It's the reason the walls exist.

    We call them people popsicles because the truth is unsayable before coffee. A factory game lives or dies on whether you can feel the cost of failure. Here's how I'm trying to make a spreadsheet hurt.

    • narrative
    • design
    • stakes
    • dev-log
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  8. 2 MIN

    Keeping the Lights On

    A foundry that never goes dark — and the small, stubborn process that makes sure of it.

    The agents do the work overnight. A supervisor keeps the agents alive. Reliability isn't a feature here — it's the survival mechanic.

    • dev-log
    • infra
    • systems
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  9. 2 MIN

    First Light on Io

    Concepting the destination — and learning that the safer waters glow.

    Spent the week trying to draw a place none of us will ever stand on. Io came back sulfur-yellow and wrong, and that turned out to be exactly right.

    • dev-log
    • narrative
    • trailer
    • concept-art
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  10. 3 MIN

    Wake Protocol

    The first vertical slice runs end to end: mine one thing, build one machine, survive one night. It finally plays like a game.

    For months it was a pitch with a heartbeat. Today the engineer woke, swung a pick, bolted down one machine, and held a single night. The loop closed.

    • dev-log
    • gameplay
    • godot
    • vertical-slice
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  11. 2 MIN

    Cold Start

    Why I'm building a factory game about the end of the world, and the date I nailed to the calendar.

    The genesis dispatch. Automation as the only kind of hope that scales, the horde as a clock you can't argue with, and an exact Starship as the one door out. Plus a release date I can't take back.

    • dev-log
    • narrative
    • genesis
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