A table, an hourglass, and a portal that sleeps

In short: Runs now start at a mission table in the hub: tokens dealt by an hourglass, carried by hand to a cradle, and a portal that sleeps until one wakes it. Holding a token properly took five passes, because the gauntlet's fingers had never been posed by anything they held.

Until this week a run was one plain loop: walk through the portal, clear five rooms, come home. Now the hub has a mission table, and what you take through the portal is a mission: an area plus a few attributes that change the run.

The table and the glass

Astra delivered three concepts for the table, and I chose the third, "Living Landscape": a carved table with bays for four regions, tokens with charms and beads, and an hourglass. I asked for the glass to float above the table at a meter tall as the room's centerpiece. Only the first region, the Clearing, is dealt today. The others sit under covers.

The hourglass drains by rooms cleared, never by the clock: a new board every ten rooms. So nothing changes while I'm away or while I'm standing in the hub, and dying straight away doesn't reroll anything. When I was asked, I tied it to the story: "the sands of time shift every outing and that, after enough outings the hourglass empties and the fabric of time shifts and changes." A failed mission can be retried until the glass runs out, and no region offers the same mission twice.

Boards are dealt from SHA-256-derived seeds, and the C# side is pinned to Python's hashlib by a golden-value test, so a board can be reproduced outside the game. The glass is saved: its epoch, the rooms it started from and the offers it dealt. That way a live mission can never be redealt under me by a code change or a reload. I also decided an early turn should cost gold, "an offering to the hourglass": 8, then 10, then 12, three at most. The glass knows the price and is tested. Nothing in the game lets you pay it yet.

Astra reviewed the glass and the table and found four real bugs. One was a repair that was never saved, and another was an empty save being accepted as valid. All four were fixed with tests that were watched failing first.

A portal that sleeps

After pass 29 I asked for the portal to start asleep, dark and silent, saying only "Choose a mission at the table". You pick a token up, near or from a distance, one hand at a time. Let it go at the cradle beside the portal and it seats. Let it go anywhere else and it glides back to its stand in 0.35 s. A seated token wakes the portal: the ring comes back and the live surface grows over a second.

Pass 31 (286 s): the sleeping portal "absolutely reads as dark and silent". Seating a token: "it took it!" And the wake: "It felt like something ancient coming alive." A run on a Nightfall token died in room 3, and the token came home sealed as failed. The round trip works. I asked for the failed seal to be red. In pass 32 it "stands out at the table", and taking a token out put the portal back to sleep. Waking it again "still feels as good as the first."

Astra reviewed the token branch too: ten findings, and nine acted on. The one I'd have hit soonest was a double press on the portal starting two departures. Pass 34's log shows the second press refused and one run begun.

Five passes to hold a token

The hold is where the time went.

Pass 31: "the token was basically gripped in my hand on top of my knuckles." The grab point was the middle of the fist.
Pass 32: moved to a pinch in front of the hand, and it overshot: "at least a few inches in front of my fingers/knuckles." I chose the fingertips.
Pass 33: the index finger clipped "where my fingernail would be", and "there was no thumb to then pinch it."

That last one was the real cause. The armored gauntlets' fingers are posed by the controller's buttons, never by what the hand holds. No offset on the token could have produced a pinch, because the hand never made one. Claude searched every thumb curl, thumb swing and index curl on the real gauntlet for poses where the pads meet 22 mm apart, measuring the fingertips from the mesh because the rig has no fingertip bone. A held token now sets its hand's pinch and rides between the pads.

Pass 34: "I do seem to be pinching the token now," but in its middle. I wanted it pinched "from the bottom right corner of the token, to see the maximum amount of the token." The portal's wake, no longer hidden behind the old domed sleeping surface, was "a fantastic effect."
Pass 35: pinched by the bottom corner on the pinching hand's side, 12 mm in. Right hand: "Yes, working perfectly." Left: "Yes, perfectly."

The lesson from it: when a held thing sits wrong, check what poses the hand before you move the thing. Three passes went on offsets, and the hand was the problem.

Still open

The hourglass doesn't play its drain and turn yet. The levels change, but the moment of the glass emptying and flipping in front of you isn't built. I've asked for the stream between the bulbs to always be falling.
The paid early turn has no way to pay.
The wake sound is a Kenney placeholder, and sleep is silent. Both sounds are mine to find.
The pinned board hasn't been run in an IL2CPP player, which is the build the headset gets.
No agent can render the hub, because it holds Asset Store art they may not look at. So the table was placed by measurement and first seen in the headset.