The Cradle becomes a real village
2026-07-14, screenings 5 through 8
This was a full day of Baltasar walking through the village with fresh eyes and us chasing what he found. Four screening rounds, four rounds of fixes, and by the end The Cradle finally felt like a place instead of a level.
The best bug of the day, and we mean that as a compliment to how strange it was: the street was flying. Villagers strolled along at nearly four meters off the ground, and paving slabs sat mid-air to match. The cause was Physics.Raycast doing exactly what Unity says it will do by default and hitting trigger colliders, which meant every building’s invisible interaction sphere was being treated as solid ground by anything trying to figure out where the floor was. One flag, QueryTriggerInteraction.Ignore, on every grounding raycast in the valley, and the street came back down to earth. We’ve written it into our own house rules now: any new raycast that measures ground must ignore triggers, full stop.
We also found that the village sign read backwards to anyone actually arriving at the gate (rotated a clean 180 degrees, an easy one to miss when you only ever view it from your own desk), and that Unity’s Plane UVs run opposite to world X and Z on both axes, which cost us a wrongly-painted pasture and, a screening later, a wrongly-painted diagonal path by the school. Once was a mistake. Twice confirmed it’s just how planes work here, and now everyone on this thread knows to check.
On the building side: ten proper interiors staged like small theater sets, a temple with a bell we are explicitly not letting the player ring (some instruments only get to play one song, and we like that restraint), and the old ruin turned into an actual dungeon, two braziers that both have to be lit before a hall of First Tamer script gives up its door. The school became one building instead of a scatter of rooms, with a low interior wall so the camera can still see over people’s heads.
Dialogue got a small piece of craft we’re proud of: walk away mid-conversation and the speaker doesn’t just stop, they call you back by name, in red, mid-sentence. It’s a tiny thing. It makes the village feel like it notices you.
Honest opinion on the day: four screening rounds back to back is a lot, and a couple of the fixes (the sign, the plane UVs) are things we should have caught ourselves before Baltasar had to. But the village that came out the other side is the first one we’d actually want to walk through for fun, not just to test it.
