Gradientfall

Gradientfall is an in-development 3D action-adventure that turns machine-learning concepts into geography, combat, quests, and exploration. The current build is an honest vertical slice: a playable Datasedge Meadows environment with a third-person controller, data-driven content, real-time combat foundations, the Bit companion, and a deliberately ambitious code-authored visual stack.

What is working today

• Godot 4.7 project with a typed GDScript architecture and autoload-based state/event boundaries.
• Third-person movement and camera controls in a generated 3D landscape.
• Melee/ranged combat foundations, enemy spawning, health, damage shards, and combat HUD.
• Bit companion behavior and landmark reactions.
• Dynamic sky, celestial layers, clouds, water, terrain, grass, vegetation, particles, and painterly shaders.
• Schema-validated JSON pipeline for quests, NPCs, items, monsters, quizzes, lore, and points of interest.
• 70 approved content entries plus 15 staged inbox entries in the preserved active-work snapshot.

This repository does not claim that the ten-region, 40–80 hour design is complete. The vision is documented in the GDD; the shipped scope and next gates live in the roadmap and devlog.

Project principles

• Quality over speed. The single most important factor of this entire project. Milestones ship when they are verified, documented, and understandable by a stranger — never to keep pace. The full contract lives in CLAUDE.md.
• Documentation is a first-class deliverable. Every script carries a doc header and member docs to the standard in docs/ARCHITECTURE.md; every session appends a dated entry to the devlog; roadmap checkboxes and content-budget ticks are updated in the same commit as the work.

Architecture

content/       JSON schemas, inbox batches, and approved game content
docs/          GDD, worldbook, roadmap, devlog, and content workflow
game/          Godot project, scenes, typed scripts, and code-authored assets
tools/         content validation and authoring utilities

The runtime never hardcodes authored content. ContentDB loads validated entries from content/approved, while GameState owns durable state and EventBus handles cross-system signals. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md and docs/CONTENT_PIPELINE.md.

Run locally

Requirements: Godot 4.7.1 and Python 3.11+.

python tools/validate_content.py --inbox
python tools/validate_content.py --all
godot --editor --path game

The local verification gate is:

godot --headless --editor --path game --quit

Godot can return zero even when its output contains a script parse error, so CI also rejects SCRIPT ERROR, Parse Error, and failed-script-load messages.

Provenance

Gradientfall was extracted from the danieltalbert profile repository with its path history intact, then updated from a verified source-only snapshot of active local work. Generated engine caches and agent-only metadata were deliberately excluded.

License

Original code, documentation, and code-authored assets are available under the MIT License. Dataset extracts will be added only with explicit source and license records before release.