Mausitron

Devlog

• Prepping for a demo
  October 14, 2026 by mausthekat

  Yesterday I looked at the games that came out of the same line as Paradroid and Quazatron . Ctrl Alt Ego is a nearest recent one, and I dug in to how it was marketed. Its demo, the first two chapters,... Continue reading

  
• Devlog Published!
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  I have finally published this page and imported my (tidied) devlog across from my notes. Annoyingly, they all show the same date for their “published” date in the list, but each individual note is... Continue reading
• Levels without a window
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The level generator came next, built with no graphics at all. It writes levels in Quazatron’s grammar and prints them as text maps, which was enough to argue with. The movement rules went into plain... Continue reading

  
• A board for the grapple
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The puzzle was a good puzzle, but it did not feel like a fight, and taking over a program should. So it went on the shelf as my first prototype of the grapple, and I started again on a board. Two side... Continue reading

  
• Story-time
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  After digging into it a bit, it became clear that the puzzle prototype’s 2D library was not going to carry an isometric world with real depth, so the game would be built on Panda3D. The evenings aro... Continue reading
• Patches, and a decoy that follows you
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Mods became software patches to the player, some of them ranked as alpha, beta, release candidate and release. The first win is always ALPHA and winning the same patch again upgrades it. Before long I... Continue reading

  
• A testbed, and two sketches
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The Panda3D testbed puts a generated level in a true 2:1 isometric view with the KLP robot walking round it on the movement rules from July. Droids, pools, lifts and impact ripples followed. Two small... Continue reading

  
• Getting closer to Tron
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  On the 13th I posted the first clip of the testbed. I still was not sure it would go anywhere, so it only asked people to guess the inspiration. It did not look like cyberspace yet, and the next two d... Continue reading
• Terminals, docking and the Grid
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Terminals went into the level on the 15th, standing in corners, facing the viewer, in the greys of the building models. Getting the robot to dock with one turned into an argument with myself about dis... Continue reading

  
• Gates, objectives, and droids that shoot back
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  This is where a level started to have a purpose. Gates and the regions behind them came on the 18th, along with drops that kill, and every level got its objective and a program carrying the key to it,... Continue reading

  
• Loadouts, orbs, and the first purge
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  A program now carries fittings in five slots, and each level deals out its own armament. A level went from sixteen machines to thirty-two. Seven of the nine devices that had only been names got built... Continue reading

  
• Water, modules, and the Next shelved
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Pools were dug out properly on the 21st and given their own render pass, so water hides what is in it. I also wrote down the map faults with the measurements that found them, which became the habit fo... Continue reading

  
• Firewalls, compilers and sectors
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Gates became wired to terminals, with open and close sent as signals that travel along the wires and act where they land. The close countdown went from thirty seconds to ten. A new droid now walks out... Continue reading
• The grapple
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The grapple game came in on the 24th from the summer’s prototype and was merged on the 25th. It is fought on a square board inside the program’s own code-scape. Each side launches crawlers from a... Continue reading

  
• Status, scans and handoffs
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The terminal’s STATUS page became a block map, drawn the way a disk checker draws a platter, with a count of the corruption on it. The scan became a wave and the purge the same wave with teeth. One... Continue reading

  
• Rebuilding the ladder
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  A sector’s difficulty and its reward had been the same number, because a program’s grapple strength was its rung and its parts were that rung in every slot. That defeated every attempt to tune the... Continue reading
• Converting the generator to Rust
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The level generator was ported to Rust and writes the same bytes. Rebuilding every shipped sector went from 270 seconds to 2.7, and git reported nothing changed in the level files. The hard part was t... Continue reading
• Fishing spots, names and a sound engine
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The fishing spots started on the 5th: glowing places in the water where lost data can be recovered, which gave the fishing prototype from August somewhere to live as the DATA RECOVERY game. They are t... Continue reading

  
• A title screen, and a design on paper
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The front end got a title screen, the camera learned to turn, the pause screen became the options screen with tabs for GAMEPLAY, CONTROLS, AUDIO and VIDEO, and a PERSPECTIVE setting went in with 0% as... Continue reading

  
• Transporters, the KERNEL's eye, and device routines
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Transporters became fixtures with a beam going up, and the ride between sectors got a camera. On the 11th the CORE started killing anything that walks in without the credentials: a banner, a count fro... Continue reading

  
• Boot images, self-destruct and more builds
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Self-destruct went in: hold FIRE and ACTION for three seconds, a red ring fills, five are counted, FIRE aborts. Droids got provocation on top of one arbiter for what a machine does. Buildings between... Continue reading

  
• Accessibility Features
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  On the 14th a tester told me that two of my gauges were no good for anyone with poor eyesight. The energy bar was fine. The weapon gauge, a cobalt lifted to a pale mauve, and the action gauge, an ambe... Continue reading

  
• Data Caches and rumbles
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The rotation puzzle from June came back on the 19th as the lock on a locker: docking deals it, three attempts, the first free and the next two paid. It stays in 3D. Over the 20th it got its own light,... Continue reading

  
• WrTFM
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  On the 21st the manual started, with the grapple chapter and a way to print it, and then the main game. Writing it was the most effective audit the game has had. Fourteen things in the grapple chapter... Continue reading

  
• Windows, and the run log
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  On the 24th the groundwork for a Steam release went in, achievements included, each with a fallback so the game plays the same without it. Twenty-one caches are placed per run, off the beaten path, fr... Continue reading

  
• The transport beam
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The transport beam is a bonus game inside the transporter between sectors, and it went from the August prototype to playable fairly quickly. You hold to the wall of a tube, hop between lanes, and pick... Continue reading

  
• Achievements, the Pi, and a juddering Deck
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The rest of the achievements went in on the 29th, among them EVERY IMAGE (the CORE taken offline once from each boot image), NO BACKUP (the CORE taken offline without saving a backup) and SCRAP DEALER... Continue reading

  
• Rust where the frame went, and hardcore saves
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  Profiling sector 7, one of the busiest, on the Deck showed the robot simulation as a fifth of the Python frame. I converted it completely, and the robots’ step moved to Rust, transcribed line for li... Continue reading
• Colour assist, and the REAPER
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The REAPER is the KERNEL’s answer to a sector corrupted too fast. Push the corruption rate over a threshold and CORRUPTION RATE THRESHOLD EXCEEDED goes up over REAPER DISPATCHED; it rezzes in near t... Continue reading

  
• Revisiting Story-time
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The terminals now tell the story I started writing in July. It is told the way Tron 2.0’s terminals told theirs: every terminal in the system holds a few messages, made up of staff emails, the KERNE... Continue reading

  
• Tutorials
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  On the 5th a TUTORIAL HINTS setting went in, starting with chevrons bobbing over the cubes that set the grapple’s territory lines, after feedback that a new player cannot read the boundaries. That t... Continue reading

  
• Menus read aloud, and top-down view
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The menus, cards and options can now be read aloud, with SPEAK ON CURSOR reading each row as the cursor reaches it, for players who find the text hard going. HIGH-VIS EDGES went in for players who str... Continue reading

  
• A puzzle
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  The first thing I actually built was the takeover puzzle for the third game, as a quick prototype on arcade and pymunk. Quazatron’s takeover is effectively Paradroid’s circuit game, which I had wr... Continue reading

  
• Two old games, and a notebook
  October 13, 2026 by mausthekat

  This started as a side project while Jet Set Willy .Net was taking most of my evenings, and the plan was bigger and different. I wanted to convert Quazatron (Hewson, 1986) and Magnetron (Hewson, 1988)... Continue reading