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Devlog #1 - FRAGGED's Islands, Bridges, and a Sprite Pipeline From Code

Week one of FRAGGED in the open: procedural island battlefields over animated lava, flow-field pathfinding, and a pre-rendered sprite pipeline with zero art files.

#devlog#fragged

First FRAGGED dev week, and the two scariest systems are standing: the world and the art pipeline.

The world. Every planet generates a battlefield of rocky islands floating over a lethal void - lava, coolant, or bottomless dust, depending on where you deployed. Islands connect by rusty metal bridges, carved by a nearest-neighbor pass so every spawn point can always reach you. The void isn't decoration: it blocks movement, which means bridges are chokepoints, which means shotguns have a purpose.

Robots navigate with a flow field - a breadth-first sweep from the player's position every third of a second, so forty units can pour across bridges without a single pathfinding hitch. Watching a wave funnel single-file across a bridge into a rocket is already the best screenshot we have.

The art. Here's the weird flex: FRAGGED currently ships zero image files. Every bro, gun, robot, rock, and barrel is drawn once at load time into sprite atlases - 3x supersampled, gradient-shaded, outlined, rim-lit - then blitted like any sprite sheet. It's the same pre-rendered pipeline the 2010-era games used, except our "Blender" is four hundred lines of canvas calls. When we want painted art later, it drops in without touching the renderer.

Also in: cliff edges faked with a double-pass silhouette drop (looks 3D, costs nothing), persistent scorch marks and bullet decals baked into the ground, and a camera that finally has somewhere to go.

Next week: making the robots interesting instead of just numerous.

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