The ambush gets a face

In Ultima Cenere, between one stretch of road and the next, an ambush can break out: a pack of rival scavengers jumping you. Until now those scavengers were placeholders — literally emoji. Today three of them have a face.

Three jackals, in flesh and ash

The Rival Jackal with his machete, the Scarred She-Jackal with twin blades, and the Pack Leader — the alpha, trophy mask and cleaver. They're animated now: a resting breath, lunges, reactions when you wound them, their signature move. One detail I got stuck on: the Pack Leader no longer "roars" to rally the pack. He wears a gas mask — he can't scream. So he raises his arms and whirls his axe overhead instead. Small stuff, maybe. But a world you believe in is made of exactly this kind of small stuff.

Every place its own backdrop

Until today every fight happened in the same clearing. I built the system so each environment gets its own scene. The first is the Scavengers' Camp: tarps, a burning oil drum, scavenged junk hanging from dead olive trees. I generated the enemies with the same lighting as the backdrop, so they sit inside the scene instead of floating on top of it.

And meanwhile, the Steam page is live

In the middle of all this, the game's Steam page went up: you can wishlist it. A small step, but the first real brick on the road to release.

A rough day (for honesty's sake)

I'll tell it the way it went, because here I write the underside too. It was a stubborn day. At one point I mounted the wrong sprite, and for a while the fierce ambush raider was… a milkman with a crate of bottles. A resting animation that made a character jitter because of one wrong setting. And a whole chunk of the afternoon thrown away trying to get an AI to animate the background: instead of moving just the fire, it melted the whole painting. I parked it — I'll do it properly, inside the engine, later. Developing alone is also this: some days you fight the tools more than the game.

How much is left (no tricks)

No victory laps: I've sorted out three jackals, but the other ambushes — the tin soldiers, the mad medics — are still placeholders. The backdrops are one of several. And a good part of the bestiary is still to animate. No shortcuts: one at a time.

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The ash is moving. Slowly, but moving.