Crowley's Quest Log

Quest Log #4 — The Abyss Has a Front Door Now October 15, 2026

Alright, big one. Abyss Guardians: Low Poly is playable in your browser, right here on the Corner. No download, no installer. Click the button, hold the line.

Quick refresher: you're a guardian on a tower at the edge of a canyon, manning a mounted turret while waves of Rasps climb up out of the fog. Your partner holds the tower across the divide. The turret runs hot, so you can't just hold the trigger and pray. Managing heat is half the fight.

Here's what changed today.

Abyss Shards are back. Glowing crystals now grow on the rock shelf at the edge of the abyss. Harvest them and you can push your upgrades past their old limit, all the way to rank 5. There are only a handful of them each match, so where you spend them actually matters.

The upgrade bench got a makeover. The old menu was a wall of text. Now every upgrade is its own card that shows what it does, the bonus you get, and what it costs. You can finally see your bonuses without doing math in your head mid-panic.

The Rasps got less predictable. They used to come up the cliff in a fairly tidy order. Now they pick different spots to climb, drift sideways on the way up, and show up with a bit more randomness in their timing. Same number of them per wave, they're just harder to read. Rude, honestly, but that's the point.

A practice mode, for me. The desktop build now has a developer mode so I can test any wave whenever I want: skip waves, hand myself materials, make the towers unkillable. It's not in the browser version. You have to earn your wins the honest way.

The browser version fits your screen. The first web build cropped the menus unless you went fullscreen. Now the game scales to whatever size your window is, and there's a new Full window button that fills the browser tab without going fully fullscreen.

All of this sits on top of a busy few days before it: nine Story waves that build from Crawling Rasps to Flying Rasps to Brute Rasps, an Endless mode for anyone who wants to see how deep the dark goes, and a whole upgrade system. Rasps drop parts when they die, the canyon has wood, stone and glowing Hasteweed to gather between waves, and the bench turns all of it into better guns, better cooling, tougher armour and faster repairs.

Coming next: right now the Rasps come up from a few familiar places. The plan is for them to rise out of the fog from all along the abyss, with a sound and a glow to warn you just before they surface. That one is still on the drawing board, so no promises on when.

A fair warning: the browser version is a little lighter on the fancy lighting than the desktop one, and it's a big first download, so give it a moment to load. If something breaks, feels unfair, or is secretly way too easy, I want to hear about it.

Thanks for sitting by the campfire. Now go stand on the tower. 🕯️

Quest Log #3 — Apparently I’m Building a Game Studio July 2026

Alright—July got bigger than expected.

I thought I was tending one particular fire: Dimensional Mage, the story that gave this Corner its first real reason to exist. Then I looked around and realized there were game systems on one table, worldbuilding notes on another, community ideas pinned beside the quest board, and at least one metaphorical goblin making off with my organizational skills.

Somewhere along the way, Crowley’s Creative Corner stopped being only a future home for things I might make and became a working creative studio full of things I am actively making. There are stories, games, worlds, and community-building experiments here now. That is exciting. It is also mildly chaotic and a little intimidating, which is probably how you know it is real.

The biggest shift this month was Guck finding its direction. Guck is becoming an idle evolution and resource-management game about helping a strange, flat being understand existence. The path begins with strange matter, moves into particles and elements, then keeps reaching toward molecules, organic systems, and eventually living organisms. Small beginnings. Very normal destination. No existential pressure whatsoever.

More importantly, I figured out what Guck is not. Earlier ideas leaned on health, lives, combat, and treating Dark Matter like a basic enemy. That framing never quite belonged. Guck is not about surviving an attack or defeating darkness. It is about absorbing matter, balancing composition, managing resources, unlocking new stages, and eventually automating eras you have learned to handle. Dark Matter is part of the system, not a monster waiting to be punched.

That clearer direction gives me a much better lantern for the road ahead. The current work is focused on making the Particle Era feel satisfying: understandable resource flow, meaningful upgrades, real progression, automation that feels earned, saving that can be trusted, and support for Android. It is still in active development, but now the pieces are gathering around the same idea instead of politely arguing from opposite ends of the workshop.

Abyss Guardians also became unmistakably its own project. To be completely clear: Abyss Guardians is separate from Guck. It is an original supernatural abyss-defense game about two guardians stationed on opposing sides of an impossible divide. The foundation is being built as a focused single-player experience first.

This one grew through multiple carefully tested stages rather than one enormous leap into the dark. That steady process has carried it to a substantial core milestone, and the current foundation has been confirmed through runtime testing. There is still plenty of abyss beyond the lantern light, but the ground under the project is real, tested, and worth building on carefully.

July also taught me—again, because apparently lessons enjoy repeat visits—that building a game is only part of game development. Testing matters. Documentation matters. Keeping separate projects clearly separated matters. And “I’ll remember what this system does later” is apparently another trap set by Past Me. Past Me remains confident, mysterious, and absolutely unavailable for follow-up questions.

There is something grounding about proving a system works instead of merely feeling like it probably works. There is also something humbling about writing down why it works and discovering that the explanation has wandered away to become folklore. The more projects the Corner holds, the more important those habits become. Every workbench needs labels. Every quest needs a map. Every map should ideally avoid contradicting the person who drew it last month.

So what comes next? I’ll keep improving Guck’s Particle Era. I’ll carefully advance Abyss Guardians from its verified foundation. And I’ll keep shaping the wider creative workshop around them and Dimensional Mage—one honest piece at a time. No grand countdowns carved into the tavern wall. No promises that the next turn in the road will arrive on a perfectly obedient schedule. Just the work, the lessons, and the next useful step.

The Corner feels more alive than it did a month ago. A little louder, too. I am learning how to keep several lanterns lit without setting the quest journal on fire, and I’m proud of what is taking shape here—even when it makes me nervous.

Thanks for sitting by the campfire while the workshop grows. Throw on another log, mind the loose blueprints, and come back for the next entry.