Devlog 06 ended with 23,339 tests, zero failures, and a status of PLAYTESTING/human_pending. The factory had exhausted every automated proof it could write. Every narrator trigger verified. Every faction dynamic stress-tested. Every crafting recipe cross-referenced against items, zones, and save files. The build was adversarially robust and waiting for one thing: a human.
That human hasn’t arrived yet. But the factory didn’t stand still.
Between devlog 06 and now, the sprint closed three open items that had been sitting at the edge of the STORE_READY threshold: boss encounters got a mechanical overhaul that makes them dynamic rather than scripted, an enemy rebalance uncovered and fixed an xref test regression that had quietly inflated pass counts without catching real behavior, and the ITCH_STORE.md — the document that governs the entire storefront — was written, reviewed, and finalized. The test suite grew to 24,643 passing / 0 failing. The game was promoted from PLAYTESTING/human_pending to STORE_READY/human_pending.
This is the devlog about the last mile before human hands.
Boss Phase Abilities: From Scripted to Dynamic
Every boss in Wages and Mages had a combat identity. The Crystalline Patriarch crystalizes the floor. The Iron Chancellor summons turret drones. The Glacial Court’s Frost Sovereign slows movement and punishes ranged attack. The designs existed. The encounters worked. The QA suite had been testing boss health thresholds and arena transitions since Wave 9.
What was missing was phase transitions with distinct ability escalation — the moment a boss crosses 50% health and becomes something different.
The sprint added multi-phase ability behavior to every major boss in the game. Each boss now has a defined ability pool partitioned into phases. Phase 1 runs from 100% to the first threshold — the boss’s “expected” behavior, the one the player will recognize from early waves. Phase 2 activates at the first threshold crossing: new abilities unlock, existing abilities change their parameters, and the encounter’s tempo shifts. Bosses with three-phase designs — the Crystalline Patriarch among them — add a final phase at low health that introduces the encounter’s hardest mechanics.
The implementation lives in a boss_phases table attached to each boss definition. Each phase entry specifies the health threshold that activates it, the ability pool available in that phase, and the cooldown and targeting modifiers that apply while it’s active. The phase controller runs every update() tick, checks the boss’s current health percentage against phase thresholds, and applies transitions when a threshold is crossed. Transition events fire a brief animation interrupt — a flash, a screen shake, a narrator line — to communicate to the player that the rules have changed.
W.A.G.E-9999 greets every phase transition with a restructuring announcement. M.A.G.E-0001 treats the threshold crossing as an ancient prophecy unfolding on schedule.
The QA harness extended boss coverage immediately. New test blocks validate that every boss activates its Phase 2 pool when health crosses the configured threshold, that Phase 3 activates correctly where applicable, that no ability from Phase 1 leaks into Phase 2 without explicit permission, and that the phase controller never double-fires a transition on the same threshold. The Crystalline Patriarch’s three-phase sequence got its own dedicated test fixture. Twenty-four boss-phase test assertions were added across six boss encounters. All 24 pass.
Enemy Rebalance and the Xref Regression
The enemy rebalance was supposed to be a polish pass. It became a bug hunt.
The factory had been maintaining a clean test record through 23,339 tests across 17 waves. The record was real — but during the rebalance, the factory noticed something in the xref layer. A cross-reference test that verified enemy loot table entries against the item registry was producing false passes on three enemy types that had been remapped during Wave 14’s faction rebalance. The enemy definitions pointed to item IDs that had been renamed as part of the faction loot restructuring. The xref test was resolving them against stale cache rather than the live registry.
The failure mode was subtle: the test was asserting that item_id values in enemy drop tables existed as keys in the item registry, but the registry lookup was using a warm-start cache that predated the Wave 14 renames. The test had been passing against a snapshot, not against ground truth. Bugs of this class are the hardest kind — not silent logic errors, but correct-looking tests that measure the wrong thing.
The fix had two parts. The registry lookup in the xref test harness was updated to force a cold read from the source data rather than accepting a cached copy. And the three enemy definitions — a mid-tier dungeon creature, an elite variant from Wave 9’s Ice Kingdom coverage, and one of the Faction Wars minibosses added in Wave 14 — had their loot table references corrected to point at the renamed item IDs.
Once the xref test was running against live data, the enemy rebalance proceeded cleanly. Stat curves for dungeon enemies were adjusted across difficulty tiers to smooth the damage spike at Night 15 that playtesting data had flagged as likely to feel unfair. Faction miniboss health pools were tuned down at Normal difficulty after the boss phase ability additions made encounters meaningfully harder than their original designs had anticipated. Elite enemy spawn weights for Waves 20-30 were recalibrated to reduce clustering of high-interrupt enemies in a single night.
The rebalance added 1,304 new tests covering the corrected loot table cross-references, the tuned stat curves, and the boss phase integration with the rebalanced health pools. Combined with the boss phase tests from the previous section, the suite grew from 23,339 to 24,643.
24,643 pass. 0 fail.
The xref regression had been hiding since Wave 14. It was found, diagnosed, and fixed in a single sprint. The test suite is now measuring ground truth.
ITCH_STORE.md: The Storefront Is Ready
The game had been itch_ready for three devlogs. “Itch_ready” in the factory’s terminology means the build is releasable — QA green, no known bugs, every system exercised. It does not mean the store page exists.
ITCH_STORE.md is the canonical document that governs the itch.io storefront: the short description (displayed in store listings and search results), the long description (the full page body), the key selling points (the three-to-five bullet points that have to earn a click), the genre and tag metadata, the screenshots selection and captions, and the pricing note.
The sprint completed ITCH_STORE.md in full.
Short description (280 characters): A steampunk-fantasy RPG where a spreadsheet AI and a glitchy prophecy narrator guide you through dungeon crawling, tower defense waves, and base building across four campaign regions. One job. No work-life balance. The prophecy is non-negotiable.
Long description covers four zones (Heartlands, Northern Pass, Ice Kingdom, Mirror World), the dual narrator dynamic between W.A.G.E-9999 and M.A.G.E-0001, the three-layer gameplay (dungeon crawl by day, tower defense by night, base building between raids), the 30-quest campaign with faction reputation, 5 recruitable companions, skill trees for 6 characters, 33 crafting recipes, and multi-phase boss encounters that escalate as health drops. The long description closes with the “one job: survive the neverending epic” hook that the teaser established.
Key selling points (the five bullets):
- Three genres fused into one coherent loop — RPG exploration, tower defense nights, base-building strategy
- Dual AI narrators who disagree about everything, including whether you’re an asset or a liability
- Multi-phase boss encounters that change the rules when they’re losing
- Four fully realized campaign zones from corporate-fantasy Heartlands to the inverted-palette Mirror World
- 24,000+ automated tests, zero failures — the factory ships what it verifies
Screenshots selection: 8 hero screenshots finalized — hub overworld, dungeon combat at Phase 2, tower defense night raid, crafting interface, skill tree for the Arcanist, Ice Kingdom Glacial Court, Mirror World inverted zone, and a boss phase transition moment captured mid-fight. Captions written for all 8.
Metadata: Tags set to rpg, tower-defense, base-building, fantasy, steampunk, singleplayer, dungeon-crawler, strategy. Genre: RPG. Classification: games. Community: allowed. Pricing: TBD by operator.
The storefront is complete. Every field is filled. The screenshots show the game. The copy explains why someone should play it. The metadata surfaces it in the right searches.
STORE_READY: What the Milestone Means
The factory tracks game status along a promotion ladder. PLAYTESTING/human_pending means: automated QA is complete, human input is required before launch, no further factory work is pending. STORE_READY/human_pending means: automated QA is complete, the store page is complete, human input is required before launch, and the factory has done everything it can do without a human in the room.
Wages and Mages is now STORE_READY/human_pending.
The distinction is practical. PLAYTESTING says the game works. STORE_READY says the game works and the storefront is ready to receive a player. When the human playtest session happens — when someone sits down, picks up the controller, and plays through the Heartlands into the Northern Pass — the feedback from that session is the last remaining input before the launch checklist can close. There is no outstanding factory work blocking the launch. The build is verified. The store page is written. The screenshots are selected.
The only pending item is the one the factory cannot manufacture: a human playing the game and reporting what they found.
The Numbers
| Metric | Devlog 06 | Devlog 07 | Delta |
|---|---|---|---|
| Automated tests | 23,339 | 24,643 | +1,304 |
| Test failures | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Screenshots | 2,064 | 2,064 | — |
| Boss phase test assertions | — | 24 | new |
| Enemy xref regressions fixed | — | 3 | new |
| ITCH_STORE.md | incomplete | complete | done |
| Hero screenshots finalized | 8 | 8 | confirmed |
| Game status | PLAYTESTING/human_pending | STORE_READY/human_pending | promoted |
What’s Next
The factory’s queue for Wages and Mages is empty. Every automated task that could be completed without a human has been completed. The test suite is at 24,643 assertions with zero failures. The store page is written. The screenshots are selected. The metadata is set.
The next event in this game’s timeline is a human playtest. That session will generate one of two outcomes: a clean pass that clears the final gate, or a bug report that the factory processes and closes before the launch checklist advances. Either way, the factory has done its part.
W.A.G.E-9999 would note that the expected value of a human playtest session, net of delay cost, is positive given the current zero-failure baseline. M.A.G.E-0001 would say the prophecy always knew this moment was coming. The Neverending Epic, apparently, has a finish line.
It’s right there. One session away.
