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— direction, not deadlines —

Now

What is being worked on. What is next. What comes later.

There is no roadmap. There is direction. The devlog is the calendar, and the calendar is weekly. Nothing on this page has a date. If a line on this page moves up, it will appear in the devlog first. If a line on this page disappears, it will say so in the devlog. Vellum does not promise futures it has not built; it shows what it is reaching for.

i.

Now

The work of the current weeks. Visible in the most recent devlog entries.

  • — An economy that drains as fast as it fills — the hard part of a player economy is not printing coins, it is destroying them. Gear now falls off the dead in the dangerous zones, dying burns a twentieth of the coins you carry, forging at the top tiers costs money, and the house that buys your surplus finally consumes what it buys instead of hoarding it. The knob that decides how much it absorbs is being turned a notch at a time, against measurements rather than instinct.
  • — A world you can hear — ninety-five sounds, all synthesised in the browser rather than shipped as a sample library, are in. What has no sound yet is the weather and the long ambient beds — the sky already storms, snows and fogs, but a continuous layer is not a one-shot, and the part of the engine that would light a source at runtime has not been written.

ii.

Next

After the current work. Designed, not started. Subject to discovery during the build.

  • — Learning NPCs — the next opponents are meant to learn, not follow scripts. The reinforcement-learning pipeline is built (a self-play league, an LLM setting each fighter a goal); the frontier is training a champion good enough to promote into the live world. Until one is, today’s NPCs run on hand-written behaviour.
  • — Reputation-driven NPC dialogue — what an innkeeper says depends on what you have done in their region.
  • — Faction-wide adaptive behaviour: NPCs that share what they have noticed across a faction, not only one-on-one.

iii.

Later

Directions the world is meant to grow in. Not committed. Honest signposts.

  • — Weather and season as systems with mechanical weight (mud slows you, frost preserves food, drought ruins the second harvest) — and, with them, the ambient layer the sound bank is still missing.
  • — A guild structure that mirrors a small medieval workshop more than a Discord-on-rails.
  • — Player housing inside cities — rare, paid in standing with the city, not in euros.

The devlog is where the dates would have gone.

Read the devlog