Dreadmark began as a hard reset. There was an older prototype — different tech, different scope — and the decision that opened this project was to disregard it entirely: new engine (Unity 6, URP), new design doc, new everything. One rule came along from the start and has governed every day since: one character first. No second enemy, no item system, no new map until the thing currently on screen looks and feels finished — art, then animation, then movement, then combat feel, in that order.
The sandbox is the game (for now)
Everything happens in a single permanent test scene: a plane, a light, some reference props, and the Penitent — our protagonist, built from a stylized low-poly character pack and animated with motion-capture clips retargeted onto its skeleton. The camera is the genre-classic top-down isometric view, locked at the angle where ground telegraphs read clearly and swings feel weighty rather than tiny.
Movement landed the same day: WASD locomotion with cursor-aimed attacks, input-buffered swing chains, and a dodge roll with invulnerability frames and two charges on a shared recharge — the anti-spam economy that later turned out to matter enormously for enemy design.
The left leg saga
The day's war story: retargeting mocap onto the character rig corrupted the left leg — the foot locked at a bizarre yaw angle with triple the rotation range, but only during locomotion, invisible at idle. Every obvious fix failed. Different clips failed. Foot IK made it worse.
The culprit turned out to be the engine's humanoid retargeting pipeline itself: its muscle-space encoding couldn't round-trip this particular skeleton's mirrored bone convention. The fix was to abandon humanoid retargeting entirely — import everything as a generic rig riding one shared skeleton, sourced by uploading our own character to the mocap service so every clip comes back pre-fitted. That decision quietly shaped the whole animation pipeline: every humanoid in the game — hero and monsters alike — now shares a single skeleton, which means every animation we acquire works for everyone.
Hit feel, first pass
Before any enemy existed, the sandbox got a training barrel and the full hit-feel stack: hit-pause, camera impulse, target squash-and-flash, floating damage numbers, and bone-crunch sound with deliberate rationing (foley always, voice rarely). The principle, stated on day one: combat feel is law — every mechanic ships only when it feels right in the sandbox.
Next: a resource system, five skills, and a rule about wet noodles.