The campaign
With arena mode built, the test bot got a standing order: clear all three waves — thirty-three monsters — with the least damage possible, as fast as possible. Then it ran the gauntlet forty times across eight batches, with the telemetry analyzer grading every run and each batch feeding fixes into the next.
The first batch was a massacre: ~670 damage and twelve deaths per run. The bot that had mastered a six-enemy skirmish collapsed against eleven simultaneous attackers. What followed was an honest tour of wrong answers, each disproven by its own batch: blanket caution (the bot turtled so hard it ran out the clock), healing while standing still (the pack forms a ring around a stationary target), even orbiting its healing circle (pursuers don't follow your circle — they cut the chord and stand on it).
What survived the evidence is a doctrine any ARPG veteran would recognize: string the pack out, then strike the front of the train. Long committed runs spread pursuers into a line by their different speeds; turn and kill the two or three leaders; run again. Healing is a pit stop taken only when genuinely alone. Damage fell by a quarter and the best runs more than halved — and the remaining cost of each clear now looks less like bot stupidity and more like the arena's honest price, which is exactly the kind of number a designer can balance against.
The campaign also proved the pipeline: batches now run at 3× speed (a full five-run batch in six minutes), with a status banner showing batch, run, and live timescale — added after a fast batch turned out to be quietly running at 1× because the hit-pause effect restored the world to normal speed after every landed blow. The forty runs also flushed out real bugs: a whirlwind that ignored its own low-health rule, arrow dodges that triggered on distance instead of time-to-impact, and an input buffer that could deadlock the hold-to-attack feature after a single missed chain window.
Ears where they belong
A player asked the obvious question the engine never does: if monsters spawn to the east, why don't they sound east? Because the game's ears were mounted on the camera — eighteen meters up, where every source is nearly equidistant and stereo collapses to mush. The listener now rides the player, oriented to the camera, and every effect became properly positional with falloff tuned to combat ranges. Close your eyes and you can point at the wave.
Alongside: the first ESC pause menu (graphics, display mode, volume), windowed-by-default builds, red damage numbers when you are the one bleeding, skeletons that finally surround you on all sides instead of queueing politely, a heavy that shoves through the crowd — and versions v0.0.2 through v0.0.5 shipped as playable builds, because the designer now plays a standalone copy while the bot churns batches in the editor. Two instruments, one telemetry pipeline, and the next entry will be about what happens when we compare them.