Cantorite: Night Freight — Devlog

Picked from a round of game ideas: a mobile-first roguelite auto-battler in the Vesper Reach. A short armoured train rolls through a gauntlet of stops; its carriages fire on their own, and between stops the player buys, orders and merges them. Godot 4 with GDScript; touch, mouse, keyboard and gamepad; Android and iOS first, then desktop and Steam Deck.

Runs take about ten minutes, so a whole run fits into a short session.

Concept images generated with Flux 2 Klein: a first pass on the 4B model, then the 9B model for the keepers. Each batch was checked by eye and the keepers picked by hand. The key art and the conductor are the picks here.

The first written design: a style guide (art direction, palette, UI rules), the game design, a technical design for Godot (deterministic simulation, platform integration, store, CI), the monetisation (a free first area, a one-time Full line unlock, no ads, no energy, no loot boxes), and every screen described with a mock-up image.

Reference sheets for the train (a locomotive turnaround and a carriage lineup) and the conductor (a turnaround sheet, with expressions and a dialogue portrait in the repo). The boss (the Viaduct Crawler) and the enemies were refined in the same round, in a first colour set that is shown in phase (e).

The enemies were the wrong colour. The Harrow are smoked quartz and ivory glass with glowing gold cracks; the first set was violet, which is the Umbra's colour. The mite, shard bat, beetle, worm, watcher eye and splinter were recoloured in gold. The violet set is kept only as the before.

“Please note the harrow art.. its not in line with the other games. You're using purple which is umbra. Thst's fine.. umbra can be an enemy.. but the harrow should be gold”

The train and the conductor in two faction styles, as concept art. Directorate: pale steel with cyan running strips and a thin brass stripe, an armoured supply train. Umbra: a matte black locomotive with a single violet light. Not made yet: an Umbra conductor, and carriage variants for each role.

“It Might be worth it to have several train styles.. eg this generic is fine.. but we might skin the train more as a directorate train.”

The vertical slice was built in its final style from day one, so nothing has to be re-skinned later. It is one whole run through Redcut Canyon: eight stops and the Viaduct Crawler as the boss on a stone viaduct, with a station halt to buy, merge and sell carriages between fights. Under it sits a deterministic simulation in whole numbers with headless tests, and the train, the Harrow and the canyon are 3D models scripted in Blender. The first screenshots and a gameplay video of the build were committed on 2026-10-16.

A web export with its own HTML launcher, a native web menu and loading screen. The Cantorite platform hosts it privately in the EU behind an access check, at a -dev address; from 2026-10-17 the game's CI uploads and smoke-tests it on every push to develop. The first fight froze the page for six to nine seconds while its shaders compiled, so a Web Worker now warms the shader cache while the player is still in the menu, the fix Chime Walk used.

“The wagon switching, buying, etc. is really weird. It doesn't feel intuitive. While the train is driving I have no idea what to do. The power-up doesn't seem to work.”

The answer to the owner's first try. The shop got one drag model for buying, merging, moving and selling, with valid slots lit up and a plain-words card on a long press. Fights became hands-on: tap an enemy to focus fire, tap the scrip shards to collect them, and a goal bar says which stop you are on. The power button was fixed (its events were wiped by the next simulation step), and each new idea gets one line of guidance with a pointing hand the first time it comes up.

The route map between stops was replaced by a short drive of about ten seconds that the player takes part in: crates, shard piles and repair kits to tap or swipe, a junction with two signs to pick a branch, and now and then an ambush of three to five creatures. The train always rolls; if the player doesn't pick a branch, the default one is taken.

Work toward a set of target concept images. The Harrow became six procedural glass creatures on one shader, each drawn in a single call and animated in the shader, all checked for a readable silhouette at 48 pixels. The train cars each got one atlas material, the canyon warm red sandstone with haze, the station a night halt and the boss viaduct dressed stone. Fight draw calls went from about 340 to 160.

The owner approved a new direction for the game: mobile first, push-your-luck runs as a freelancer hauling crystal, and turn-based fights instead of an auto-battler. The more cargo the train carries, the louder the world rings (the Hum), and at 100 the Harrow comes to reap it, so every load is a choice between one more and getting out. With the new direction the game was renamed from Carriage Line to Night Freight. The slug changed from carriageline to nightfreight in the game and on the Cantorite platform, the web addresses changed with it, and desktop saves are copied over once from the old folder. Older notes, screenshots and this devlog's first entries still use the old name.

An iOS export preset and a committed Xcode project, so Xcode Cloud can build the game; a script after the clone downloads Godot 4.7.2 and the iOS template and exports again before the build. Android and iOS share the store id pattern com.hollowcut.nightfreight. The branch was merged into develop on 2026-10-17. The headless export works; a build through Xcode and the first TestFlight upload are still to come.

The new direction was first tried as a grey-box slice and then built in full by ten parallel work packages: the simulation with contracts, cargo, the Hum and the reaping, the app flow and saves, 22 real screens with EN and NL strings, a 3D stage for travel and fights, audio, performance presets and a benchmark. They were merged the same night and play a whole run. A device check on the owner's PC on 2026-10-17 held 60 fps in play, but the scene used 4 to 15 times its draw-call budget, and the Dutch strings overflowed on several screens.

The Night Freight build played a whole run, but the device check's shots show screens full of sentences: contract boards, intent lists and long buttons. The rebuild starts from a new game design, a technical design, a UI design and an art guide, with the owner's rules on top: engagement first, not too much text, clear at first look, and only small guidance where something cannot be clear. Railhead is squad tactics: three units guard a train that lays track up one lane of an 8x8 board. Every Harrow shows the tile it will hit next round, and you move, shoot and push to turn those attacks aside, into rock, into each other or off the edge. Four rounds make a stretch, four stretches and a terminus fight make a run of 15 to 20 minutes, and each won stretch lays your faction's line across the Reach map. The name is now Night Freight: Railhead; the slug stays nightfreight.

Built the same day: the deterministic stretch rules and the Harrow's AI with headless tests, the 3D board with procedural Harrow gems and crystals, the line run with route picks, rewards and a terminus, saves after every action, and a first-launch tutorial stretch with a pulse instead of text. The first Reach map came with it: a hex world where your line grows with every won stretch. It was merged into develop, whose pushes deploy the web build.

Unit models from the shared Cantorite assets were reduced to the budget (16k triangles and one 2048 atlas each) and wired in with their idle, walk, shoot and die clips. A unit shader adds a faction palette and a rim light: the Free Holds squad in navy and cream with an amber rim, the Directorate in cyan. Five more Harrow constructs were recorded from Harrowfall. A look pass added ink outlines, a split-tone grade and a vignette.

The Reach map grew in layers. The region is a diorama of hex plates with lakes, forests and a real railway, where you pick the next hex (a quiet plain, a Harrow nest, a fort with its boss or a depot) and see the Directorate and Umbra lines as rivals. Zooming out shows the planet, a hex globe where the Harrow storm rises as a gold funnel; then the Vesper Reach system as an orrery; then the star chart as a holographic table. Ships from Harrowfall and Hush Money fly over it.

After the owner's playtest: a goal banner with three objectives, a lineup before each stretch to pick a loadout and a boost, rival Directorate squads as enemies in later stretches, and a calmer board with one damage badge per tile. The railhead now shows where it will go next, rolls tile by tile and rams whatever stands in its lane before the victim dies. The selected unit gets a white spotlight, spent units grey out, and End turn pulses once every unit has acted.

Guest play stays the default. A small profile button on the map opens a sign-in with an e-mailed code through the Cantorite account, and once signed in the player's line across the Reach syncs on start, after every save and on resume. The same account code is what leaderboards will use.

The rebuild's work lands on develop when it is ready. The first milestone is one faction, one world and a full run with a Warden at the terminus. Next come the Directorate and Umbra squads as playable factions, a daily stretch with a leaderboard, five Harrow types and three worlds; after that a weekly line, all nine worlds, achievements and the store builds.