The Clock You Can Finally See

The Action Bar

The energy scheduler has run this whole game since before there was a game to look at — every actor ticks toward its next turn on its own speed, and until now you found out who went next by finding out. That's over. Press b and the Action Bar opens across the top of the screen: the next twelve activations, hero and every hostile you can currently see, in the order they're actually going to happen. Boss tokens sit larger. A dormant or stunned creature still shows up, flagged as not-yet-a-threat. Whoever's about to act gets a gold pulse. It toggles off just as easily and remembers your preference, because I know some of you will hate having it on screen during a real fight and I'm not going to relitigate that.

Building the panel was the easy half. The Action Bar is a forecast, re-projected fresh every frame with zero memory of what it showed a moment ago — which meant the instant you submitted a command, the whole thing would just teleport to the post-resolution state, because the engine resolves an entire round's worth of turns in one frame and only fakes the pacing afterward with a fixed stagger. So the token doesn't just appear in its new slot anymore — it lifts out, fades, and the rest of the bar closes the gap behind it, timed against a real beat clock that now also drives the hit-flash, the SFX, and the damage numbers. You get to pick how fast that clock ticks in Settings — Swift, Measured, or Deliberate — and Deliberate is going to be somebody's favorite and somebody's complaint by Sunday.

Getting the beats to land in the right order surfaced a bug that's probably always been there, just too fast to see at the old pacing: Shockwave's burst ring was hazing in after the enemies it had already thrown, because the event that represents "you got knocked backward" was quietly stealing the clock from the event that represents "I'm the one who did it." Same mistake, same fix, across every knockback, grapple, swap, trip, and reactive proc in the game — an activation now only advances the clock when it's the actor's own turn beginning, never something being done to them mid-someone-else's-turn. If you never noticed a Shockwave firing out of order, that's the point; you'll notice this fix by not noticing anything.

Squaring up without moving

Ctrl+direction now spends a full turn to reface in place — free if you're already facing that way. It's the same reface the AI has always had; you just couldn't ask for it. Presenting your front trades the turn for restored armor and a smaller hit next time something reaches you, and it's the move that finally lets a spear brace a Charge on purpose instead of by accident of positioning. Small addition, but it closes a gap between what the garrison could always do to you and what you could do back.

Everything else

• A ground item, chest, grave, or lore page fully hidden under whatever's standing on its tile now shows a four-corner "something's underfoot" reticle — worst offender was a scroll stuck forever under a barrow-thrall that never moves.
• Renounce's legacy wipe used to File.Delete your whole profile outright. It now moves the file aside instead, recoverable, after the last release cut's build machine lost real graves to exactly this. Belt, meet buckle.
• A voice bark still hanging on screen at the moment you win or die used to paint its italic caption straight across the end panel. Gone — worst on Renounce, which times a bark for the exact wrong instant.
• The shop row list no longer lets a long item name shove the price and the Buy/Sell button off the edge of the panel.
• The default Unity application icon is finally the labyrinth mark instead of Unity's, in the taskbar and the title bar both.
• HUD health-bar text gets a drop shadow so white-on-pale-green stops being a legibility test.

What's next

A good chunk of the backlog has quietly turned toward getting this thing onto Steam: capsule art, a proper trailer and screenshot set, a wishlist link wired into both the game and the website, the Unity player-settings branding and save-path work a store release actually requires, and teaching the publish pipeline to push a build straight to a depot instead of just GitHub and itch. None of that changes anything you'll feel in a run — it's the unglamorous scaffolding a launch needs under it — but it's where a fair amount of my hours are about to go. The deep floors still owe you a balance argument, and that doesn't get any less true for it.