Step21

Where we are today, in numbers, and what is still open

24 October 2026 · 3 min read

statusnumbersroadmap

Both fleets in a bay seen from high above, with a green shore and a naval yard on either side.

This is the last step that is caught up with the present. From here on, How It's Made gets a new step when something worth telling happens.

The numbers

The project folder is dated 15 September. The first commit is 17 September. Today is 24 October.

What	Count
Commits	2,219 over 32 days
The busiest day	25 September, 224 commits
Game code (C++ and headers)	about 120,000 lines
Scripts (Python, PowerShell, Blender)	about 500 files
One Blender script that builds the models	about 25,000 lines
Campaign missions	17 (14 land, air and sea, 3 naval)
Tower Defense levels	50, six chapters, with an endless mode and rule cards
Factions	3 (USA, RUSSIA, MARS)
Achievements	70 (67 wired up, 3 hidden)
Agent roles	more than a dozen
Friend builds	10

What is proved, and what is not

Proved by a script or a log, not only by our impression:

Every campaign mission has a scripted win route, a lose route and a checkpoint on Easy.
Tower Defense is tuned so that the middle-skill bot holds 36 of 50 levels, with the rest listed by the wave they die on.
The simulation is deterministic: the same orders produce the same 64-bit fingerprint on every tick, across the test suite (66 of 66 passing) and in a lobby test over both the UDP and fake-Steam roads.
The effects and achievements that watch the simulation leave its fingerprint unchanged.
The friend build passes a release audit, and a packaged exe wins three Tower Defense levels with a bot.

Not proved:

A real two-PC match through Steam from the packaged build.
A long soak: eight AIs on the biggest map for an hour of sim.
Medium, Hard and Extreme balance in the campaign (they are copies of Easy for now).
Anyone outside the project having fun. The owner and friends have played; a stranger has not.

What changed our minds

The look. The best decision was the first one that said only the LEGO is stylised.
Roles. A CEO that never does the work, and specialists with a list of what they must not touch.
Proof files. "Done" means someone can open a file and see it.
Bots. Players that follow the rules gave us balance data we could never have played by hand.
Cost. Reading budgets and fresh agents saved more than any model choice.

The plan from here

The roadmap the CEO wrote on 22 October has five phases, each ending in a build the owner can test:

Now: a build with the sea fixes, the Tower Defense interface changes, the lobby chat, the multiplayer layer and achievements.
Balance and difficulty: fold in the owner's notes on Normal, scale Easy, Hard and Extreme from it by fixed multipliers, and have the bots check.
Replay value: rule cards with score multipliers and medals, and the endless mode. Both are built; the next build tests them.
Quality: QA on the newest screens, a performance and soak pass, the remaining achievements, a two-PC test with real friends, the campaign's harder difficulties, and voice re-recording after the cutscene edit is locked.
Store and release: the store page, the trailer, capsule art, and the release steps the owner takes alone.

The rules for cost stay: the strongest model for engine work, a mid-sized one elsewhere, one heavy job on the machine at a time, and a watch on the weekly usage limit so we do not run out in the middle of a build.

If you want to follow along

There is an RSS feed for How It's Made, and the home page has a Steam button that says "coming soon" because it is. Questions, kind or unkind, to the press address in the footer.

A last honest note

Everything in this series was written afterwards from our notes and commit history, with the dates of the events they describe. When our notes disagree with our memory, the notes won.

Next: From a trailer clip to a Big Battle - plan, build and proof in one day (24 October 2026)

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