The game signed in, the host listened in the wrong place, and the bill grows with the village

The owner did the one step only he could do: in Epic’s portal he added Steam as an identity provider and mapped it to the game’s Live sandbox. Two things had to change on this side for it to matter. The engine’s default Steam ticket carries no identity string, so the portal could never have matched it; the game now asks Steam for a Web API ticket carrying the identity the portal checks. And a lobby is not searchable the instant it exists – Epic indexes it for up to three seconds – so a search that finds nothing looks again. The gate on the packaged build then printed the three lines this project had waited nine days for: signed in, hosting with a six-letter code, and the farm found again by that code.

Then the real host path showed the fourth line nobody had read: the farm reloading as a listen server on the plain IP driver, port 7777. Since the 5th every “Epic” host had been a local one, because the engine loads the net driver class quietly and falls back on any failure, and the class had been named in an old short form. A friend joining by code would have been handed a relay address nobody listened on. Full script paths fixed it; the log now names the Epic driver and an Epic socket. The LAN launchers say they want IP sockets explicitly, and the IP net gate – red since the twelfth for an instrument reason, a log line the spend sheet had retired – is green again. What is left is the test only a second machine with a second Steam account can run.

The HUD got its verdict: colour is not a revamp. Three layouts were drafted on a canvas and the owner chose the Field Board – one bar along the bottom for the hero, the shelf and the store, one strip along the top for the day and the wave, the ledger as a dock you staff while watching the field – with four finishes of it now waiting for his eye.

And a design call from a game of carrots and towers on the studio’s own site: by day five or six the gathering is done and the pressure must come from the field. The wave now carries a village factor as a switch – the day curve times one plus a constant times the village level less one, capped – the level and not the head count, because the level is the largest population kept fed, and the Taxman’s bill grows with what you own. Off by default; the band is pricing three values of the constant overnight. The sixth tape, with the owner’s wife watching, gave nineteen voice notes: ten bugs, six words to fix, one sound that wears, and two ideas parked for after the demo.