The release steps

From empty repo to live war

The roadmap is carved into stages, and gates govern, not dates — a stage ships when its checks pass, and the next one doesn't start until a kill-question is answered honestly. What's below is what actually happened, and what's actually next. It doubles as the devlog schedule: episodes are milestone-locked to these gates.

“Gates govern, not dates.” — The operating rule, unchanged since the empty repo

The timeline

What shipped, and what's next

  • July 13, 2026

    The stack decision DONE

    One language everywhere, a deterministic simulation core with zero dependencies, and serverless infrastructure that scales to zero between matches. The whole cost model is verified before a line of game code exists.

  • July 13–14, 2026

    S0 — The Range DONE

    The core volley proven: fixed-point ballistics, destructible terrain, simultaneous resolution, replays, and the determinism gates that make two computers agree forever. First playable within two sessions.

  • July 15, 2026

    The name locks, and the first deploy ships DONE

    The project takes its name — Branchwars — and the first production deploy goes out the same day: real infrastructure, global counters, scale-to-zero between matches, running live on the free tier.

  • July 15–16, 2026

    S1 build — nine departments, a career, an economy DONE

    Online play with bot backfill, then all nine department kits in days, the procurement buy menu, careers from Intern to Senior with real promotion gating, and Orientation Week with the System plus nine voiced mentors — 125 lines of VO, generated from scripts in the repo.

  • July 17, 2026

    S1 closes — maps, sudden death, and the ops gauntlet DONE

    Three authored maps and Cost Cutting sudden death close the build. Then the logistics gates: a 200-concurrent load test (1,350 matches, zero desyncs), the replay archive turned on, retention instrumentation, and the real cost measured — about $22 per million matches. The game goes live at play.branchwars.com.

  • July 18, 2026

    The tweak-to-fun pass DONE

    Before adding anything new, the complete game got a dedicated feel-and-fun tuning pass — pacing, readability, game-feel — with no changes to the simulation. The internal fun score climbed from 65 to 73; the client-feel budget was spent honestly and logged.

  • July 18, 2026

    S2 — The War ships DONE

    The company goes to war with itself. A campaign map where every match pushes a front line across eighteen office floors and held territory grants real bonuses; ranked Stack Rank with a skill ladder and Post-Mortem replays; the Senior Track past Senior; a daily Inbox of tickets; and “claim your career” Google sign-in. All live on prod — shipped incrementally, not held behind a launch.

  • Now

    Launched — the game is live LIVE

    Branchwars is fully launched: free in your browser, no install, no account, complete through S2 — nine departments, the career ladder, the campaign map, and ranked play. And because it's us, the War Room publishes the real match and retention numbers as they come in, pass or fail. Nobody else shows those. We think that's strange.

Follow the build

Watch it happen

Every gate above is also a devlog episode — a message from the Company, one real engineering concept at a time. The fastest way to follow the project, though, is to play the current build.

PLAY THE CURRENT BUILD → Watch the devlog Read how it's built