Between yesterday afternoon and this morning, more than forty pieces of work landed on the main branch, each one reviewed and re-run before it merged. This chapter is the tour. Everything below is a graybox or a record at review unless it says otherwise; none of it has had a timed human playtest yet.
The cast has faces
Seven dramatic portraits were picked from candidate sheets and are now in the game, showing beside their lines in the third and fourth missions. These are the people the briefings have been talking about since the first chapter: Bregga who counts the stores, Fenna who counts who has not come home, Molgra who keeps the forge lit, and Rill, who has to choose between all of them.
The Sharpshooter takes the field
The shield-and-rifle Sharpshooter from three chapters ago is imported and trained at the Foundry Annex. The three attack headings that fired sideways ship as delivered and are written down as a known defect, which is the project's way: in the game and honest about it beats waiting for perfect.
Dunbrek under siege
The sixth mission is the first where the hold itself is the battlefield. Dunbrek is besieged by a Dark Iron siege camp that runs as a real strategic base, building and sending assaults against the gate. The West Gate is a building the player opens and closes in play. Under the walls, a sap shaft and a breach mouth threaten the tunnel bet.
Orders in Stone
The seventh mission is built as a graybox too, with the rearguard as a working base and the host's columns, raids and escapes scripted. The finale, the eighth mission, is designed on paper with both of its paths, and its ending conditions are written into the campaign graph: whether the hall stands, who survives, and how much the advisers trust you by then.
The first research
Reinforced Plate is the campaign's first player research: two points of armour for every Shieldguard, researched at the Foundry Annex. The panel shows the bar, the percentage and the icon, and a cancel button refunds every coin. Small as it looks, this is the first rung of the tech tree, and it was preceded by a lab that measured what the engine actually does when a producer dies mid-research or a save lands on the boundary.
Humans with somewhere to live
The Warden of the Greywater is now a working strategic base in the fifth mission: the keep trains its workers, the farms feed its levies, and it plays the toll like a player would. Its Farm and Barracks are content at review, in the same warm limestone and half-timber as the Keep.
Under the hood
- The commander's level, experience and unlocked abilities now carry from mission to mission, in one sitting or across a relaunch. A lab found the gap; a fix lane closed it.
- Team colours are measured and fixed: the player is blue, hostiles are red, and every map sets its palette.
- A sound bible exists: 126 cues in a manifest, weapon and ability cues in the registry, and three designed dwarf voices waiting for an audition.
- Three engine batches: the save-file trigger budget that broke large missions, a pathfinder crash on dismissing a bombard, and boxed-in units that gave up instead of waiting.
- The Hall can upgrade to a Fortress Keep, the finale's centrepiece, as a record at review with stand-in art.