Ya, Not Gonna Do It

Somewhere in this repo's history is an issue I closed with the reply "ya. not gonna do it. No need to save if you just leave the app open. The whole game is designed to be played in one sitting." I closed a second attempt at the same idea the same way. This time I put it to a Discord poll instead of deciding it myself, and lost. Democracy, or something like it.

You can put it down now

Quit Run in the pause menu no longer ends your descent — it suspends it, and the title screen offers to take it back up. One run in flight at a time, consumed the instant you resume, gone for good the instant you die. The reason I can live with this: it's not a snapshot, it's the run's own command log, replayed through the real engine on resume with recording still on — so the result still certifies, still counts for the weekly board, and nothing in the file can be hand-edited into something that was never legal to happen.

If what you actually wanted was out — no coming back, no legacy, nothing — that's Abandon the Descent, three rows down in the pause menu, no confirmation, no hedge.

The interface stopped pretending to be Unity

Every panel, button, field, and scrollbar in the game used to be flat Unity gray wearing a dark fantasy costume over its shoulders. That seam is closed: the whole UI now draws in dark oiled hide and smoke-stained vellum behind tarnished-iron frames, and the body text is set in Cardo instead of the default face — something that looks like it belongs at the bottom of the chest you're currently looting instead of a settings menu. Getting there without breaking a single tight button label meant throwing out every hardcoded pixel measurement I'd accumulated over a year of "that number looked right at the time" and replacing it with actual measured layout, so this also quietly fixed two years-old label clips ("Unequip," "Unwield") that were dropping a letter and nobody had ever mentioned.

The picture I promised is finished

Last week I said the sprites for doors, chests, graves, stairs, and loot markers were drawn but not wired in. They're wired in now — state and all, so a door looks open once you've opened it and a grave looks spent once you've taken its blessing. On top of that: the boss guarding each floor now announces itself with a full-screen ink portrait and its bark the first time it wakes to you, instead of a caption easy to miss mid-fight. And the Hollow — depth 11, the chamber past the bottom floor — finally has its own bone-pale tileset and a Heart that pulses under its own red light instead of sitting there in flat fallback color.

Everything else

• Chargers no longer oscillate in place against a braced spear — a real report, reproduced, fixed at the AI level rather than patched around.
• The Trainer and Merchant now try to stand in the down-stairs room first, so five floors of hoarded gold with nobody to spend it on shouldn't happen again.
• The Hollow's stair now opens where its guardian actually died, not somewhere generic.
• A mis-targeted wand zap refuses out loud instead of silently doing nothing.
• The scroll read-target picker only offers items a scroll can actually target.
• Inventory tabs are class icons now, not ascii-glyph-and-text.
• The title screen finally shows a real, populated depth-10 floor instead of the placeholder it's been quietly stuck on since before the art existed.

What's next

The visual promise from docs/design-vision.md is close to fully realized now — dungeon, bestiary, props, and chrome all drawing the same dark, painterly game. What's left is the part no amount of art fixes: the deep floors are still where balance goes to argue with itself, and the only way through that is more of you going down there and telling me where it broke.