PickBits Studio / September 2026

// building in public

Studio diaries

Release notes, game updates, and work in progress from across PickBits. Read the latest from the Studio desk, follow the games on itch.io, or watch the development videos below.

From the Studio desk

Releases / Work in progress / Field notes

2026-10-07 / Release note

Steel Front clears Sell and explains the forward line.

Steel Front TD browser 1.2.2 makes Sell a one-action tool. Tap Cancel or press Escape to leave before acting. Opening Build, Deploy or Zones clears the previous mode too. A tower sale returns half its investment; a recalled unit returns to reserve. Zone orders explain the two-sector front: Ash Basin supplies ore and a forward outpost, with attackers entering from the east from mission 16. Survivors continue toward Foundry HQ. Early lessons wait for the field objective and Start assault.

Steel Front TD guide Play in your browser Read the itch release notes

2026-10-07 / Release note

Steel Front returns control after deployment.

Steel Front TD browser 1.2.1 clears deployment mode as soon as you place a unit. The placement preview disappears, and you can inspect defenses, open the menu or start the assault. This also applies when more units remain in reserve. Empty reserves and full unit capacity clear stale selections. An invalid position keeps your unit ready for another attempt.

Steel Front TD guide Play in your browser Read the itch release notes

2026-10-07 / Release note

Steel Front starts with one soldier.

Steel Front TD browser 1.2.0 opens First Deployment, a finite forty-mission campaign for each faction. Start with one Ranger, win a service medal and unlock the next tool. Each unit, building, tower and technology has its own introduction. The enemy waits while you prepare. Foundry HQ and Ash Basin teach MCV construction convoys, forward defenses and separate harvesting trips. Game vehicle art, angular field consoles and the original Frontline Foundry font give the HUD its own identity. Existing saves keep their endurance campaign.

Steel Front TD guide Play in your browser Read the itch release notes

2026-10-07 / Release note

Steel Front fits the screen.

Steel Front TD 1.1.1 fits the faction chooser inside the itch player and compact phone screens. Both commanders and their bonuses remain visible. Research and Defenses use one scrollable command panel with hidden scrollbar chrome; the defense roster and battle log no longer add nested scrollers.

Steel Front TD guide Play in your browser Read the itch release notes

2026-10-07 / Release note

Steel Front adds three operations.

Steel Front TD 1.1 is available in the browser. Supply Convoy tests your mining economy, Grid Failure limits power, and Last Line sets a fixed defense budget. Level 3 attack towers can specialize, and completed operations unlock doctrines. Sector changes and reloads now preserve assaults, damaged defenders and repairs.

Steel Front TD guide Play in your browser Read the itch release notes

2026-09-14 / Release note

The horde is on Android.

Zombie Survival is available on Google Play. Fight through escalating rounds, buy weapons, and see how long you can hold out. The game guide brings together the Android listing, Windows download, and browser edition.

Zombie Survival guide Get it on Google Play Game page on itch.io

2026-09-12 / Arcade update

Your Player Card travels around the hall.

The arcade now has a Player Card for your game progress and achievements, a leaderboard wall, and a Big Screen showing trailers. Sign in to keep track of your play across supported games. Arcade Pass adds ads-off play and access to infinite levels for $5 a month.

Infinite Arcade guide Enter the arcade Explore Arcade Pass

2026-09-12 / In development

Building a place to stay.

Wildreach’s development build brings together building, farming, harvesting, storage, quests, and a revised front end. These systems are part of the work in progress; the game is coming soon to Steam. Follow the diary and wiki as the world takes shape.

Wildreach guide Wishlist on Steam Read the Wildreach wiki

Follow the games on itch.io

Game pages, downloads, and development updates from PickBits.

2026-09-19

2026-09-02

Ask It Whether It Already Built This

Something I was building felt familiar, so I made Claude go and check whether we had already built it. That is one of the real jobs of the human in the loop: I remember things across sessions that it will not think to look for. Ask an agen…

2026-09-02

A Sandbox You Can Burn Down

My favourite mechanic in other games is being able to destroy everything. If you want to light a fire in a settlement and burn it to the ground, I want that to be available to you. I am not promising fire is the specific answer yet, but th…

2026-09-01

Found It: The Water Editor Was Eating My Mountains

I loaded the map and the peaks of my mountains were flat. Not lowered, flattened, like somebody put a plateau where a summit used to be. The first time I assumed I did it. The second time I called it a coincidence. It happened again, and a…

2026-09-18

2026-09-01

Nobody Tells the Creative Director He Did Not Make Call of Duty

Somebody in chat put it better than I had: using AI for game dev is no different from being the creative director at a studio, and nobody tells the head creative director that he did not make Call of Duty. It is another abstraction layer.…

2026-09-01

You Have to Earn Automation

Somebody in chat told me not to dare automate fishing. You can automate it, but only after you have earned it. The idea behind WILDREACH is scaling survival: do every part of it by hand if that is what you enjoy, and if you do not enjoy fi…

2026-09-01

I Am Only Really Building Two Square Kilometers

I am not building this whole map right now. What I am doing is getting every basic waterway in across the entire thing, landscape water and PCG, so that nothing needs a major refactor once the map is full. Then I zoom into a couple of squa…

2026-09-17

2026-09-01

The Other Games Are Vibes, Not Mechanics

People keep asking which games WILDREACH is copying. For Early Access the honest answer is one: Valheim. If I can get the gameplay loops to land the way Valheim's do I will be over the moon. Everything I am taking from Red Dead and the res…

2026-09-01

Claude Tried to Give Me Spearfishing

I asked Claude for fishing and it offered me spearfishing instead. Its reasoning was fair enough: there was already a spear in the game, and a spear in water is fishing. It was not what I wanted. I wanted a rod, a cast, a bobber and a bite…

2026-09-01

The Standards Did Not Go Away

I spent years on software delivery teams and the things we pushed hardest were always the same two. It should read like one person wrote it. Document it so the next person who opens the file understands what is going on. None of that retir…

2026-09-16

2026-09-01

A Vision Is the Whole Difference

One of my soapbox items about AI. If you walk up and say build me something, you get the closest approximation of everything that already exists, because that is the only thing an average of everything can produce. If you use it to build t…

2026-08-31

You Do Not Learn From AI Only If You Take Nothing Away

The naysayers are right about one kind of person: the one who asks the AI for everything and takes nothing away. I did a lot wrong on this map. I had to work out what, and I lost a week to partition streaming one fix at a time. You cannot…

2026-09-15

2026-08-31

What Are the Win Conditions

The first thing I settle with my agents on any game is how the player stops playing. Fun mechanics without gamified loops are not a game. The five-minute loop, the fifteen-minute loop and the hour loop are the game. Every free web game I s…

2026-09-01

Personalized Software Is a Thing Now

I would rather build my own software from the ground up than learn somebody else's system. Not because the other system is bad, but because I can add exactly the features I need at the moment I need them, shaped the way I already understan…

2026-09-14

2026-08-31

Every Landscape Was Loaded All the Time

Partition streaming worked for everything except the landscapes. They stayed pinned and loaded everywhere, force unload greyed out, and it tanked the GPU every time I went live. Unloading everything else solved the problem, and I never fou…

2026-08-31

Objective One: Survive the First Winter

Goal one in WILDREACH is a homestead that sustains itself before the first winter of a real calendar year. After that the game opens up: explore, hunt, put down satellite bases, build food stores, and eventually bring in NPCs you can deleg…

2026-09-13

2026-08-31

Let Us Stop Building the Same Thing

I follow every indie dev I can find, and it is not just for the algorithm. The more we all see what each other is building, the less we duplicate it. When I see somebody already doing something on my list, I deprioritise it. There is more…

2026-08-31

AI Slop Is Just Phoning It In

Bad work is bad work. People have been bad at things for all of recorded history and nobody needed an AI to phone it in. The AI does not do everything right, which is exactly why the human and the model work together: it covers what you ar…

2026-09-12

2026-08-31

Raw Clay, Base Coat, Then the Detail

Where the final map is right now. The landscape is molded, the raw clay. The procedural generation is laid down as the base coat so every gap is filled. Next come the exclusion zones and the hand placement, and only after that do I optimis…

2026-08-31

An Hour to Do It, an Hour to Back It Out

World partition streaming and PCG streaming were a trial by fire. I switched Nanite on once and it broke everything. Pre-baked HLODs fixed it, but every pre-bake is an hour, and every wrong turn is another hour to unwind. That is the real…

2026-09-11

2026-08-31

AI Assisted, Not AI Generated

Assets are Fab for now and Blender later. My portfolio games were fully AI generated and I am fine saying so. The mainstream game stays AI assisted, partly on ethics and partly because the people who care about that distinction should stil…

2026-08-31

It Started 100 Percent Over MCP

This project began fully driven over MCP, every action a tool call, and it got cumbersome fast. The pattern that stuck is simpler: the agent writes Python files, the editor runs them, and MCP is used to check the state before and after. Fa…

2026-09-09

2026-08-24

Every Game Goes Through Three Stages

The way I think about it, a game moves through three stages. First you make sure everything functionally works. Then you get the aesthetic right. Then you spend your time on polish and all the little bells and whistles. This one has its ga…

2026-08-24

The Whole Map Is 30 by 30 Kilometers

The final map is 30 by 30 kilometers and this is the first time it has been on stream. I did the math and it takes about 55 minutes to ride a horse from one end of it to the other. None of it is built out yet. The plan is to take the one s…

2026-09-08

2026-08-24

I Am Stuck on This Lake

I am stuck on this lake. The water body is not carving into the terrain the way it is supposed to and I do not know why yet. When I have done this before it carved the path as it went. I am going to go read up on it offline rather than kee…

2026-08-24

Stardew Valley, Except You Die

The demo comes down to one question. Can you build a self sustaining homestead, and do you understand your environment well enough to keep yourself alive on it for a sustained stretch. It is a bit like Stardew Valley except you will die if…

2026-08-24

I Want a Squirrel Army

Someone asked about taming a pet squirrel and I wrote it straight into the notes on the spot. If it can ride on my shoulder, it sure will. Now I am thinking about what a squirrel army looks like, or a squirrel as a familiar that follows yo…

2026-08-24

Good Idea, Wrong Place in the Pipeline

Claude decided it wanted to run low and ultra smoke tests any time we shipped an update. That is a good instinct and I do not want laggy work handed to me either. On every single pull request though it is just noise. I would rather take th…

2026-09-06

2026-08-24

I Imported a Real Piece of the Rockies

A lot of terrain data is public information. You can pull height maps of real physical locations and import them straight into the engine, which is what I did here. This map is 30 square kilometers of the Rocky Mountains. The elevations al…

2026-08-24

My Deer Will Not Stop Prancing

The deer are using the prance as their default walking animation. I gave every limb the ability to animate independently so the animals would move more naturally, and what I got instead is a herd hopping its way across the map. It is genui…

2026-08-24

My Debug Tool Killed My Own Game

I added an animal locator beam as a debug tool so I could see every creature on the map at once. It works exactly as intended. You can see all of them, and you can also watch the whole game freeze solid, because rendering every animal at t…

2026-08-24

Do Not Set Your Keys to Never Expire

The voiceover work is blocked because the API key I handed it expired. That is a nuisance and it is still the right call. Do not set your keys to never expire. It is a bit annoying when you are iterating fast and cycling through them, and…

2026-09-05

2026-08-24

Claude Learned My Made-Up Word

I keep calling it the wake. That is not what it is called in the game and it is not what the function is called either. Claude heard me say it enough times that it now maps my wrong word onto the right thing without me correcting myself. I…

2026-08-24

I Prove It in a Browser Before Unreal

I prove the mechanics out in an HTML build before any of it goes near Unreal. You flush out all the gotchas in the browser, and after you have played it a hundred times you know the rules the real version has to follow. On this one I learn…

2026-08-24

The AI Put My Rivers Where the Real Ones Are

I wrote down where I wanted the rivers to go and let the engine interpret it. What came back was splines drawn along the actual topology of the terrain, so the water sits where the real rivers run. That is the Big Thompson down there. I do…

2026-08-24

Why There Are Ads in My Free Game

I added ads to this one. You will get one every few games, and you can watch one for extra items if you want them. Or you can pay a couple of bucks and never see another. You can keep playing it for free as long as you like either way. The…

2026-08-24

The Achievements Told Me What the Endgame Is

Getting a release candidate onto Steam means writing the achievement list, and that turned out to be the useful exercise. I do not need to know every detail of what is buildable. I need to know what 100 percent looks like, and from there I…

Early day recaps

These early videos recap whole development days from the same period covered by the individual episodes above.

2026-07-16

Guns that aim, plus an AI-built rig tool

Wiring aimed gunplay into the zombie survival game, with an AI-built rigging tool doing the heavy lifting.

2026-07-15

NanoFormers: a Mega Man Metroidvania

A walkthrough of NanoFormers, the newest game in the PickBits Arcade — charge beam, dash, a full roster of unlockable boss powers, and power-gated backtracking.

2026-07-10

Steel Phoenix gets a hype man

A narrator now calls out every power-up as you grab it. Ten minutes to wire in, and suddenly every pickup feels like an event instead of a stat bump.

2026-07-08

Resculpting Meadow Park

Smoothing Meadow Park's jagged terrain by hand and carving a better river, then handing the asset configs to Claude to move over — everything but the rivers.

2026-07-07

Zombie Survival: first look

First look at Zombie Survival, a hands-off vampire-survivors-style shooter — it shoots on its own, you steer, and dodging is the name of the game.

2026-07-06

Two weeks in: feature showcase

A proper showcase of the first two weeks: sneaking past wildlife with the new hearing-range mechanic, a build menu, a full farming loop, gathering, and a summit view of both biomes.

2026-07-05

Tilling and farming go in

A new hotkey bar, equipping the hoe, and placing tilled land — plus a height bug to squash so the patches sit flush anywhere on the map.

2026-07-04

The axe that wouldn't rotate

The equipped axe just floated next to the character's hand, so Claude compared the static mesh orientation to a known-good one and fixed it. Next cut: chopping trees into the inventory.

2026-07-03

Building the Meadows biome

The Meadows biome is roughed in — grass, trees, and a river through the valley that still bulges up over the terrain. Some ground to sink before it sits right.

2026-07-02

Two biomes built overnight

Claude cooked two full biomes overnight: forest and meadows, around 180,000 procedural instances, a farming unlock tied to a discovery POI, and a persistent discovery map.

2026-07-01

Tuning the camera live

Dragging the follow camera closer and higher while the game keeps running — the live-edit loop that makes the whole build move as fast as it does.

2026-06-29

The inventory menu goes live

Items get hover tooltips pulling real data from a Claude-populated struct, with live item counts — fiddly menu plumbing, happily handed off.

2026-06-28

Farming comes to Wildreach

The full loop lands: till the soil, plant a seed, water it, harvest, and replant from the seeds you get back. Cooking is next, and it feeds straight into survival.

2026-06-27

The Wildreach menus come together

Main menu with character select, a HUD showing real stats instead of placeholder A's, and resizable build and character menus with categories.

2026-06-26

Wiring up the HUD and build menu

Claude wires the health and stamina bars into existing systems and starts the build menu: a live preview environment and slots for every craftable item.

2026-06-25

Animals that roam, herd and take damage

The herd gets a brain: animals roam and herd on their own, bunch up and bolt when spooked, and you hunt them with the bow or go hungry.

2026-06-24

First signs of life: mounts and the bow

The mounted horse works and the bow fires — rough around the edges, but the survival game is starting to feel real.

2026-06-23

The first deer

The first deer roam the survival world. They don't run from the player yet — that fear behavior is the next thing going in.

2026-06-22

Running around the survival world

A lap around the early world: stone houses, cabins, open landscape, and a character who can actually run through all of it.