Devlog 001 Building the Crypt from scratch

UNDERCROFT starts with a constraint: construct a playable first-person dungeon
from shader code. There is no game engine, imported model library, texture pack,
or collection of recorded sounds behind the Crypt. Its rooms, enemies, sword,
interface, and audio are procedural constructions in GLSL. A small browser host
supplies input and presents the shader output.

That restriction shapes the world. Stone arches frame narrow paths. Torchlight
breaks up the darkness and gives the player a direction to read. Armored figures
occupy the same spaces the player can walk through. The dungeon needs to feel
like a place, but it also needs to show where movement is possible and where an
enemy can reach you.

The technical foundation is a persistent texture. One shader stores the layout,
player state, enemies, and progression there; the image shader reads that state
to draw the scene. This gives collision and rendering a shared source of truth.
Movement checks the path between positions rather than trusting the final
position alone, which matters when a frame takes longer than expected.

Combat grows around commitment. A sword sequence spends stamina. Dodging spends
more, while blocking trades incoming damage for stamina. Three healing flasks
give the player a limited chance to recover. The goal is to make a missed swing
or an exhausted dodge matter without making every mistake end the run.

The Cinder Warden gives those rules a destination. Its visible anticipation,
charge, and recovery create a cycle the player can read. Below half health, the
fight becomes faster. Recovery remains important: a boss needs moments when the
player can answer its attack, not only moments when the player must retreat.
Defeating the Warden leads to the Crypt ending; death and victory both support a
fresh run.

Audio follows the same construction rule as the environment. A dedicated shader
generates stereo samples, and the browser passes those samples to Web Audio.
Material sounds and attack cues belong to the simulation’s timing rather than
to a separate JavaScript combat system.

Verification and limits. The Crypt browser suite exercises movement,
collision, looking, stamina, healing, dodge, block, pickups, sword damage, the
ending, restart, and sound bounds. This entry records the foundation’s design;
it does not claim a new benchmark run. Desktop WebGL2 with floating-point shader
targets is required. Frame rate across different GPUs and sound perception on
different speakers remain device-dependent and unverified here.