Rooted Weekly Dev Log: Week 32, 2026

Hey everyone!

This week went almost entirely to the current public alpha rather than to the new build: the servers it talks to, what comes back when it crashes, and the first minutes of a new game. There is also a small performance pass in there.

A word on the summer break first, and on the word break, which in practice turned out to mean a console port. I spent it on the PlayStation version of Backrooms Extractions, the studio's side project. Headlight is now a PlayStation partner and that game is on its way to the platform, so I have had a dev kit in hand. For a studio this size, getting to work directly on that hardware is a real opportunity, and what you learn on a console port does not stay on the console port.

And since it comes up: yes, I read the impatience. I understand it. Game development takes the time it takes, and the new build is where the gameplay goes properly deep, combat, AI camps, animals, all of it running full C++ underneath. In its current state it is simply not something you hand out.

Being arrogant or insulting about it has, I can confirm after careful observation, exactly zero effect on how fast a build gets finished.

To the overwhelming majority of you who just back the game and wait patiently: thank you, sincerely. It makes a real difference!

The public alpha moves onto the new infrastructure

Everything I have built around the studio, the telemetry, the crash reporting, the NDA side, now runs on a new infrastructure. The public alpha still points at the older setup, so it needs an update to talk to the new one, and the old server is retired with it. That leaves a single point of truth: telemetry, crash reports, the NDA side, all read from the same place instead of being split across two setups that have to agree with each other.

That is the whole reason the public alpha is being touched at all. So if you see an update land on it, take it easy: it is plumbing underneath, not a content patch. Juggling the old setup and the new one in parallel is exactly what I want to avoid.

What that changes for crash reports

The direct upside of the move is crash reporting. On the new infrastructure a crash comes back with far more context attached, so the cause is readable from the report itself instead of having to be reconstructed from a description.

The first minutes of a new game

The other half of that break went to UX on the side project, and to reading how players actually behave in it. Rooted has data too, but it is an alpha and it reads differently. Coming back to Rooted, I started a fresh game myself and had to work out what I was supposed to be doing.

So the same update is where a better first grip on the game goes: making it clearer what you are looking at when you land in the world, and what to do with it, rather than leaving a new player to reverse engineer the opening. If you bounced off your first session because you had no idea where to start, that one is on me, not on you.

Performance

Some performance work is going into the same pass. The scope on that one is deliberately narrow. This is the old alpha, and the bulk of the work belongs to the new build.

So, what that update actually is

Since I had to put one out anyway, I took the time to improve a handful of things while I was in there. The drone is one of them, imported from the new production build, plus a few other bits. I am not going to build that up into a list: it is a few improvements that fit in the same pass, no more than that.

It goes out at the end of next week. Just so nobody reads it as something it is not: this is the current public alpha, with its plumbing moved over and some things improved along the way. It is not the production build.

That is the week from the development side. Thanks for reading, and see you in the next one!

Mat