In development: milestone 1
A drill ship bores down through a hollow Earth toward the place where the saucers are built.
A Windows game in Godot 4.7. No public build yet: it is in weekly playtests.
CLASSIFIED
FIELD ORDER 1-A // AUGER
You command the drill tower Auger, a near-future black-budget rig standing on its own drill bit. Bore down through the Crust, row by row, past old mine works, a Soviet rig module and caverns no survey ever logged. Keep the reactor's power where it matters, keep the heat down, put out the fires, pump out the water, and keep moving: something follows the noise you make.
At the bottom of the hollow world is the facility where the unidentified craft are built. Nobody who went looking has come back up to say so.
TOPSIDE Auger, TOPSIDE. Dying is normal. What you learn goes in the codex, and the codex lifts the black bars next time.
ROW 2 / 18 m
The ship is a cutaway of six rooms stacked on a drill crown. The reactor's bars go where you send them: helm, bracing, weapons, drill, coolant and pumps. Deeper rock is hotter, fires spread room to room and water pools in the bottom deck.
Your crew handle emergencies on their own when they can. When they can't, you pause, pull a bar from the drill and send someone up the ladder with an extinguisher.
ROW 5 / 64 m
Nine ores and gems sit in the rock by depth, from coal to emerald. Steer onto a vein, hold depth to cut sideways along it, or fire a mining charge to crack a shell, burn off a gas pocket or drain the water before you reach it. A blast shatters half the ore it frees; cutting the vein yourself pays all of it.
The seismic scanner shows what is ahead: ore, gas, water, fault rock that drops rockfalls on the top deck, and buried structures to break into for crates.
ROW 8 / 112 m
Park the drill and send one crew member into the rock with a pick and a headlamp. They climb out a side hatch, tunnel to the vein you clicked and mine it out by hand, at full yield.
While they are out they man nothing, and the gas, the water and the fault rock can hurt them. The haul pays only if they climb back in. The front keeps coming the whole time.
ROW 11 / 160 m
A run is one dive down a node map of the Crust: events written as redacted field dossiers, trading posts that take ore for gear and gems for supplies, rival drill crews who tunnel in beside you to fight, and the layer gate at the bottom.
Every run earns research. Spend it on requisitions loaded onto every later dive: spare bits, charges, a tungsten head, a fourth crew member.
THE GATE / 214 m
Inner Sun is built almost entirely by Claude, working autonomously in long sessions. Stewart pitched it, plays every build and writes notes; his notes outrank everything. Three days in, it has 177 commits, 368 automated tests and six playtest builds.
The rules live in plain GDScript classes with no rendering and no clock. The game, the tests and headless balance runs all drive the same sim through one command chain at a fixed 60 Hz. A seed plus the command log replays any run exactly, and every build checks that headless, recorded and exported runs end on the same hash.
Three policy bots (cautious, greedy, balanced) play about 1,000 full runs in twelve minutes. Their win rates and death rows tune the Crust: when the balanced bot wins too often or a row kills everyone, a number in a data file moves.
Each build is filmed off-screen by Godot's Movie Maker while a bot plays, then judged blind: first by a Claude critic that sees only frames, later by Gemini watching the video. Its scores and complaints ("a debug view, not a game yet") become the next list of fixes.
Orange: Claude critic on frames. Green: Gemini on video, which judges harder and swings a point between runs. The dip at 4.5 was the first rock texture ("wavy sand"); it was redrawn the same night. The last point is the footage on this page.
