# Blackbird Hollow changelog

Draft entries for Eric to rewrite.

## 2026-11-03

- Continue puts back everything a save holds. It used to lose: the crane hook's chain (so a finished bridge came back
  as a pit, with Rosie's crane console already spent), chains cut in a group not yet finished (one of the lift-gate
  chains, some of the jig's), crates already cut down, and the titanium panels (they reappeared in the cage). Saves
  made before this fix are repaired as they load.
- The patrols' red vision cones point where the drones look. They were drawn behind the drones while the drones
  spotted you from the front, so every patrol caught you from a direction that looked safe.
- Rosie types at consoles again (she stayed in her walk while she worked one).
- A results screen after every win: each of the party's damage, healing, damage taken and drones downed (with
  "Most damage" and "Top healer"), then the rewards: XP, the level bar, a level-up, and the new skills it brings.
  Continue (or E, Enter, Space, a tap) carries on. It fits phones upright (two by two) and on their side.
- The fight on the inclined car keeps everyone on the deck (the back row stood out past the rail, in the air).
- Textures ride with things that move: the car's caution stripes, the blast doors, the lift cages and every prop no
  longer crawl as they move (they were mapped in world space, so a moving object slid through its own stripes).
- Shields you can wear down. The Shield Drone's field and the Sentry's screens are now a pool of shield points that
  soaks up hits until it breaks, instead of a flat cut to every hit that never ended. A blue bar sits over the drone's
  health bar with its number, the target list shows it (⬢ and what's left), each hit shows how much the shield took,
  and a "Break!" lands with a crunch and a hitstop when it goes.
- The Void meter fills: a proper gauge with its percentage, and "Overload ready ✦" when it's full; the Astronomer's
  card glows while she's overloaded. Her plain attack now charges it too. (The bar never filled before: it measured
  its width against a box that shrank to fit it.)
- The Astronomer's skills are little cinematics now, cut like Star Rail's: Comet opens a gate of light overhead and
  comets come down on every drone; Void Lance crosses the room; Supernova is a star that swells over the drones and
  dies; Event Horizon, Gravity Well, Sanctuary, Rebirth, Starlight, Rust, Regrowth and Entropy Bloom each get their
  own shots and effects. Starfall's light comes down as comets too.
- The Burner fight is on the test-cell floor (it was staged at the height of whoever led in from the gantry, so the
  party fought in the air under the ceiling).
- Skills aimed at one drone now know which drone: Rin walks in to land Haymaker, Rising Combo, Meteor Fist and Shield
  Bash on it, Seven steps up to torch it, and everyone faces their target (single-target skills used to play at home,
  facing forward, as if the drone weren't there).
- Doorways have floors. Every room's floor stopped at the middle of its wall, so between two rooms there was a strip
  two walls thick (about 2 ft) with nothing in it: you could walk across (the walk surface was there), but it looked
  like the party hopped a gap. 23 doorways across the base now have a slab of floor.
- The follow camera no longer swings round at doors. Kept inside the room by sliding it sideways, it could flip to
  the far side of the leader (a half turn in one frame) as the leader stepped through; now it only moves in along its
  own line of sight, and may stay in the room behind while it can see through the door.
- The target list in fights no longer runs off the edge when a drone has a shield (the health went missing), and on
  phones held upright the dialogue box in fights is full width again (it was squeezed into a sliver).
- The first time the party meets each kind of drone, Rosie gets excited about it and someone cuts her off.

## 2026-11-02

- The sound pass. A mixer with channels (music, ambience, the world, fights, panels, voice) and every sound levelled
  to its role from measurements (tools/sfx_levels.py writes src/mix.js); Music, Effects and Voice faders in the pause
  menu; music dips under dialogue (it never did) and for a moment under the biggest hits.
- New sounds, synthesised for the game (tools/sfx_synth.py): a fight set for each of the party (punches and kicks,
  finger-gun shots, the overclock charge and beam, the hack, starlight, rust, the bloom), a dual-tech sting, block and
  perfect-block sounds, hits on the party and on drones. Replaced: the melee hit that landed 0.8 s late, heals and the
  void that were 25-second drones, the thin panel beeps (now three variations), the scanner, the alarms, Seven's treads.
- Footsteps were silent: now metal on grates and plates, concrete elsewhere, quieter walking than running. Seven's
  treads follow his speed, and the nearest drones hum.
- Fix: after the opening film played to its end (not skipped), the party stayed under the film's control, so they
  never animated in the first fight or after it. Lines in the comms box now time out during fights too, and the
  party calls out their skills and dual techs as they use them.
- Fix: pressing E at a console while standing on its spot left Rosie shuffling against the leader for 8 seconds
  before she got to work; the leader now steps back out of her way. A fight starting while Rosie walked to a console
  no longer leaves that console dead for the rest of the session.
- Footsteps only sound when someone is really moving: no more footfall from a character walking in place against a
  wall or a partner, and Seven's treads go quiet when he's pushing into something. Footsteps are as loud as the
  walker is close to Seven: full beside him, gone by about 14 m.
- A new skill for each of the party at every level from 2 to 10 (28 in all), with a banner naming them on each level-up:
  Rin gets Haymaker, Sweep Kick, Iron Will, Rally, Rising Combo, Bulwark and Meteor Fist; Seven gets Spark Spray, Weld
  Patch, Arc Weld, Plate Up, Thermal Lance, Reboot and Meltdown; Rosie gets Double Tap, EMP Pulse, Ricochet, Firewall,
  Lock-On, System Crash and Orbital Strike; the Astronomer gets Void Lance, Comet, Sanctuary, Gravity Well, Rebirth,
  Event Horizon and Supernova. The skills list scrolls once it is long. Starlight can now pick a fallen ally to revive
  (it could revive, but the list never offered anyone who was down).
- Spell and skill sounds from ElevenLabs: the placeholder spell sounds replaced (Starlight, Rust, the Void, Overclock's
  charge and beam, Hack, fire swings, zaps, the dual-tech sting, Rin's finisher) and a sound for every new skill. The
  dual-tech sting now lands on the hit.
- Taunt now pays off: while it holds, Rin hits back every time a drone attacks her (harder still on a perfect block).
- Fight cameras no longer park behind stairs or under catwalks (the view check now sees stairs, ramps and catwalks, not
  only walls), and no one in the party is placed under a staircase.
- The hoist chains: each hanging crate is tied off to a cleat on the floor, and that tie is what Seven cuts (the cut
  prompt used to float in the air with nothing there).
- Heals no longer show "+0" over party members already at full health.
- A sound pass with ElevenLabs: 16 sounds replaced with picked and trimmed ElevenLabs takes (drone hits, punches,
  kicks, block, hurt, the perfect-block clash, swings, the blaster, KOs, heal, the chest, access granted and denied,
  metal and concrete footsteps); the panel beeps stay. Repeated sounds never play the same take twice running and vary
  a little in pitch and level, and fight sounds hold their level through the camera cuts instead of jumping with
  every shot.
- Chests: one in each room, tucked into a corner off the route, 17 in all (7 of them before the Foreman). Each
  holds an upgrade for the whole party, +5% damage or +3% armour, and some hold kits, coolant or an EMP. The
  latch lamp glows green while a chest is full; the lid swings open with a new sound.
- Rin, the tank, starts with 65% more health (231, from 140).
- Starfall heals at least 35 to each of the party. It healed a share of the damage it dealt, which against a single
  armoured boss came to about 7, not worth what it costs.
- A new hit on the drones: a dented-armour crunch in three takes, instead of the ring that sounded like a fork on
  a glass.
- The 19 sound files the game no longer loads are moved to assets/sfx/_archive, with a note on each.
- The build number now fingerprints every file, so a browser can never mix old cached code with new files.
- New fight moves for Rin, Rosie and the Astronomer, keyed pose to pose with anticipation, steps, hips and shoulders:
  Rin's three-hit combo (straight, spinning roundhouse, two-fist hammer), shoulder charge and uppercut, taunt and
  guard; Rosie's finger-gun double tap, spinning overclock, air-keyboard hack and patch lob; the Astronomer's
  pirouette strike, orbiting heal, rust, bloom and regrowth.
- Effects from the Prism Forge pack, a look per character: fire for Rin, ice and volt for Rosie, holy light, venom and
  void for the Astronomer.
- Camera cuts, hit-stops, slow motion and flashes on the big blows; dual techs cut from one partner to the other, then
  to both for the hit.
- Contact shadows under the party, Seven, Mote and the drones at every quality setting, and a lower key light for
  longer shadows.
- Fixes: you can walk and drive under the SR-71 now (only its landing gear and the jig's cradles are solid); a chain
  can only be cut from its own floor, with nothing in the way; Rosie faces the console she works; stepping up or back
  never stacks two of the party on one spot.
- The opening film, reshot: hard cuts instead of one long drift, every shot framed on someone. The door chains wrap
  the handles low enough for Seven's torch, and you see each one cut. Rosie says why she heads off, and the door
  controls now sit on the portal's pillar, lit, instead of inside the rock. Mote keeps out of the torch shot, and the
  drones' red vision cones stay off the floor during the film.
- Shading on the faces and hair: rounded "pillow" normals (as anime-style 3D games do) so one clean shadow shape
  sweeps across a face as the light moves, instead of blotches; the faces now have a proper light and shadow tone;
  cloth folds from the baked normal maps show more. A turntable test page is in tools/lighttest.html.

## 2026-11-01 (later)

- The back half of the game: Clean Rooms, Power Plant, Plotting Room, Engine Test Cells and the Runway, with airlocks,
  decon gas, generators, the inclined car, the plotting-room vault code, gantries and the last airframe's jig.
- Three new bosses: the Sentry (hides behind its screens), the Burner (an unblockable blast every third turn, warned a
  turn ahead) and the Carrier (launches drones of its own).
- The ending: Seven loads the crates, everyone boards the transport, and it flies out of the mountain. Thanks for
  playing.
- New props: generators, heal stations, the plotting screens, the flight computer, the J58 on its dolly, the star
  tracker, the inclined car, cargo crates and the transport.
- Every floor arrival is a full rest and checkpoint; every lift rides back up; a lost boss comes round after a wipe;
  a safety net catches anyone who falls out of the world.
- Fight tuning across all 19 fights from simulated runs.
- The CityLab start-up loader, as in Replacement: every file checked and shown as it lands, the build steps with the
  time left, a shader warm-up, Try again and Reset app cache when something fails, and records to read while it loads.
- A pass over all the world geometry after Eric's playtest: no more flicker where two surfaces overlapped (props over
  their collision boxes, the lift deck over the floor, duplicated walls over doorways, the tunnel lining), lift shafts
  barred with rails on any floor the cage isn't at, the airframe's jig solid only where something is really there,
  catwalks that ran out short of the wall, walls over doorways with no collision, open edges outside the blast doors,
  and shadows that hold still instead of crawling. Being spotted by a patrol gives the drones one free round, not a
  dozen turns each for the fast ones; a first strike is one free round for the party. Fight and explore cameras stay inside the room you're in.
- Fixes from playing the whole game: the pit crossing on the Metal Shop, the parts cage you couldn't walk into, walls
  that ran up through the floors above, the test cell and hangar overlapping the floors above them, the inclined car
  stopping for good after its fight, patrols noticing the party through a floor, doorway gaps you could fall through,
  chains and pickups just out of reach, and a lost boss coming back after a wipe on every floor.

## 2026-11-01

- First playable slice: Hangar Doors and the Metal Shop, the opening cutscene, six fights including the Foreman, and the
  end card.
- Rin's hair rebuilt as a spiky mop with copper underneath, closer to her character sheet.
- Battle camera picks the clearest view of the whole fight instead of a fixed spot behind the party.
- Drones get a steel rim light so they read in dim rooms.
- The mountain outside is a snowy ridgeline under the stars instead of a wall over the sky; floodlights on the blast
  doors.
- Fight tuning from simulated runs of the real route: XP raised about threefold, rests added, the shop patrol now has
  a welder that revives fallen drones, hunters hit a little softer.
- A lost boss or opening fight comes round again after a respawn.
- Level fixes from an end-to-end play: the stairs now lead onto the east catwalk, the catwalks join the north bridge
  and run to the wall, the pillars no longer block Seven, the office has doors onto the catwalk, and the guard booth's
  repair kit sits on the table where you can see and reach it.
- Pickups are visible: a white case with a red cross for a repair kit, a blue canister for coolant.
- Battle layout for short screens (phones on their side, small windows).