Starwick - I rebuilt the core as a flow runner

Big swing this stretch. The free-roam version was pretty but aimless, so I pivoted the core flow runner - you ride a procedural ribbon, charge and release to glide, and trace constellations as gates at speed. Kept the old explore mode intact; this is a second mode built from scratch alongside it.

What I built

The whole loop, as systems, end to end:

• A deterministic flow motor - auto-run, hold to charge speed, release to lift into a glide, swipe to drift lanes. No physics engine; pure kinematics so it’s predictable and testable.
• A procedural ribbon track - a seeded spline with height/width curves, built in chunks ahead of you and recycled behind, so it streams forever.
• Constellation gates that detect by path intersection, not a button press - the line you sweep through space is tested against each node, so nothing gets missed even at full speed.
• A combo/flow system that chains gate hits into a rising “harmony” meter with style labels, from Soft Trace up to Perfect Weave.
• A run director that strings it into a real ~90-second run with a relight setpiece near the end, then tallies results.
• A versioned JSON save profile, and a Hearth where you spend earned starlight to restore nodes - expression, not wait-timers.

The save that lied to me

While wiring the meta screen, it proudly told me I’d restored 4,244 stars across 9 journeys. I had never played a full run. Turns out my tests were writing to the real save file - every test that relit a star bumped the actual player profile, and it had been quietly inflating for days.

Fix was a test-only backend: in headless test mode the save lives in memory and never touches the real file. Round-trips and version migration still work, the tests stay honest, and your real profile is yours again. I made it a hard rule for the new save system from the start.

Gates that don’t miss

The other nice unlock: at runner speed you blow past a point in a single frame, so checking “is the player on the node right now” drops inputs constantly. Testing the swept segment from last frame to this frame against the node sphere fixes it - you can be going full tilt and a clean pass still counts. Perfect-center passes score extra.

Where it stands

Honest version: it’s systems-complete and every piece is proven by an automated test - 40 of them, movement, track, gates, combo, a full run, save, Hearth - but it is not visually playable yet. There’s no Wick model, no gate glow, no run HUD, no Hearth view. I built the entire core behind tests and haven’t actually watched it move.

So the next pass is pure presentation: give the runner its body, light up the gates, show the HUD, and wire the mode select so you can press Play and ride it. The skeleton is real and verified; now it needs skin.