Song of Larithea

Speech bubbles no longer vanish when you tap forward past a revealed panel. If a panel is on screen, its bubble is on screen with it.

The stone-plateau (team-split) cutscene is wired to its final panel art, and the Ormron Gates cutscene picks up new slides in place of the old ones. A cutscene input bug that could skip text when you tapped during the small delay before a speech bubble appeared is fixed.

Dart is now on the same fight-field animation set as Maya, Nell, Tara, and Grey — all five main heroes share the same on-grid pipeline. The brief blink heroes used to show at the transition from planning to playout is gone. Portrait emotions and spell-card art now preload so nothing pops in mid-turn.

On slow web, item, spell, enemy, and hero card icons could show up blank, and dialogue portraits could reload between lines. Both are fixed. Higher-strength spell aspect art now preloads during the fight's setup, so cards don't pop in mid-turn.

Chapter 1's desert dialogues are rewritten to match the opening cinematic's audio-drama register. The sign-in modal is restructured into a clear New player and Returning player two-column layout. Scene reveals on the web are now all-or-nothing — a scene either paints fully or waits, no half-painted appearances.

Scene backgrounds that were coming up blank or green on the web now paint reliably. A battle-scene exit that sometimes never completed is fixed. The F&F welcome popup now checks connection quality when you land and warns you if it isn't stable enough to play well.

Tara and Grey now run on the same fight-field animations Maya and Nell already had — ready stance when selected, attack wind-up, hit flinch, KO slump, victory dance. The fight outcome popups pick up animated finishers: the hero who landed the killing blow dances on a win, and the last hero to fall slumps into a looping KO on a loss. Maya picks up a celebrate pose for parity.

The opening fight tutorial now notices when you stop and surfaces a centered hint with your next step. On the free-play turn it names the exact hero who still needs to move, pick a spell, or cast, instead of leaving you to figure out whose turn it is. The press-and-hold step trades a small on-card chip for a purple highlight, a pointing arrow, and a plain centered instruction.

Heroes can now carry and use consumable items in battle. The Bazar sells basic health, mana, and strength potions for the same basic materials you'd otherwise spend on crafting spells, so every drop is now a choice — stock up on items or save for new spells. Items occupy a hero's cast slot for the turn and are picked through a new Use card right of the spell strip, with a target picker, a playout zoom on user and target, and a 'used an item' avatar tag. Quest popups also preview the reward on offer before you accept.

Walking scenes no longer wait on hero animations to load before revealing — the animations stream in behind a still pose and swap in once they're ready. On a slow connection the library scene drops from around 50 seconds to about 6, and Ormron Street stops getting stuck mid-load. Elemental strain now always starts on a reach-based turn (8 / 7 / 6) instead of defaulting to turn 10 in fights without a passive enemy, and battle fatigue now starts 3 turns after strain instead of 5. The participating-heroes chain panel also stops disappearing on turns you win.

Max health now layers a per-range modifier on top of the school modifier — short and close ranges get +1, mid is 0, long gets -1. Heroes and enemies both pick it up, with energy still mirroring the same-school hero 1:1. Rose Lake's first fight swaps a Fire Ghoul for a Fire Wraith. Down the Gorge's first fight swaps an Iron Strider for a new Iron Brute, the first Metal-school brute in the roster. The story map picks up the starfield background that was previously placeholder.

Enemy max health and energy now copy your owned same-school hero 1:1 across the whole roster, not just the active party, and the per-fight count multiplier comes out entirely. Maya is hard-pinned as the base-hub walker, with a fallback chain covering story scenes when she's not in the party.

Chapter 1's sigil unlocks get reshuffled. Maya's Spikes moves later, Grey's Gust and Draft move earlier, Tara's Adamant pulls out. Dart joins during the excavations arc, and the leaving-excavations scene drops its required-hero list — pick any three.

Title, fight, base walking, story and battle walking, and the opening now wait until their art has actually finished painting before revealing — they used to reveal on prefetch and fill in in front of you. A failed image fetch retries instead of leaving art missing.

Nell's full fight-field sprite set — idle, selected, attack, hit, KO — wires into the same animation state machine Maya uses. The fight field also stops blanking on the portrait stacks at playout, which fixes the brief unloaded-portrait flash on slower or uncached devices.

Arena fight 3 gets a full redesign as Ochre Pits — Tara and Grey against a Wind Strider, Earth Golem, and a long-range Iron Revenant. Arena fight 1 (Metal Winds) goes from three enemies to four with a second Wind Husk, and Proving Ground is retuned. Empower casts now surface their buff icon the moment they land instead of waiting for the next snapshot; pushes actually slide the displaced enemy across instead of skipping straight to the final position. A stored session the server no longer recognises now routes you cleanly back to the title instead of leaving you stuck on the loading screen. Dart picks up new dialogue art and his own VS-screen banner pose. Arena mobile layout tightens up — completed fights grey out as a whole block, rewards shrink, multi-word CTAs wrap.

A pass on which music plays where. The arena gets its own track instead of pulling from the general fight pool. The base playlist gets tightened. The opening cutscene plays silent so the first thing you hear is the first scene, not a track that competes with it. Activity cutscenes drop their background music so the activity's own sound has the room.

Ormron Gates cutscene art is wired in. Cutscene panels get double-frame comic borders, character dialogue inside cutscenes now renders as speech bubbles instead of a separate dialogue box, and the panel art ships as webp. School ranks rename: the single 'Master' rank splits into Apprentice / Professor / Grandmaster, so the school hierarchy reads at a glance. Walking battles get a Leave button with a warning, and a Maya-less party no longer breaks the walking-battle screen. The chain order reveal gets an animated electric border to make the reveal feel like a charge-up. Version cut 4.2.3 → 4.3.0 for the dev → staging promotion.

Elemental chains get rebuilt around per-fight hero order — the chain used to follow a fixed element ordering, and now it's anchored to the order the heroes act in this specific fight, with the chain tracker hidden in the tutorial so it doesn't tease a mechanic that isn't taught yet. Difficulty gets honest levers: actsInUnison is renamed to what it actually does, a soft-cooperation knob lands so enemies can ease into coordinated play instead of always doing it or never doing it, and enemy spell strength now scales. Multi-cell damage on enemy turns batches up and lands simultaneously instead of trickling cell by cell. Move and attack cells in the fight grid render in one colour, never blending into a third. The in-fight spell detail popup now reflects a hero's active strength buff. Story map and aspects tree get freeform 2D pan instead of locked axes. Alchemy crafting buttons read as tappable and show per-batch cost. The recovery sign-in modal gets a 'Start a new game' escape hatch. Arena fight 2 (Metal Winds) gets rebalanced harder, with one strong spell per hero.

The web alpha cuts to 4.2.2. Audio mute and volumes now survive a refresh or cold start instead of resetting every session. Fight-win rewards move into a dedicated rewards popup with a tidier loot list. Small-screen polish lands across the board: a compact Arena spells popup, a tighter spell card with smaller buff icons and name-tags, and a stacked quest list in the Journal so short viewports stop running out of room.

Arena rewards are now randomized and shown in a reveal popup at the end of a run. A new Arena spells popup shows the spell set for the fight, and the spell card's secondary-damage line moves to a clearer slot. Active-effect icons on the fight-field combatants render in their school color, so it's readable at a glance who's carrying what. In the crafting picker, a long-press on a sigil opens the aspect-details view, and the Snake Medallion's bark gets finalized. Banter contiguity fix: a pair or trio exchange plays its lines back-to-back instead of being interleaved with other turn beats. Combos over dead enemies no longer mis-fire, pre/post banter timing is corrected, and dialogue speaker names resolve through an identity lookup so renamed NPCs read correctly.

A polish pass on the Broken Bridge area. Tanzin the Archeologist gets bridge dialogue and is wired in as the snake-medallion quest giver — no more orphaned quest. Gold examine-spots get a sparkle so they read at a glance instead of needing a hunt. Trigger positions and dialogue copy get a tightening pass. After the Broken Bridge scene resolves, enemy positioning becomes space-aware so encounters laid out on top of the new geometry don't end up sitting in walls or off-cell. The grandmaster's office exit zone gets a small nudge so you don't clip it leaving. Version cut 4.1.0 → 4.1.1.

Combat tuning on elemental chains. A chain only counts now if its links share an enemy — random links across the board don't trigger one anymore — and the bonus damage scales with chain length, so longer chains hit harder. The Digsite Student NPC splits into two characters: a Library Student who lives in the library and a separate Digsite student who shows up at the bridge. Tutorial polish: the spell-pointing arrow is raised 100px so it stops sitting on top of the card it's pointing at.

A pass on the spell side. Spell-card visuals are repainted for the new element set, with a single source of truth for the school label. Spell descriptions become composed strategic copy — per-hero range, per-hero phrasing, and the list of sigils you'd need to pre-craft each spell. The VS popup goes size-aware: mini cards on phones, compact on larger screens, two-up scrolling. Empower switches to a strength-set duration model (it sets strength for N turns instead of stacking with itself), with a pre-craft sigil popup added to its showcase. A new difficulty lever ships: enemy row-seeking movement, default on — enemies now move toward the row they want to hit instead of holding their starting cell. Library Student NPC art is in.

The element model is reworked end-to-end into a sequential chain — every element now sits in one ordering, and the same chain drives the data, the visuals, and the banter relations. When a chain resolves in a fight, it reenacts across the actual cells on the field, with banter portraits leading the burst — the chain is a piece of choreography now, not just a math step. A second peaceful music track lands. The comic burst bubble gets a redesign, with center and no-tail variants and a leading-avatar slot used by the new chain choreography. Version cut: 4.0.0.

Elemental chaining ships as a real combat mechanic. When casts line up in an elemental sequence, the chain triggers a combo overlay — polygon-clipped diagonal panels with per-link art, an enemy spotlight ping, and a follow-on bonus step on top of the base damage. The aspects screen gets a polish pass: two-times open zoom, web drag-to-pan with a grab-hand cursor, sigil strength and area preview on open nodes, press-and-hold on a sigil for a detail popup, and a badge trail (menu → hero → aspects → craft) that walks you to any uncrafted sigil. Aspect badges clear on tap, craft badges stay until you actually craft. Library Journal: a new quest-log panel opens from a library hotspot. Teahouse rest now blocks when the party is at full health and energy, so you can't waste a rest on nothing.

Two passes on yesterday's field-banter shipment. Playback choreography: a hero's line now plays on the damage their cast deals (a single-target kill renders the enemy down on the same step), a hit line plays when damage lands on the hero, a heal line plays when the heal lands — instead of all of them firing at the cast moment. The step auto-advance freezes for a second when a line fires so it's readable on the stationary hero, then the bubble keeps tracking the cell as the camera moves on and dismisses shortly after. And a new authoring sim drives the real banter selection over a worst-case fight run and reports which pools would go silent.

Heroes now talk to each other in combat. The selector is server-authoritative: an element chain (when chains exist), a same-target pair (two heroes hit the same enemy consecutively), a same-target trio (three in a row), or a solo line as the floor — capped at three barks per turn. A six-fight dedup window keeps the same exchange from repeating right after you hear it. Authored content covers all five Chapter 1 heroes across solo, pair, and trio pools, every line tagged with an emotion. The frontend overlay maps emotion → kaomoji face on the speaker. Twenty-two unit tests on the selector, plus a hero-voices reference doc for writing future banter.

Plumbing for the upcoming web demo. Version bumped 3.10.2 → 3.11.0 across all five version files as the dev → staging promotion. The deploy workflow learns per-target gating — staging and prod can now have different access expectations end to end, and the smoke test honors which one is which (some targets are checked for public 200s, others for the gated 401-then-200 dance). Infrastructure-only; nothing player-visible yet.

A design doc for in-combat banter goes in ahead of the implementation: five trigger categories, an element/pair/trio/character cascade, a six-fight dedup window, replay-safe server-side selection, the allBanter.json schema, and a coverage sim plan. Two doc fixes ride along: the element wheel is restated as the 5+3 model (Metal sits in the classic ring; Order is the future esoteric school), and the crafting rule is corrected to match the shipped data — own-school materials for T1–T4 area, all strength, and all effect spells; generating-neighbour material for T5/T6 area. Olija is renamed Light → Order to complete the esoteric Order → Fate → Chaos cycle.

Small readability fix on the fight log. The chip text in the plan-summary panel was rose (#C084B8), which sat too low-contrast on its own background. Switched to black; chip background and border are unchanged.

A new hub room reached from Ormron Street. First time you step in, Maya delivers a quick "no one here, check in later" line and the room is marked visited — only the exit-back trigger is active for now. The secretary, the grandmaster himself, and the desk all unlock through later dialogue. New parallax background art for the room (back / mid / fore) and a front-facing secretary sprite are in.

Two systems pushes. Grey gets a new Embolden buff sigil — an in-fight +1 strength to a chosen ally, extending the in-fight buff system that paired with this week's rest-activity buff. Arena used to ship with hardcoded spell definitions, completely separate from the main game's spell data — so any economy or effect tweak had to be duplicated. Now Arena pulls spells straight from game data: when the rest of the game changes, Arena stays in sync automatically. Plus the opening cutscene stages the Ormron mid background through the intro, and Lamia's selected-sprite on the fight field gets a refresh.

A readability pass on combat. Burn was misfiring — it required strength even though it's an effect-only spell — so burn spells were resolving without damage. Fixed, and burn spell cards now show a top-center burn badge so you can read the effect off the card directly. Aspect-name chips tint by school color instead of all defaulting to gold, so school is readable at a glance everywhere aspects appear.

A friction-reduction pass aimed at the upcoming web playtest. Sign-in is no longer required to play — you can jump straight in, and Settings stays reachable from anywhere. Resting at base now grants a +1 strength buff for your next fight, so rest has a mechanical reason beyond healing. Cutscene controls collapse from a Next/Skip animation pair into a single Skip button. The Daily Arena popup tightens its layout so fight cards equalize to the tallest card, and dialogue boxes get a fixed minimum height across cutscene and regular dialogue. A dead-hero sticker no longer overlaps the health/mana stats in the vertical fight column.

A wide bug-and-polish pass. Hub walking triggers now fire immediately on tap instead of waiting for the hero to walk over them. Alchemy ingredient rows get a dedicated Alchemy button instead of the whole row redirecting. Ingredient counts color green or red by sufficiency so you can see at a glance whether you have enough. The VS popup asks for confirmation before leaving a story fight. The Plan Ready popup no longer discards your plan if you tap the backdrop. Two new client tutorials — hero-died and last-resort — plug onboarding gaps. Sigil descriptions get real playable copy replacing the placeholder text. Plus a tutorial turn-1 fix and a story-exit + broken-bridge quest-flow fix.

A data-driven ambient effects layer lands across base locations and story scenes — atmospherics are now defined alongside scene data instead of being one-off. Trigger sparkles get a density boost so they're easier to spot, addressing the "I didn't see anything I could tap" failure mode on first-time runs. Search-spot triggers skip an extra image step, the digsite-student NPC moves to a better position, and Arena herald assets land.

Four combat and tutorial fixes. Tapping a dead hero's cell now correctly selects the living hero standing on it for pickup, fixing the long-standing issue where the click went nowhere. Fight playback shows a +1 energy stat pulse at SIDE_END so the mana regen tick is visible instead of just numbers bumping silently. The End Turn button auto-fills any heroes you didn't plan actions for with Skip, so a missed click no longer blocks the turn. And the tutorial swaps between a sparkle highlight and a gold border depending on which action type is required next.

Quest completion now has a proper beat: a Quest Completed popup that shows per-quest rewards explicitly, plus Name the Dead's turn-in content. Dialogue cutscenes advance on a tap anywhere on the screen, not just on the dialogue box — useful on mobile where the box was a small target. The story map's Q quest marker is restricted to side quests now, so the main story line doesn't get visually tagged like an optional aside. And the basic-rest-with-Dart party-rest cutscene picks up two new panel art frames.

3.10.0 went to staging today. Two new per-fight difficulty levers — enemyAggression (bool) and enemyInRangeSlotCount (variable) — let combat tuning happen per fight instead of through global toggles. First pass: a difficulty ladder bump that adds more 3-enemy fights along the main path, paired with eased start fights on both side quests. A new Main quest popup fires when the main story takes a step (separate from side-quest popups), and the story map ticks visited scenes. Snake Medallion's giver moves to the Library with a proper map quest indicator. The web build gets a consistent selected-hero position and a horizontal spell strip at the bottom — desktop play was using the mobile portrait layout.

3.9.0 → 3.9.2 ships a lot in one day. Spell casts now show their trajectory: school-tinted sparkle trails fly from the caster's cell to each targeted cell. Fight playout gets explicit Skip all / Skip stage controls and auto-advances every 500ms by default. Materials and Aspects stay "Opens soon" until Maya finishes her first Heal craft, then unlock with one-shot intros. Cancel Move stays available after Skip Attack so a hero's turn can be re-planned. Bazar and arena get first-time entry intros, and the popup back/close UX distinguishes Back from Close on hero panels. Plus art for teahouse_mid and Grey's VS-screen banner, dialogue polish, and a battle-scene stuck-loop fix after multi-fight wins.

Railway hosts the game's backend, and Railway went fully down for roughly six hours overnight (Sydney time). Staging and prod both went with it. Yesterday's connection-error screen did its job on the client side. The interesting part is what caused the outage, and what it implies about whether Railway is the right host going into October.

3.8.0 ships a lot in one day. Burn becomes the second effect keyword in the spell system (heal was the first) — Nell's Burn sigil unlocks at the end of Name the Dead and ticks fire damage on enemies in its area at the end of every turn. A new walking battle drops in between Old Road and Broken Bridge with a Tara/Grey beat. The library aspect screen gets new mid-ground art and collapses seven per-hero triggers into one central trigger. Fight playout zooms in closer (1.25× → 2×) and the spell-card gem now matches the spell's school color.

Snake Medallion and Name the Dead both feed into Ch1's spell-sigil economy now. Each grants a new T1 effect sigil on completion (Tara Push, Nell Burn), priced at a new tier-wide 100c discount instead of the old per-hero Maya·Heal exception. Base activities switch to a two-step hero pick so a stray tap can't fire the cutscene by accident.

Story map gets three player-visible improvements. Pinch zoom (0.5×–1.5×) on mobile, scroll-wheel zoom on web. Quest scenes stay hidden until you've taken the quest, so the map doesn't telegraph what's around the corner. And scene nodes no longer overlap each other when names wrap onto two lines.

The Snake Medallion quest is rebuilt from a 5-scene stub into a 7-scene chain branching off the broken-bridge area. Five new battle scenes through the desert and old-digsite, a new walking scene at the Old Quarter ruins with a boulder-pickup, and a Snake Order tease.

First full side quest in the demo arc lands. Name the Dead is an 11-scene chain branching off Ormron Street: pick it up from the Traveller merchant, fight through 15 encounters, and turn it in at the halrock aftermath. The merchant unlocks earlier in the chapter so the quest is available right after your first desert fight.

The base-rest activity stops being placeholder color panels. It now plays as a two-panel cutscene with real art, video, and a cozy folk soundtrack baked into the MP4s. Location music pauses while it plays so the cutscene's audio carries the moment, and resumes when you dismiss.

3.5.0 ships. The opening cutscene moves from static panels to 13 MP4 panel videos with its own soundtrack and a corner skip control. A guest tutorial flow lets new players try the game without signing in. Popups now run through a unified queue — one modal at a time, priority-ordered. Sigil-unlock popups always show the celebratory card.

Walking scenes across hub, story, and battle now run on the same shared presentation, with trigger enforcement so collisions can't be skipped. The broken-bridge story scene picks up its written content. Party selector and battle popup got web-clipping fixes and the rewards block is now centered.

Big polish day across fight setup and playback. VS screen drops crowded horizontal rows for vertical hero and enemy bars with paging. Party selector adds per-fight enemy and reward previews. Heal spells now pulse on the affected cell with a floating stat bar. And KO'd heroes still in decay come back when the fight is won.

Fight playback picks up camera moves. The view now slides sideways to follow whichever side is acting, zooms on the current actor as they move, and pulls in close on the caster at the moment a spell resolves — so the playout reads as a sequence of shots instead of a fixed render.

3.4.2 wires 17 sound cues into fight playback — turn ticks, spell casts, damage, heal, KO, win/lose. A second fight composition lands with cycling playlist support, the fight hero column gets extracted into its own component, and Maya's first Heal sigil moves earlier in Chapter 1.

3.4.0 ships Maya's animated sprite sheets on the fight field driven by a state machine (idle, selected, attack, hit, KO), heal becomes a stand-alone effect-only card with cost equal to magnitude, and the fight stack now supports up to five heroes or enemies per side.

The title screen now previews all seven chapters of Song of Larithea up front, so the full shape of the run is visible from the start. Social login is fully functional — one tap and you're in, no email-password flow.

3.2.0 lands background music with per-screen track selection and live volume sliders, plus a five-page opening cutscene on a fresh run. The design aspect ratio drops to 16:9 so popups stop squashing on tall phones.

A small bugfix release. Maya was sliding on iOS when she switched between walking and standing still — that's fixed. Her walk cycle was also a touch too slow for the speed she was actually moving, so the legs are catching up to the feet now.

Walking-scene NPCs can play animations now — auri is the first, with three idle poses and a welcome wave. Maya picks up her own side walk and idle animations, so she's actually walking through hubs instead of sliding around.

3.0.0 lands selection-and-screen polish. Tapping a selected hero, enemy, or spell now deselects it. Scene images preload during transitions, popup headers got a restyle, and two bugs are out — the daily-rewards tap target and an activity-cutscene crash on web.

Web letterboxes to 16:9 and every platform locks to 19.5:9 so the layout stays put no matter the device shape. Players who started on Google can now link an Apple identity to the same account, with conflict resolution if the second identity is already in use.

2.1.3 ships a unified HeroPanel component family — same skewed slot, same selected treatment, same stat layout — across the world-map hero strip, the base-menu top bar, the party selector with multi-select, and the fight-field rest popup. Base popups now share the Aspects starfield backdrop, and scene parallax got a math refactor so the mid layer tracks world coordinates exactly.

2.2.0 adds the engine plumbing for effect sigils: a status-effect list on every fight character, a four-slot turn dispatcher (onCast / heroEnd / enemyEnd / turnEnd), and atomic field blocks. Maya's Heal ships as the first effect — casting it opens a hero picker, and the unlock pops a story dialogue instead of a generic title card.

Hero and enemy actions inside a turn can now be ordered freely instead of locked into per-actor move-then-cast pairs. Chapter 1 melee packs bias toward coordinated moves-first attacks, and out-of-range Passive enemies flip aggressive instead of camping.

2.0.0 brings real sign-in. The title screen's PLAY button now opens a sign-in flow with Continue with Google or Continue with Apple, plus a Terms & Privacy link. Sessions persist across launches, so you don't sign in every time. Account deletion is in too, with a clean revoke of the Apple/Google grant. Behind the scenes, the API gained backpressure protection so a fresh launch under load stays calm.

2.1.0 ships a new poster-backed title screen with sparkles at character hand locations, the walking-battle scene gains tiled parallax and image-backed enemy triggers, and all the dev-only entry points collapse behind a single global red DEBUG button.

A guided crafting tutorial walks the player through their first spell, ending in a card-reveal beat. New dialogue execution kind handles steps that need the player to read before tapping, and three bugs that surfaced while building it got fixed.

The pre-fight VS popup used to live on its own dark screen. Walking up to an enemy now keeps the walking scene mounted and renders the popup as an overlay — much less of a hard cut.

Spell crafting is now tier-based against a much smaller material catalog, and Chapter 1 scene rewards are derived directly from each fight's enemies — so what you get from a battle reflects who you actually fought.

ComicButton shrinks ~25%, the bottom menu narrows, alchemy gets a compact layout with owned counts on every card, and the hero now stops next to friend/enemy triggers instead of overlapping them.

Story map gets a hero strip overlay, repositioned location nodes, and tap-to-preview popups on closed scenes. Cutscene dialogue now uses the same text box and speaker badge as in-game dialogue.

Repainted back and mid layers across five hubs, and tightened the VS popup with selectable enemies and a cleaner comic hero card.

Order and Chaos are now Metal and Dark, Sheichi moved into the Fate slot, base panels follow the selected hero instead of asking you to pick a school, and the Aspects screen got a starfield background with pinch/button zoom.

A full day of fixes in direct response to the Sandbox playtest. Cast and Cancel buttons, atomic move-plus-cast, a louder sparkle burst, a proper end to the guided intro, and a comic bubble over NPCs instead of the sparkle nobody saw.

Every shipped enemy now has its own fight art under a single shared vocabulary — idle, attack, hit, ko — so the same word means the same pose across banners and field sprites. The iOS build is wired up for the first TestFlight alpha.

Eight characters now have their own fight art across field sprites, banner playout, dialogue portraits, and spell cards — everyone else still falls back to Lamia while the look settles. Planning order is fully manual now, and the story-map battle popup shows enemies per fight.

The cutscene engine is live and the game opens with a proper comic-panel intro instead of a stub. Ormron Street also got a post-tutorial tweak so only Olija starts active.

The plan screen got a proper pass — per-hero selection memory, sparkle feedback, and energy cost outcomes. Heroes and enemies now have sprite variants for planning and playback.

Fight playback has been redesigned as a comic-panel sequence with stat bars, energy recovery, and auto-skip — replacing the old step-through with something that actually feels like watching a battle unfold.

A first look at the Larithea tutorial before this week's playtest. See how the guided intro walks new players through the game.

The story map now includes base locations as nodes alongside scenes. A journal system tracks player progress, heroes have full emotion portrait sets, and the viewport scales beyond 16:9.

Every legacy UI component has been replaced by the new comic design system. The story map, settings, VS screen, daily rewards, and hero cards all run on shared primitives now.

New comic-styled components for spell cards, barks, hero popups, and crafting — plus entry animations and a burst bubble effect. The visual language of the game is getting a proper system behind it.

Arena fights now use the new spell system end to end. A notification layer has been added so the game can surface events without interrupting flow.

The Aspects menu is fully playable, spells have new card art and a reworked look, and dialogues now animate in and out instead of popping.

Reworking the Library to show aspects — making it easier to see when sigils unlock and when stats grow. Some of those UI findings are pushing changes to story screens too.

Every button and label was reviewed and routed through shared components so primary actions read as CTAs and secondary controls no longer compete for attention—directly addressing confusion we saw in user testing.

Tactical fights now read biome-specific backdrop art on the fight field. Hub and story exploration use a fully refreshed background style—kept separate from battle flow and from the grid itself.

Short bark lines now appear when you poke at the world and story beats, and the build applies player-state changes more reliably across combat, hub, and tutorial.

A progression-blocking bug in the second fight is fixed — combat would stall completely and leave you stuck. Several other combat edge cases from testing builds are resolved too.

Your spell list opens in a clearer default state, constellation presentation is updated, and class-themed backgrounds refresh several hub and menu screens.

The guided intro skips steps you don't need; new and updated materials show up in the UI, the menu and inventory art got a pass, and scene images load with less hitching.

In "There is no engine" I said sprite animations were the spicier of the two things a game engine would have made easier. This month sprites came back and asked for a bigger conversation.

Since the alpha went out, a few people have asked what engine Larithea is built on. The honest answer is — there isn't one. Here's why I deliberately built a web game with web tools, and what I had to build myself because of it.

Why economy is easier for me to love than balance, how the Larithea loop pushes you to craft constantly, and why I now run a simulation before designing any fight in the game.

Finished the one-minute opening cinematic for Larithea — the cold open that will play right after the tutorial. The characters first appeared in a novel I published in Ukraine in 2008. This week I got to watch them move.

Took the game to Sandbox gym on Wednesday with one nice piece of promo and four doughnuts. Walked out with a list of assumptions to throw out.

Finished Cliff Bleszinski's Control Freak this week — the story behind Gears of War and Unreal. Also: experimenting with Kling animations for some of the Larithea enemies, just for fun.

The fight playout got rebuilt as comic-panel sequences. Two games shaped how it feels — Enchanted Arms for the tactics, Dragalia Lost for the charm. Also: why animations have to wait.

Just finished Blood, Sweat, and Pixels by Jason Schreier. Two chapters stood out — The Witcher 3 and Stardew Valley. Also wrapped up the design system migration and moving into playtesting.