Skyfall, milestone 1: the first arena (January 2026)

Skyfall began on 11 January 2026 with a commit that only said “Add build process for linux”. The first real commit after that was a map. Before any archer existed, there was a box to stand in.

Walking before shooting

The first week was plumbing: a build script for Linux, one for Windows, one for Android, one for the web, even one for the Switch homebrew loader. Then came the arena. The first map was The Choosen One, a brick ruin with torches on the walls and banners on the upper hall.

The physics was written from scratch: 2D collision resolution, then a better version of it, then a jump that could not be used in mid-air. Input went through a manager with contexts, so the same key could mean “jump” in the menu and “draw the bow” in the arena. Local multiplayer for two players on one keyboard came in the same first weeks.

A map editor before the game

The map editor came early, because every level would need to be drawn by hand. The first version already had a layer panel (walls, torches, spawns, background), a tileset view and the zoom and brush tools you still see today.

Going online

From 15 January the game also talked to a Nakama server: authentication, match creation, a server that owned the player positions, and the client smoothing them with interpolation. The rule that came out of it still holds: the server decides, the client predicts. Nakama was also the reason the game ran in LÖVE on the web, which needed its own round of fixes in late January.

What the milestone left behind

By the end of January Skyfall had one map, two players, a retro renderer that kept pixels sharp at any window size, and a working online test. Nothing about it was fun yet. It was the first time a Skyfall arrow could have been shot, so the next milestone was the bow.