Wake Protocol
The first vertical slice boots: thaw, mine, build one machine, survive the first probe. The night it stopped being a pitch and started being a game.
For months this thing has been a deck. Concept art, a countdown, a Three.js Starship spinning on the landing page — a promise with a render attached. Tonight, for the first time, it was a loop you could actually lose.
The vertical slice is small on purpose. One room of the world. The engineer comes up out of cryo — frost-burn shader, the cryo lid hissing off, a HUD that boots in pieces because half the grid is dark. You get control. You walk to an ore node. You hold the button. You mine.
That was the first thing that mattered: the mining actually feeds something. The resource counter ticks, and the counter unlocks a single fabricator. In Godot it's nothing — a state machine, a progress bar, a signal that says enough. But watching the number cross the threshold and the build option go live, I felt the spine of the whole game click into place. Take from the cold ground, turn it into a machine.
So I built the machine. One auto-miner, placed on the node, chugging on its own. And the instant it powered up, the thing I've been writing into the design docs for a year finally bit me in the actual build: it pinged. The machine runs, the machine is loud to MONARCH's sensors, and the timer started counting toward a probe.
The probe is a single Skitter right now — recon, red optic, skittering in on a nav path I half-trust. No combat balance yet, no real AI, just enough that it walks toward your heat and you have to deal with it or die. I'd wired a crude turret to the same resource I'd just spent on the miner, so the choice was real: economy or defense, and not enough for both.
I lost the first three runs. Built the miner, got greedy, no turret, Skitter walked in and that was the slice. Lost on purpose, then lost by accident, which is the difference between a prototype and a game.
None of this is pretty. The miner is a grey box with a Tripo placeholder that doesn't fit. The Skitter is a capsule with a light bolted to its face. The audio is one ElevenLabs sting on the thaw and silence after. But the loop closed: thaw, mine, build, get found, survive — or don't.
That's the whole pitch in ninety seconds, and tonight it wasn't a pitch. It was a thing I played until it beat me, then played again. Everything from here is making that ninety seconds worth the next year.
// SLICE BOOTS. LOOP HOLDS. THE COLD GROUND PINGS BACK. — logged 04:12, factory still dark.