A standing weekly commitment to share real progress — made public. Every entry links
back to the actual source material (design docs, proofs of concept, this site itself)
rather than summarising from memory.
Since 2026-08-03, a deliverable can also be a promise: a file created
the moment a commitment is made, ahead of the work landing, carrying acceptance criteria
instead of a finished write-up. Promised entries flip to delivered — with live links —
once the thing they describe actually ships.
Some entries are backdated, added on 2026-09-13 for things made before
the log began — the early HTML experiments, each embedded here as it was — so the log
reads true from the start. They carry their own dates, and the list runs by date.
Eight pieces of furniture for your home and twelve Persian rugs, each picked up, carried and put down like the chest — a rug carried rolled up and unrolling across the floor away from you. Madame Zahra, a wolf-faced rug seller, trades five dyes for a rug of your choice; the dyes burst out of Cinder Hollow's new Moon Well when you win it; Hob grew; the villagers' homes are furnished; and a step onto a cell now picks up everything on it. On the staging server, coming to everyone with the houses.
The App Store's new product page has a header across the top, and search results show a big picture or video for each game. Spellgrove's are now two twenty-second loops made from the game itself — the Village of Lor at night, its lit house street and children walking toward a huge moon under the Spellgrove lettering, and Esmeralda asking whether you'd like to learn the spell to create a familiar. Kris chose the header with the lettering and Esmeralda for search, and is uploading them now.
Every player is getting a house of their own in the Village of Lor — walls in the colour of their pants, the roof in the colour of their top, the lights on while they're in the game. Before building it into the game, the house was drawn in three shapes, inside and out, with the ways to mark an empty plot and to handle the door you can't see, and Kris voted. The Village grows south by six rows of streets and eighty plots to make room.
Kris, by voice, 26 October — a design that is largely Rah’s: “Instead of everyone having their
own little room that they come out of through the same portal… it becomes a house, very much
like the bazaar is a tent… the door will be away from where you’re seeing… the walls should be
the same colour as the pants colour of the player and the roof the colour of the top… when the
player is offline, a reduced, simpler, standard version — maybe the lights are out, probably just
brown, but a nice little house.”
Every picture below is the game’s own renderer, from the chase camera at its normal height
unless it says otherwise. The four owners in them are Rah (rose top, denim pants), Tom (marigold,
khaki), Ivy (teal, wine) and Kris (scarlet, navy); a brown house with its shutters closed is
somebody who isn’t in the game; four little marks on the grass are a plot nobody has yet. A
design review had already been through the first renders and asked for taller walls under a
lower roof, a door a child can walk through (the first one came up to Tom’s chest), cream trim
so a dark pants colour still reads as a colour, and gold names for houses so a place never reads
as a person.
1 — Which house? The cottage
A — the cottage (chosen)A, closerA, the door side — the north, away from the cameraB — hippedB, closerB, the door sideC — storybookC, closerC, the door side
2 — The walls: the owner’s true pants colour
True (chosen)Softened toward cream — navy, wine and khaki all drift to beige
3 — Offline houses
No vote: brown, a little smaller, the shutters closed, no name, and a tap does nothing — Kris:
“if offline the house looks and acts like background decoration.” They are the brown houses
in every picture.
4 — A plot nobody has yet: the corners
Line · corners (chosen) · dashed · pegs — walkable until somebody moves in
5 — The door you can’t see: leave it
The camera looks north and the door is on the north side, so whoever is knocking stands behind
the house. Three ways to deal with it were drawn; Kris chose to leave it — the house hides you
while you knock.
Leave it (chosen)See-throughCut away
6 — Inside: lower walls, a honey floor
Your home is the room you already have, chest and all, drawn inside the house’s walls in your
colours, the roof’s edge in your top colour.
a — tall, like the Bazaarb — lower walls, the grey plank floorb with the honey floor (chosen)b with the honey floor, closer
Two changes from the sheet, in Kris’s words. The rug goes: “no rug on the floor, that is
something to purchase in the game later and add.” And the door moves: “the door should be
against the BACK wall… there should be a visible door against the middle of that back wall —
because that is where the door IS, and you just can’t see it from the standard camera angle…
with the portal kind of in front of it.” The honey planks became a ground of their own:
the grey planks in the pictures turned out to be the ramp up to the high ground, not a floor, so
Kris chose a hexagram for it — “use Wind over Fire… change Wind on Fire to be the wooden floor
honey plank”: Wind over Fire (37), The Family — “warmth given out slowly, evenly, to everyone
in the room”. Its lower trigram makes it a lava by type; as the Plank floor it is dry, flat
and on the ground’s own level, and the ramps keep their look.
What comes next
The Village of Lor grows south by six rows of street blocks with eighty plots (Kris: “let’s go
for 80 house sites to start — that’s an arbitrary but interesting milestone to hit”), and a
“Player Home” in the area editor for adding more by hand. Each player is given a plot when they
log in, the house shows their colours while they’re in the game, and anyone can knock on a lit
house — the owner says Let in or Keep out, and a visitor can only walk around. It goes to
the staging server first, with some test players living in the Village, before anyone else sees
it. The work is GitHub issue #42.
A player can now die. Lava hurts everywhere — the fifth cell kills — and flames come up round you while you wade. Dead, you lie down; the chest you carry drops in front of you or falls apart; your bag spills on the ground round you for anyone to collect (what lands in the lava burns); the screen goes black and you get up at home. Health heals slowly and no longer refills at a door. The fire hounds bite three times as hard and take three times the beating.
Esmeralda's familiar spell now follows the quest she gives you, and while it is open you can ask her where to find each ingredient. Far Away is renamed Far Hop, and a Tumbling Cairn there sheds Smooth Pebbles beside the old tree that drops Sharp Sticks, so both ingredients have one answer.
The game's first quests. Esmeralda sends you for a chest and teaches her familiar spell as a quest with steps; Hob Hartwood the carpenter sits in the Bazaar and makes chests for twenty Mushrooms; you carry one home in your arms, put it down, and keep your things in it. The Quests list lives in the menu, and the buttons on the screen now appear as you first need them.
When the game cannot reach the realm it no longer just says so — seven seconds later your own character is running, side on, Chrome's offline dinosaur game with Spellgrove's own grass, bushes, trees and dragon, day and night, until "The realm is back".
The Market became the Bazaar in one evening by voice. A striped tent now stands over its door in the Village, with the portal in the doorway; walk through and the same canvas walls stand round you inside. The comparison page Kris chose from is below, round by round — two palettes, two heights, and the shaded floor.
The day the arms and hands were solved. After two passes of editing the Meshy bodies by hand, every character now goes through Godot's humanoid profile and plays one shared library of motion-captured clips, with three measured fixes to each hand mesh. The sheet below is all twelve as they stand in the game now, and the notes say what was tried on the way.
A record, taken from the live Google Play listing on 20 October 2026, of the screenshots and the words the store shows now — the painted title, flat green ground, the plain figures — kept so that when the graphics change there is a "before" to put beside the "after".
Two Australian word-mark applications, SPELLGROVE (2706928) and LEGEND OF RAH (2706929), classes 9 and 41, owner CoCreations Australia Pty Ltd, filed on 19 October 2026. IP Australia's two "Your trade mark has been filed" letters arrived the next morning and are kept with the filing receipt. They are an acknowledgement, not a decision — the examiner's turn comes in about three to four months.
The proof for the detailed graphics tier — a rigged, animated character generated from a text prompt in four minutes, cut into head, torso and legs on one skeleton, wearing the player's shirt and pants colours, walking in the real client and on Kris's phone. Signed off the same day as the direction to keep going; this page holds that build.
Rah drew the eyes, the mouths and the hair herself, digitally. Every part is cut out of her drawings exactly as drawn — no threshold, no redrawing, the ink's darkness is its opacity — a small viewer puts them on the game's player body so they can be judged on a head, and the same day they went into the game with shirt and pants colours, a hand-turned account box with six buttons, and a name the player can change.
The record of the attempts to have an AI decide what a face in Spellgrove looks like — the sixty-four heads that were reverted in three days, and Rah's sketches cut into face parts that came out, in Kris's words, comically bad. Kept exactly as delivered, so the next attempt starts from what was actually seen. The faces will be hand-drawn by Rah next.
A trial APK, pointed at the staging server, that draws the public Areas next to yours on the world map as static islands floating around the one you are walking on — Market Stalls, Mountain Pass and Golem Hollow around the Village — reachable only through their doors as ever. Built to measure what it costs a phone and to see whether the world should be islands in the sky.
A full audit of the game server, the Builder, the area server, the client and the droplet, three days before store submission — twenty-seven findings, every one patched and verified live the same day, from a link that could have run a stranger's script on the site to a service user with root and areas listening on the open internet.
The game got its name, its icon and its legal pages, an in-app "delete my account", a Codemagic pipeline that signs a bundle for Google Play and an archive for the App Store from one tag, and sign-in on phones through the platform's own player — Play Games on Android, Game Center on iOS — with no email asked for. The first Android bundle reached Play's internal testing and the first iOS build reached App Store Connect.
Playground tag as a core mechanic — opt in on your account, one "it" in the whole world at once, a cartoon glove over every player in the game and a white one over the it, a twenty-second lock against tagging straight back, doors that ask before they take you somewhere the game does not follow, and a fair pick when the it player goes offline.
West of the Village, a place with rules and an end — stone golems marching on the Grove Tree, the first spell (the Lightning Tower) found as a scroll on the ground and cast from what you have gathered, a volcano that throws fire crystals, an ice patch that grows ice, health on every creature, and a Life Seed for whoever stops thirty golems.
The game's building blocks — the sixty-four elements, the same sixty-four as ground, the creatures, the world and each of its areas — shown on spellgrove.com live from the game, view-only for everyone and editable by Kris through the Builder, a separate admin service with the game's own sign-in; plus the first thing built through it, Dirt, the first item the ground grows.
The workspace repo folded into the game's, the public site moved off the task-runner host onto the game's own droplet, and the whole thing came up at spellgrove.com — built on the box itself, two minutes after every push, with the game, the site and a staging realm behind one address.
A contiguous group of the same mountain flavour is now one continuous massif in the ground itself — smooth steep faces, a sheer foot, a real apex — a group of the blocky kind is one big rounded cube, and stacking needs the exact same hexagram so a mixed painting reads as a range of separate peaks; the ground mesh got cheaper doing it, from 64,800 triangles in the Badlands to 18,900.
The third tileset — 29 tiles and a painted cliff face from a dedicated Claude Design session, one colour per family, no motifs — dropped into the game the day it was delivered, approved by Kris on the in-game renders, and shipped to the browser and the phone; screenshots kept beside deliverable 14's so the step is visible, and the design session is on record because it will be reused for tweaks.
The Badlands as it stands the day before Claude Design's third tileset goes in — three levels of ground joined by ramps, stone plateaus with cliff faces, a deep lake, a cone range crowned by a volcano, a boulder square, moving water and lava — in ten screenshots and a contact sheet of the twenty-eight painted tiles the game draws today, kept beside deliverables 12 and 13 so the step is visible.
The first real tileset, made from the brief the day it was written — sixty-four seamless painted tiles, one per hexagram — dropped into the game with no code change and shipped to the browser and the phone the same day; screenshots kept beside deliverable 12's placeholders so the step is visible.
Six screenshots of the world the day after the ground got types — the Village of Lor with its river, the Badlands with every type in patches, a home in the browser, the stone floors up close — kept so the progression can be seen once the painted tiles land.
When the connection stalls the character stops and says so; when it dies the game reconnects in the open or tells you it couldn't; every step you take is answered by the server. (The offline home this once promised was withdrawn on 2026-10-24 — offline play is the offline runner, deliverable 37.)
Promised 2026-08-18, the day the review landed. Kris played the phone and a browser side by
side and watched them disagree; the review found why — a client that kept walking after its
socket had silently died — and a dozen relatives of the same fault. This deliverable is the
game becoming trustworthy about its own connection.
Acceptance criteria
On the phone: put the app in the background for 30 s and return, or switch airplane mode on
for 20 s — the character freezes and a “Reconnecting…” notice shows within a few seconds;
then either play resumes with the world caught up, or after ~15 s a “Connection lost” screen
appears with Retry, and nothing moves until it’s back. Never a character walking through
portal rings on a dead channel.
Two clients on the same account or two players in the same Area agree: the other body moves
when it moves, and appears when it arrives — APK and browser alike.
A connection indicator on the HUD tells the truth (green / amber / red), and “Send
diagnostics” delivers the phone’s own log to the server.
Areas carry single_player / multiplayer / either; the home is either: with no realm
reachable, Start still puts you in your home (walk-only), and its doors to the shared world
bump with “That way needs a connection”.Withdrawn 2026-10-24 (Kris): the Area
“Connection” property and the offline home are dropped — nothing ever acted on them. Offline
play is the offline runner (deliverable 37); the home needs the realm like everywhere else.
The server answers every step (ack, reject or superseded), delivers every kick with its
reason, and never shuts an Area down under a player who is still standing in it.
Artifacts
Pending until delivery: the /play page and the APK; docs/handoff/connection-and-sync.md;
the fault-injection harness and soak in game/director/test/.
Every cell of every Area becomes one of the 64 hexagrams — grass, sand, snow, stone, water and lava sunk below the ground, and mountains standing up out of it — visible in the browser and on the phone, with soft edges between neighbouring types.
The first actual game interface — a title screen that boots the live 3D world, a HUD with health and your stuff, and the 64 elements as collectible cards you can browse — live in the browser at a URL.
The live multiplayer world now renders 3D people who walk between cells — turning to face where they're going, arms and legs swinging — instead of flat coloured blocks teleporting a cell at a time. Same live server, same link, new eyes.
A tap-to-download .apk on the deliverables page, built from the same unchanged Stage 3 client as the browser link, connecting to the same droplet-hosted world — proof this runs on real hardware in someone's hand, not just a desktop browser tab.
A link on this page that opens the Godot web export of the Stage 3 multiplayer client, connected to a live world on the droplet — two or more players in the same world seeing each other move, from nothing but a browser tab.
A from-scratch runbook for the box the game will actually run on — one DigitalOcean droplet, Godot headless world processes, a director service, Postgres, and Caddy in front of it all.
The site itself, as this week's deliverable — and the principle it's built to demonstrate: the repo is the source of truth, the site is just a rendering of it.
The engineering note behind every model in the game — three ways of getting a large, growing library of low-poly creatures and gear actually tried against the one mechanic that matters, composing creatures from parts and attaching gear at runtime — and the verdict that has held since. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
A twenty-minute read for someone arriving fresh — what was settled, what was on the shelf, and the most important move in the whole project — the day the game stopped living in its physics and started living in the things players make. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
The sixty-four elements as a graph — each joined to the six it becomes when one of its lines flips — drawn live in the browser and arrangeable by dimension, by drive, or by line. A picture of what transmutation would mean before any of it was built. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
All sixty-four elements on one page, each fully determined by its hexagram — the upper trigram its face, the lower its body — with names, readings, uses and two computed stats, filterable by face and by body. The direct ancestor of the element table the game runs on. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
A single-file simulation of matter under pressure — paint ground, drop items, watch heat and charge flow across a grid and lines strain until they flip — built to see whether the physics-first version of the element system would actually behave. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
The earliest written statement of what this game is — ten commitments, from "creation happens inside the game" to a world of permission rings — set down the day of the founding conversation with Rah, as a page for humans and AI collaborators coming up to speed. A backdated entry, added 2026-09-13.
