Devlog
Updates from the spire
Patch notes, mechanics deep-dives, and development retrospectives from the Pyrekin team.
2026-05-22
The fifth climber and the Heat meter
The Pyromancer joins the climb with a brand-new Heat mechanic — build the meter for scaling fire damage, vent it for burst, but Overheat at the cap and you burn yourself. Plus 44 new cards, four fire-touched enemies, eight events, and a catch-up pass that brings the Druid level with the rest.
Read more →2026-04-30
The fourth climber and a wider shop
Druid joins the climb with 33 cards and three mastery picks, four bosses per act instead of three, 29 new Flux-painted card arts, and seven new cosmetic categories — profile titles, energy orbs, HP bars, map nodes, card borders, ambience, and nine new class skins.
Read more →2026-04-27
The climb deepens — three acts, daily challenges, and a polish pass
Three full acts with a final boss, daily challenges with a per-day leaderboard, ten achievements, three playable classes with class-locked relics and events, mobile-first combat, and a real audio rework.
Read more →2026-04-25
Pyrekin opens its doors (early access)
First playable build is live: 30 cards, 10 relics, three bosses, branching 15-floor map, accounts and cloud save. Here's what shipped and what's next.
Read more →2026-04-12
Cosmetics only, in writing
The shop opens with 18 items across five categories — skins, card backs, name effects, map themes, avatar frames. What's for sale, what is never going to be, and why I'm putting it in writing.
Read more →2026-03-21
Six playtests in: what's actually wrong
Friends played for an hour each. Card balance and boss difficulty went unmentioned. Visual differentiation, victory feedback, and the missing music came up six times out of six.
Read more →2026-02-28
Procedural audio, take one
Every sound effect built from oscillators, noise bursts, and biquad filters at click time. 15 KB transferred for the entire audio system. No music yet — that's another evening.
Read more →2026-02-08
The Stone Sentinel
First boss design. 180 HP, three-action cycle, deliberately telegraphed. The hardest part wasn't the encounter — it was getting Slam from 18 to 32 to 26 in three nights of solo playtesting.
Read more →2026-01-18
Accounts, cloud save, and the F2P split
Email + password auth, JSONB run state per user, and a written promise about what is and isn't for sale. If I'm wrong about the cosmetic-only model commercially, the project fails.
Read more →2025-12-30
Year-end: lessons from a half-built spire
Two months in. What worked: pure-function engine, Tailwind, App Router. What didn't: starting with art, hand-rolling RNG, Google OAuth. Q1 plan: cloud save, first real boss, audio.
Read more →2025-12-13
Procedural maps in 200 lines
Branching 15-floor maps generated from a seed: nodes per floor, biased forward edges, fixed orphans, reserved campfire/treasure floors. Plus an ASCII renderer for the test suite.
Read more →2025-11-29
Card-play loop, week one
Pure-function reducer. Deterministic. Strike, Defend, Bash, Iron Wave, plus the Acid Slime. Five-second fights that feel right. Why the engine being deterministic is paid-for replay validation.
Read more →2025-11-08
Why I'm building Pyrekin
Solo developer, browser-only, deck-building roguelike, F2P with cosmetics. The plan, the stack (Next + TS + Postgres), and the constraint: ship something playable in a month even if it's ugly.
Read more →