A glove worn three times, and a heavy on short legs

Today was mostly spent in the headset, on two things Astra modeled: a leather glove for my hands and the fungal creatures that will live in the Fungal Hollow. Most of what went wrong was ours, not the models', and one fault is still open.

Where the creatures stand

Since the last entry, three of Astra's five fungal creatures went into the game: the Hushbud, a small swarmer that dies in one hit; the Stalkhound, which coils and pounces; and the Bellows bearer, which holds its distance and fires from three sacs on its chest in turn. A fourth, Shelfback, arrived today. All of them are spawned from the dev panel for now. None is in a room yet.

The sacs that disappeared

I reported that the bearer's sacs disappeared when I hit it. Claude could not see what I was seeing and did not guess. It added a probe that logged the body's facing through every hit, and I wore it. The sacs never changed. The whole body swung between 30 and 135 degrees away from me for the half second of the flinch, so the sacs were simply facing somewhere else.

The cause: the ranged enemy's facing code wrote the rotation directly, while the flinch leans the body from a rest pose it remembers. That rest was still the facing the body had when it was dealt into the room. The skeleton mage has had the same bug all along. Nobody saw it, because the mage has nothing on its chest to lose sight of. On a blow it survives, the bearer now stays within 9 degrees of me. The probe is gone, and a counter stays behind that logs any stale rest it has to correct: none in two passes.

The second fault was in the model. The sacs read as floating in front of the chest, and Astra's README said why: they were separate parts with deliberate small clearances. I asked for tissue joining each sac to the body. The revision came back the same day at 2,452 triangles with nothing else changed, and it reads as one creature now.

Sounds

I generated 113 more recordings in ElevenLabs: 85 spoken lines for enemies and bosses that are not in the game yet, and 28 creature sounds, with a second take for four of them. Only the three fungal creatures' sounds are wired so far. I liked every one I heard and changed no levels. Each sound logs its clip and its distance from me, so a missing sound can be told from one that never played.

The glove, three times

Astra's glove had been sitting delivered since the end of September. It went onto my hands today, beside the plate gauntlet it will replace.

First wearing: wrong. The tip of my real thumb sat at the base of the virtual one. We had placed the glove with the gauntlet's wrist offset, a number tuned for a different hand. And I could not make a fist: the space inside my closed hand was the size of a large can. That was ours too. Claude had mapped the squeeze to Astra's grip pose, which is sized to clear the thickest weapon, and had never used the fist pose that was sitting in the same file.

Second wearing: the fit was right at Claude's first guess, 8 cm back and 3 cm down, worked out from the length of the virtual thumb. I never touched the dials built to correct it. The fist and the point were right. A held sword was not: weapons were still seated for the gauntlet's hand, 8 cm away from the glove's, and I pressed one adjustment row 24 times trying to pull it in.

Then revision 4B arrived, the same day: a darker working hide, real recesses for gems on the bracer, a cradle for the health vial, and three grip poses, each closed to within 0.4 mm of one real handle. Astra also corrected the brief. I had asked for poses by handle thickness. The handles are rounded rectangles of different shapes, not three sizes of one shape, so the pose is chosen by weapon.

Third wearing: the leather is right, and the sword still floats in 2 to 3 cm of air, on a pose fitted to that exact grip. The likely cause, not confirmed: every finger closed by how hard I squeezed the grip button. I squeeze all the way to make a fist, and much less to hold a sword, so the hand stopped part way. A hand holding something now closes fully, and each hold logs the range of the squeeze. If the gap survives that, the next suspects are the sword's scale and the angle it sits at.

Shelfback, and its legs

Shelfback is the heavy: about 1.9 m tall, with one long swing that takes a full second to wind up.

Astra's render of the wind-up, not the game.

Astra's README corrected us before it was ever in the game. Our brief said a melee blow lands on whoever is in front of the body. The code measured distance in every direction and had no facing test at all, so a swing across the front would have hit me standing behind it. I chose a front arc for this one: 120 degrees, 1.5 m, and it stops turning once the swing begins. Getting behind it is a dodge.

I fought three of them, eight swings in all. The wind-up reads and I could step out of it. The groan and the slam work. The legs do not.

Astra's render again. The legs are the problem.

Each step covers 25 cm. To move at even 0.55 m/s it takes 2.2 steps a second, and every step has a heavy footfall sound: 132 of them in one fight. The bearer has the same fault, with 18 cm steps played at more than twice the speed they were animated for. Astra now has a revision for both: longer legs, and for Shelfback a step of about 0.6 m every 0.85 seconds, so each stomp earns its sound.

Two process notes

Adding one class of import rules for the glove made Unity reimport every model and texture in the project. The Editor was blocked for 28 minutes. It also turned up 23 models whose saved import settings predated the rules that cover them.

And Claude committed straight to main for the second time in four days, after the rule against it was already written down. It was reverted and re-applied through a pull request, and a git hook now refuses such a commit.

Not done

• The sword's gap: a cause is proposed, not confirmed.
• Shelfback's steps and slam are now sent to the controllers when it is near. I have not felt them yet.
• I have not looked at the vial in its new cradle.
• The Stalkhound runs straight at me. Circling and pack tactics are wanted and unbuilt.
• The fifth creature, the Crownwaker, comes after the legs.