A wolf at the treehouse
2026-07-16, screenings 17 through 20
The companions got their arms back today, which sounds like a strange thing to celebrate until you know they’d been missing. Nara and Alden had been built on our generic villager rig, arms fused straight into the torso, no proper joints. For the handful of scenes where they actually needed to move like people rather than furniture, we moved just those three call sites onto the same rig the hero uses. We want to flag something we’re a little proud of here: we touched exactly the files we own and nothing in the NPC folder that belongs to another part of the pipeline. Boundaries matter more the bigger a project gets, even a solo one running on multiple threads of work.
We also gave the kids a treehouse. A dense grove of twenty-two trees in the northwest, one giant tree three times the size of the others, with a hideout built into its southern face. It has been there since day one now, quietly, waiting for the story to catch up to it.
And the story did catch up, in the best bad-news way a game can deliver it. The first real combat in Vexalia is not a friendly spar, it’s a defense. On the ninth night, something tests the ladder up to the treehouse: a wolf, an actual animal, hunger and nothing supernatural about it, and the three young Vex the party has been secretly raising put themselves between the children and the dark. We won’t describe more of that scene than this. It’s an early, honest beat about what it means to be protected by something you’re supposed to be protecting, and we’d rather you meet it in the game.
The satchel had been riding suspiciously low all week, and today we finally moved it from somewhere around the character’s waist up to between the shoulder blades, where a bag actually belongs. We also caught a genuinely embarrassing bug: quit a save mid-conversation, start a brand new game, and the old dialogue would still be sitting there, armed and ready, because our subtitle bar survives scene loads by design and nobody had told it to clear itself. Somebody’s very first morning in a new world was getting interrupted by a line meant for a completely different save. Fixed, now, on every scene load.
One more thing we’re happy with: the “invisible wall” reports from village testing turned out to be conversation trigger zones we’d built as solid colliders instead of triggers, some of them six meters wide. We went through and made a house rule out of it: interaction zones are never walls, full stop, and we swept every zone in the valley to make sure that’s actually true now, not just true where we remembered to check.
