Chimera
A town that was painted before it was built. A boy drawn in ink who does not always stay drawn. Somewhere past the chapel, the paint stops.
Anchor stabilized 27 October 2026. This is the record of where the game stands. The record is kept in order.
Where it stands
What is anchored in the packaged build, as far as the record knows. The build is native, on a Mac, and playable from the courtyard to the estate gate. The record has been wrong before and corrected itself.
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5, since 19 October 2026. Before that the same world was proved in Godot, and before that it was a browser game.
- Look
- Locked on 20 October: ink lines, five value bands, lavender shadows, paper grain, flat painted colour, no global illumination. How it works.
- Places
- Twelve are built, on one map with no loading: the courtyard and the street, the lane down to the harbour, the church square and the hill village, Dyers' Steps, the chapel, the shop and the Rusted Cog from the inside, a rooftop garden, and the road to the estate gate. A first patch of the opening desert lies 7.4 kilometres off. The Long Road is a separate exploration prototype, now dressed in golden grass, stone, trees and river arches. The world.
- People
- Kai and 15 townsfolk, made from three lineup drawings and one of Greta alone. Each has a name and something to say. Four will trade with you. A few walk routes. The characters.
- Story
- A desert prologue and four acts, since 26 October. Act I is Havenwood, and Havenwood is what is built. The cast and the systems are written. The story, the mechanics.
- Latest build
- Long Road 6, 27 October 2026, macOS on Apple Silicon. Launch checks passed. The scenery and light have moved toward the paintings; Nic has not accepted this build yet. The jump and village ground changed after his earlier playtest.
- Now
- Nic's eye on the latest Long Road and the darker Stranger. The hollow still shows its boxes. A clean performance sample for Long Road 6 remains open. The roadmap.
Recent updates
Each entry is a save point. Touch one and it shows you a frame of something that already happened. All of them.
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The road has learned the colour of grass
Five more Long Road builds. Golden ground, river bends, olive trees and longer shadows. The jump changed after Nic played. The latest scenery is packaged, with acceptance still open.
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The cape is still. The road is open.
Kai moves more quietly, the Stranger has gone dark, and the Long Road has a first playable loop. Nic accepted its movement and layout as a base. The scenery is still made of boxes.
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Four doors open, one gate stays shut
Seven batches and ten packaged builds in three days. A chapel, a shop and a tavern you can walk into, a rooftop garden up a ladder, a first barter, four more residents, the road to the estate gate, Kai moving on new clips, and a first patch of the desert where the game now begins.
Moving
The first recording. A camera followed a drawing around a painting for forty seconds and nobody stopped it. Courtyard, street, arch, well, two conversations. Trimmed at the ends, otherwise as it happened.
It plays on its own and loops. There is no sound in it; the sound is in the navigation.
From the build
Frames from the review rig, which takes the same views after every change so the look can be checked against the day it was accepted. The rig does not know what it is looking at.
Where the people come from
Every figure in the game starts as this drawing. It is taken apart, turned into a shape, and the drawing is put back on as skin. The head and hands are built by hand. They do not remember any of this.
How it got here
Three versions of the same square. The story stayed where it was. Everything around it was replaced, twice. The record calls this iteration. The whole timeline goes back to May 2025.
