The reset: Unreal, photoreal, one night
Seven decisions in one day: the client moves to Unreal Engine 5, the look follows the film, and the demo becomes Night One, offline by design.
The intro film was approved today, and it forced the biggest day of decisions in the project. Seven of them, written down as ADRs:
- Engine (ADR-005): Unreal Engine 5. The film is photoreal and the game must continue from its last frame. UE5 gives us Lumen and MegaLights for the monitor-and-neon lighting, MetaHuman for people, Sequencer for the cutaways, and a media framework that can literally play the intro in-engine. The Bevy and Unity clients are archived: they stay in git history and get no new work.
- Look (ADR-007): photoreal, per the intro. About 90% of the frame dark or neutral, 10% accent. No floating holograms, no excessive neon, no hooded hackers, no falling code. The comic-neon direction of the MVP docs is retired. A game that looks different from its trailer breaks the promise the trailer makes.
- Scope (ADR-008): “Night One” replaces the three-month MVP. A 15 to 25 minute cinematic slice at final polish, two playable spaces, everything else as cutaway, CCTV or film. New kill list: multiplayer, blockchain and wallets, open world, life sim, voice acting, extra locations.
- Game logic (ADR-006): Drift Core. All rules in one deterministic Rust library, loaded in-process. No Docker, no Postgres, no ports on a player’s machine. Covered in its own post.
- Assets (ADR-009): buy what is generic, craft what the camera studies. Kits and MetaHuman for bulk, hand-finished hero props (the cassette player, the phone, the badge), AI where it is already good enough. Image-to-3D statues never ship. Every asset gets a rights row before Steam.
- Platform (ADR-010): Windows 64-bit only. One matrix to package, test and support, measured on real player-class GPUs. (Amended the same day: the demo targets Windows, Linux and macOS on Steam. Drift Core is plain Rust and UE5 packages for all three, so the cost is a wider test matrix, not new engineering.)
- The lair (ADR-011): the film’s last frame is ground truth. Six monitors on poles, the cassette player and cyan clock at the left end of the desk, lamp off, rain on the window. The player starts seated at the workstation, not at the door.
On blockchain, plainly, because cutting it from the demo will read as cutting it from the game: it is not cut from the game. Your name, your Creds, your tapes and your Hash Drift living on-chain is the full game’s memory, and that design stands. What changed today is the demo. Night One runs fully offline, no wallet, nothing to install, for two reasons: twenty minutes should be install-and-play, and Steam does not distribute games with chain mechanics. The chain work is not thrown away, it is waiting. The transcript hash Drift Core computes today is exactly what anchors on-chain when the online game arrives.
A year of work went into the two clients and the backend that today got archived. It was not wasted: it taught us what the game is, what it is not, and exactly which parts were load-bearing. Those parts moved into Drift Core the same day.