This round, our automated test heroes did something no run had ever done: they beat the demo's whole critical path, end to end, without a single restart.
For context — Dreadmark's demo funnels you through the Graveyard: clear its four guardian minibosses, and the Cathedral doors open on the endgame. Our test pilgrims have been throwing themselves at that funnel for weeks, and this week one of them finally walked the entire road: four guardians down, through the Cathedral gauntlet, and face to face with the Dark Lord himself. Then a second pilgrim did it. Then, by morning, four of five — including a character born at level 1 the same evening.
Watching hundreds of those attempts taught us things no spreadsheet could, and this round ships the results.
The Cathedral re-locks between sessions. Killing the four guardians opens the doors for that sitting — quit the game, and the pilgrimage must be earned again. It keeps the climb meaningful instead of a one-time checkbox, and it makes each run's arc complete: gear up, take the guardians, storm the Cathedral.
The Dark Lord learned patience. Our testers proved that at any realistic level, his old rhythm was mathematically unbeatable — a wall, not a fight. He now telegraphs longer, breathes between abilities, and raises his Horrors less relentlessly, and his health pool no longer assumes you brought an army. He is still the demo's hardest test by a wide margin; he's just fightable now, and we'll keep tuning by hand from here.
A thousand deaths drew us a map. Every place our heroes died, got cornered, or wedged into scenery is now catalogued with coordinates — a punch list of terrain fixes and encounter-density tweaks for the Graveyard's meanest pockets, especially one crossroads where three spawners overlap into a killing field. Expect that area to fight fairer soon.
And one honest bug confession: the test heroes discovered that swinging a staff — any staff — landed exactly nothing. The swing looked right, the damage never came. Staves are benched from their arsenals until the fix ships, and if you ever felt suspiciously harmless holding one, you weren't imagining it.
Next up: the designer plays alongside the machines. We've built a way to record real human runs — every decision, kite, and gamble annotated in place — and that data becomes the blueprint for the biggest test-hero brain upgrade yet. The better they play, the harder they push the game, and the better Dreadmark gets before it ever reaches you.