starwick - i rebuilt the core as a flow runner

big swing this stretch. the free-roam build was pretty but aimless so i pivoted the core into a flow runner. u ride a procedural ribbon, charge and release to glide, trace constellations as gates at speed. kept the old explore mode intact, this is a second mode built from scratch beside it.

what i built

the whole loop as systems. a deterministic flow motor, auto-run, hold to charge, release to lift into a glide, swipe to drift lanes, pure kinematics so its predictable. a seeded ribbon track with height and width curves, built in chunks ahead and recycled behind so it streams forever. gates that detect by path intersection not a button press. a combo system that chains hits into a rising harmony meter, Soft Trace up to Perfect Weave. a run director that ties it into a real ~90 second run with a relight setpiece near the end. plus a save profile and a hearth where u spend starlight to restore nodes, expression not wait-timers.

the save that lied to me

wiring the meta screen, it proudly told me id restored 4,244 stars across 9 journeys. id never finished a single run. my headless dev runs were writing straight to the real profile and it had been quietly inflating for days. fix was a dev-only backend, in headless mode the save lives in memory and never touches the real file. round-trips and version migration still work and ur real profile is yours again. made it a hard rule for the save system from the start.

where it stands

honest version, its systems-complete but not visually playable yet. no wick model, no gate glow, no hud, no hearth view. i built the whole core and havent really watched it move. next pass is pure presentation, give the runner a body, light the gates, show the hud, wire mode select so u can press play and ride. skeleton’s real, now it needs skin.