This round the game got its face. When the day started, the graveyard sat under a warm sunset like a diorama in a shop window. When it ended, the whole game was one continuous moonlit night — cold steel-blue light, fog swallowing the distance, and a chain of flickering torches marking the long walk from the spawn to the cathedral gate.
The torches deserve their own paragraph. They follow the actual route an enemy pathfinder would walk, alternating sides every sixteen metres, so they read as wayfinding without a single UI marker. Each flame flickers on its own rhythm — a row of them never pulses in sync — and every light is deliberately cheap, because this is an ARPG and one day soon there will be forty skeletons on screen. Frame time is now a first-class design constraint here: there's a small always-on FPS readout at the top of the screen, and every pretty thing that ships gets weighed against it.
The week-long fight with camera occlusion — what happens when a wall stands between the camera and your hero — finally ended. The answer turned out to be a small see-through ghost disc punched around the character, per-pixel, inside the very shader the world is drawn with. Six bugs shipped and died on the way: shadows carved by a phantom disc, a red band where the floor opened into the void, a screen full of shimmer from one wrong number in a dither table, and a "mystery circle" that turned out to be the shadow system's own seam, older than the feature itself. Each one was found the same way: play the game, describe exactly what you see, and let one small experiment decide. The last piece was almost funny — thin red dashes on the ground traced back to a single vertex in the ground tile mesh, two centimetres out of place, repeated by every one of 1,092 tiles.
And the cathedral finally has a door — a real one. A gothic portal with iron-studded double doors that you click to enter, with a border that lights pale when you're close enough and burns orange when you're not. The sides of the cathedral are sealed by rockfall, so the door is the only way in; inside, a matching arch is the only way out. No more zoning by accident because you drifted into an invisible trigger. Between the two, a fullscreen loading screen with the torch-lit gate as its artwork — held on screen just long enough to feel like a threshold, not a hiccup.
Next: an executioner's platform in front of the gate, and something worth fighting along those three hundred metres of torchlight.