So, after all the research, filtering, structuring and design wrestling, it was finally time to do the thing people usually think gamedev starts with: opening your engine of choice and building actual game stuff - because that’s what all those YouTube pros making “make Diablo in one day” tutorials do, right?

This phase was mostly about technical groundwork. Project setup, engine-side decisions, early content pipeline tests, camera controls, post-process experiments, map work, materials, and the general question of how this thing should actually look.

A lot of it was first-pass work, obviously. The point here wasn’t polish, it was to establish a base that could support the game later without immediately collapsing under the weight of its own ambition. Which meant making and testing some tools, fumbling with technical and implementation tradeoffs etc.

This is also where the visual side started properly entering the conversation. Not final art, not even close, but the first steps towards atmosphere: how the map should feel, how readable the world is from a gameplay perspective, what style we want, how much is just right, and how to avoid making the whole thing look either utterly dead or undoable - you know, scaling problems.

Basically, this is finally the moment where we started working on the actual product.

(November 2025)