DeepHold: trial and error

What I tried

The design document set five principles (no growth, three hits and out, hard, never unfair, same monster same pattern) along with 50 monsters, 5 bosses, the economy and the rules for building your own dungeon. Then came a rules core that runs without a screen; 36 monsters were built in parallel by four agents. Five bosses, the village, summoning, the old mine, the dungeon editor, a record-checking server and a desktop app wrapper followed.

What went wrong

• The server started on Supabase's free plan, where a server function gets 2 seconds of CPU per request, so checking one run had to be split into 15,000-tick slices over several requests.
• The desktop wrapper was set up without ever running it, because the build environment could not reach npm.
• Wherever art did not exist yet, a plain shape of the same size stood in.

What I tried

848 images, sound effects and music were wired in, along with the archive (bestiary), curses, relics, 250 achievements, cosmetics and the daily Abyss. The village was rebuilt from new art and you can now slash and roll inside it too. The plaza, chat and emotes, village window UI v2 and a reworked economy and mine came in at the same time. Auto-updates went out through GitHub Releases, and downloads moved to their own public repository so the code repository could go private.

What went wrong

• Old and new village art had animations with the same names, and tests broke. → The old village art is no longer loaded at all.
• The automatic build failed: generated data it needed was missing from the repository, and it tried to upload files before the release existed. → The data went in, and the release is now created first.
• You could not roll while mid-slash. → Attack cancel became a core rule, in the dungeon and the village alike: rolling cuts the slash short on the spot.

What I tried

Real-time parties, co-op dungeons and friend codes went in, and the run rules (biomes, boss floors, death loss, insurance, practice, ranking season 2) and the economy (smelter, ingot prices) were rebuilt. The screen got 1080p and a new settings window, and the first operator page opened.

What went wrong

• Offering three text sizes made text overflow and overlap all over the village windows and input boxes. A size-calculation test suite caught them one at a time, until → text size became "UI size": the whole window scales up and down through its own camera, and long text scrolls with the wheel instead of being cut. (v0.3.1)
• In the mine you could dig in one straight line forever, so auto-miners worked. → Undiggable bedrock is now scattered through the upper tunnels, and the macro check looks only at the dig key going down and up, which cut false alarms.
• The economy numbers were redone too. → Ore income was cut to a third, and death loss now starts at 75% on floor 1 and drops each floor to 50% from floor 21. The price change was paid back once, on first launch.
• A save test passed some runs and failed others: the server's start-up log was leaking into the test tool's output.

What I tried

Play logs are kept on the server for 90 days, and the operator page shows per-player logs and stats. A party lag overlay shows ticks, light calculation and input delay, and every result-changing fix now bumps the dungeon rule number (gen). Hidden rooms and empty space, emblems and titles, easy mode, published summon rates and the mine's silverfish all arrived here.

What went wrong

• Party lag: party members' lantern rays were expensive. → 120 rays became 40, and a still lantern reuses its last result. Input delay now adjusts itself between 6 and 12 ticks during a run.
• Run checking ran on the same thread as the party relay, so parties stuttered while a run was being checked. → Checking moved to its own worker thread. (v0.4.11)
• A server setting dropped every websocket after 60 minutes. → A dropped player's seat is held for 9 seconds, and reconnecting resumes in the same room on the same tick.
• Deep mine veins went 10% → 5% → back to 10%, and finally back to the v0.4.1 layout with the vein count raised from 36 to 200. Four changes in one day.
• Collapsing floors cut paths (gen 5) and dungeon props blocked them (gen 6). Generation now checks paths for both.
• A quick tap of the attack key rarely hit a silverfish. → One press now swings all the way through, and reach, swing angle and the pause after a bite were tuned twice more.
• Lantern oil kept getting patched: one bottle per run and three per day, refunds for early deaths on floors 1 to 3, auto-refill from 20 minutes and 2 bottles to 30 minutes and 5.

What I tried

The developer lab spawns monsters, picks a boss phase, turns on invincibility and attaches relics on the spot, and all 30 relics are checked automatically to make sure they really trigger. Five-tier achievement scores with unique emblems, Steam build prep and warning and ban screens went in. The second boss, the Endless Furnace, was reworked: 50 hits down to 36, and only 3 hits per opening.

What went wrong

• Meeting the furnace a second time froze the game, because it tried to reuse an image that had already been destroyed. → Fixed within the hour in v0.5.3.
• A cooling valve's warning could fill up and do no damage. → Now it bursts into steam for 1 damage.
• Overheat dropped molten iron in bundles; it was rebuilt as 12 in a row, in a targeting order, around a random ring. (v0.5.4, gen 9)
• The block-break effect shrank other blocks of the same kind, and the mine's darkness grew a thin vertical line that followed the hero. → Darkness is now painted as one sheet with the light shapes erased from it.
• Every build regenerated the collision data, and because the result differed between machines, it once blocked the bot's paths and broke building collisions. → Builds now use the values in the repository; regenerating is a separate command.

What I tried

Draft hit and hurt shapes were generated automatically from the monster, boss, hero and impact art, merged with hand-painted ones and put into the rules (gen 9). Attacks with a ground warning have their shapes clipped to the warning area. A tool also sends a human-like bot, with perception, reaction time and mistakes, on runs from floor 1 to 25.

What went wrong

• Comparing the feel with the same bot, kill times went up 2 to 10 times. Nine of the eighteen common monsters in the first two biomes could not be killed within 60 seconds, and three bosses could not be beaten within four minutes.
• The cause was the hero's slash. Its shape was cut from the sword art alone, so reach shrank from the code's 30 px radius to about 15 px and the front (downward) barely hit at all. → Only the hero's slash shape was left out; it kept the old half circle.
• Monsters in states that should not hurt on contact (stunned, latched on, underground) still hit when their effect art overlapped you. → Shapes now decide only where; the code's rules always decide whether there is damage.

What I tried

For every drop of molten iron, the game was copied at that moment and searched for a place to walk or roll to without taking damage. In gen 9, 26 of 3,000 drops had no escape. In gen 10, with fewer drops, longer gaps and fewer warnings at once, it was 0 of 2,500.

What went wrong

• The top reason the bot failed was an opening that ended with 0 or 1 hits (59%). Getting from the last valve to the furnace mouth took 2.6 to 3.8 seconds, leaving about one second of a 4-second opening. → At 5.5 seconds, openings with 0 or 1 hits fell from 32% to 9%, and the bot, with no potions, cleared it in 2 runs out of 20.
• Then steam became the bottleneck (16 of 20 deaths). → The steam warning is fixed at 1.4 seconds and the valve spots were placed again.
• The furnace mouth was drawn larger than the body and covered its outline and warning lights. The furnace was then redrawn, and its hit shapes generated again for the new art. Old records keep the old shapes.
• Pausing or seeking a replay knocked music, looping sounds and boss phases out of sync. → Replays now have their own view clock, and music resumes from its position.

What I tried

The oil currency, auto-refill, apprentice runs, daily limits and refunds are all gone (gen 11). Oil springs became "black springs" that give treasure chests, and pitch joined the mine's ore table. Old replays from gen 10 and earlier still play under their old rules: 60 check worlds came out exactly the same as before. Download addresses moved with the GitHub account rename, and each run's replay is now stored once, with duplicates cleaned up.