Devlog

Alpha progress — September 2026

The last three days were the biggest jump this game has ever taken. At the start of the week Vesper was a landscape with a few buildings on it. Tonight it is a story you can play from the main menu to the ending, a build you can host for a friend, and a launcher that installs it. These are the change notes for that jump, written for players rather than for us — including the part where we say plainly what is still rough, because it is an alpha and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Substation 3 at night — the lit yard behind the fence, the objective, the compass and the new minimap

Vesper, nine hours dark

Vesper, Colorado. The power has been out for nine hours. You are Merritt, a lineman sent up the pass to find out why the valley went dark, and the first thing the dispatcher tells you is to reach Substation 3 and throw the breaker. From there the story runs eighteen objectives long — the crashed sedan on the pass road, the gas station at Ridgeline, the clinic, the gym the survivors are holed up in, the cabin on the dam road, and finally Calder Dam itself, its control room and the tunnels under it.

Every one of those places is built, lit for night and reachable on foot, and the whole chain from the cold open to the ending at the dam has been played through end to end. The valley is dark on purpose: moonlight, your flashlight, and the few pools of light where somebody still has a generator running. Those pools are where you will want to be — and, as it turns out, where you should not.

The rule

The thing that makes this game what it is finally works the way it was written:

  • The Sleepless are only dangerous where the power is on. In the dark they stand still. They do not chase, they do not swing, their eyes are out. You can walk into the middle of a crowd of them with a flashlight and they will not so much as turn.

In the dark: five Sleepless standing within arm’s reach of the flashlight — and not one of them moves

  • Throw a breaker and the valley lights up — and so do they. Powered zones wake everything inside them. Near a live substation there are more of them and they are meaner. Light is where the people are, and light is where the danger is. That tension is the whole game.
  • Bodies near power rise. Anyone who dies where the current is flowing gets back up as one of them. That includes the people you meet on the road, and it includes you: go down in the dark and you stay down until a teammate reaches you; go down in the light and you are on a clock, and if it runs out you become the thing your friends are fighting.

The power comes back on: a Sleepless under the work lamp by the breaker cabinet — and, at your shoulder, the body that just rose

  • Wall cling. Put your back to a wall, a fence or a truck and you are out of sight. Lean to look, and step out when it is clear.

Combat got a full pass too. A Sleepless takes four hits to put you down. A pistol drops one in four or five body shots or two to the head, and the tire iron you find at the crashed sedan does it in one or two swings — if you are close enough to mean it. Ammo, food and water are placed by hand around the sites, and hunger and thirst were rebalanced so that the first act no longer kills you of dehydration before you reach the clinic.

Finding your way

The old minimap was a blank disc. The new one is a real top-down of Vesper made from the actual terrain, with the road, the objective marker and its distance, the sites you have discovered and the people nearby — and, because it matters here more than anywhere, which zones are powered and which are dark. Throw a breaker and you watch the tint change around you.

The minimap in the dark, the same spot a second after the breaker, and the dark zones at Calder Dam

Press M for the full map of the valley: the pass road from Substation 3 down through Vesper to the dam, the same powered / dark legend, zoom, and a north-up toggle. A compass across the top of the screen carries the objective too, so you are never more than a glance from where you are meant to be going.

The full map of Vesper — Substation 3, the pass road, the town and Calder Dam, with the powered band across the valley

Quorra

There is a new voice on the radio. Quorra is Vesper’s volunteer radio operator — the one talking you through the first act from her makeshift studio while you are still alone on the pass, with a line waiting at each site you reach. In the second act you find the studio itself, in the back room of the clinic, and meet her in person. If the name is familiar, it should be: she is the same Quorra from our Tron OS side, brought into the game with her own face and hair.

Playing together

Co-op is in. Host a game from the main menu, friends join over LAN or by direct IP, everyone readies up in the lobby and the host starts the run. The whole flow — menu, lobby, roster, ready-up, the trip into Vesper — has been proven in a packaged build, not just in the editor, and a joined player stayed in the valley for more than thirteen minutes without a single drop.

Steam sessions are wired up next to it. The game is built to work the same way whether it came from Steam or from our own launcher: Steam friends and sessions when the Steam client is there, plain LAN and direct IP when it is not, with the same lobby either way. The Steam half has not been exercised against a live Steam client yet, so for this alpha LAN and direct IP are the supported paths.

The launcher

The alpha does not come as a bare zip. It comes through our own launcher: sign in with your Sleepless Games account, pick an install folder, and it downloads, verifies and patches the game — and only for accounts that are entitled to it. Alpha access is a supporter perk, and the download is checked on the server on every request, not just in the launcher, so the build stays with the people it is meant for.

The freeze that was found and fixed

For most of the week, the hosting player froze solid about four minutes after arriving in the valley. Not a crash — the game simply stopped drawing frames and never came back. It was the single thing standing between this build and an alpha, and it took days to run down: it was not the number of enemies, not the AI, not the network, not the navigation. The host was quietly loading the entire valley — every tree, every rock, millions of tiny physics bodies — while a normal player only ever loads what is around them, and one part of the physics engine could not keep up with that much at once. The fix makes the host load the world the way a player does. The valley now comes up in about five seconds for the host instead of two to three minutes, uses around a tenth of the memory, and the freeze is gone.

What is being rebuilt next

We have been looking hard at this build ourselves, and the characters and the menus are not good enough yet. They are the next jobs, and they are why there are no character close-ups or menu screenshots in this post.

  • The characters. Merritt, the survivors and Quorra’s body are placeholder models. They look low-detail up close, and the clothing reads like it is painted onto the body rather than pieces a person is actually wearing. The character chooser works — male or female Merritt, three outfits, three hair options, carried into the game and shown to the other players in your session — but what it puts on screen is getting rebuilt: higher-detail bodies, and clothing made of real pieces you can put on and take off. The Sleepless are still the stock zombie model for now as well.
  • The menus. The main menu, character screen and lobby were rebuilt this week so that nothing overlaps at any resolution, but they still look dated. They are getting a full modern pass next, with the new characters on the screen.
  • Animation. The female character currently uses the male walk and run. The wall-cling pose does not visibly crouch yet. People who die in front of you stay standing until they rise.

What else is rough in the alpha

This is an alpha, and this list is the honest one:

  • The world. Marketplace assets throughout (we credit them, and they will not be in the production game). It is summer in Vesper — no snow yet. Most houses are shells you cannot enter.
  • Co-op. LAN and direct IP only; hosts behind a home router need to forward a port. Teammate markers on the map, the wall-cling pose and the Sleepless eye-glow have not yet been proven on a second player’s screen. Steam sessions are untested against a real Steam client.
  • Loading. The first trip into Vesper is slow while shaders compile, and there is no proper loading screen for a player joining a game yet.
  • The freeze fix. It has held through long sessions around the opening area; a full start-to-finish run on it is part of the next test.
  • The map. Powered zones are drawn as boxes, so most of the valley reads as one tint and only the smaller sites read as shapes. Labels overlap where things stand close together. The full map does not pan yet.
  • Quorra. Her in-game body and animation are still being finished, and the story’s plan for her to come with you to the dam in the third act is not in the build yet.
  • Balance. Weapon feel, aim and difficulty have been tuned by numbers, not yet by enough human hands.
  • Missing on purpose for now: cinematics, a full dialogue system, vehicles, and saving progress between sessions (the server side for launcher installs is built; the game side is next).
  • Windows only, and the download is about 9.5 GB.

What is next

Alpha 0.1.1 is the next build. Before it goes out: the character and menu rebuilds above, the game learning whether it was installed from Steam or from our launcher so that servers and saves match up, a full release package with everything in this post, and a start-to-finish test of that package. Then it goes to supporters through the launcher.

If you want to be in that first group, the Patreon is where it happens. The progress page and the roadmap are updated with everything in this post.