Devlog
Design notes, milestones and lessons from the workshop. We build in the open.
We have been building a second game. No Return Depth is a first-person co-operative submarine horror game for one to four players, where there is no HUD and every fact about the ocean arrives through an instrument that belongs to one seat. A vertical slice is playable, and we are looking for playtesters.
No Return Depth has no HUD, which sounds like a decision you make once and then stop paying for. It is not. Every answer a HUD would have given has to become a physical object in a compartment — and six of our signs could not be read while passing the entire test suite.
Cosmetics gave PULSE//ZERO a reason to keep playing. Directives are how you earn them — a data-driven layer of around forty-four challenges that track what you actually do in a run and pay out in looks, never power. Here is how the challenge layer is built, and why every reward stays cosmetic.
PULSE//ZERO has a progression system, and it never makes you stronger. Everything you unlock is cosmetic — grid themes, ship skins, kill effects, engine trails, display modes. Here is why we drew that line, and how the data-driven systems behind it keep it honest.
The Living Grid is the stage every fight happens on. Grid Anomalies are the moments that stage stops being scenery and becomes the threat — timed, arena-wide events that bend the rules of the floor for thirty to sixty seconds and then let go. Here is how they work, and why we built the room to attack you.
PULSE//ZERO's soundtrack ships with zero audio files — every note is synthesised from PCM at startup. It's a layered score in D minor that reads the run's intensity and breathes with it: layers fade in as the heat climbs, and event stings punctuate the moments that matter.
v0.5.0 is out. Every run now picks a Combat Profile and a Sector that rewrite the rules of the arena — backed by eleven new enemies, four Elite variants and two new bosses.
The arena floor in PULSE//ZERO is not a backdrop — it is a single shader that listens to the whole game and answers in light. Here is what the Living Grid is, why a reactive stage is the thing that makes the game sing, and how it works.
The Adaptive Director decides when a run earns a mini-boss. This is what shows up: a reusable boss chassis, an encounter that never overstays its welcome, and the Elite Hunter — three telegraphed mechanics that reward reading tells over out-DPSing.
We built a tempo-locked adaptive music system for Godot 4 — vertical layer blending and bar-quantised section transitions — and we've released it under MIT. It's the system PULSE//ZERO's music is moving onto, and it's yours to use in anything.
v0.4.0 is a systems update — Overdrive becomes an earned charge→spend burst, combos climb to x32, bosses reshape the arena, and a rebuilt director paces the whole run.
Static spawn timers make every run feel the same. PULSE//ZERO has an invisible game master instead — a deterministic, explainable pacing system that reads the run and decides who shows up, when, and how hard. Here is how it breathes.
v0.3.1 lands a native macOS build, the global leaderboard inside the game, QR pairing, and a hotfix that reconnects linked players to the board.
v0.3.0 lands the Void Titan, a big readability pass, new accessibility controls and offline-first leaderboards.
How we build enemies in PULSE//ZERO: a behaviour-object architecture, five archetypes that each ask a different question of the player, and an elite system that remixes them. Bosses come later — this is the rank and file.
PULSE//ZERO is an arcade game first.
I’ve been building PULSE//ZERO in public — a solo-built neon twin-stick bullet-hell where the arena fights back and the enemies never stop coming. It’s now playable as a public…
The first vertical slice of PULSE//ZERO is playable. Here is what the slice proves, what it deliberately leaves out, and where the Living Grid goes next.
A new independent studio making thoughtful, systems-driven games. Here is who we are, what we believe, and what we are building first.
