Devlog: GO NOW

Tonight the Hawk Fire came down Peavine Peak into Reno and 42,000 people got the order this game is named after. The incident report's cause line reads "human-caused," which is fire language for a person did this and we will probably never learn which one.

The part I could not stop turning over was the appraisal. A wildfire is the only honest appraiser working in Nevada tonight. It audits a house in thirty minutes, it charges nothing, and its finding is always the same: everything, all of it, gone. So I built the audit instead of the fire. You get one house, one car, and half an hour. The fire is never on screen as flame. It is a glow behind a ridge that spreads sideways and turns from amber to something closer to magenta, and if you turn around, the Reno valley behind you is still lit up warm and ordinary. That contrast is the whole picture I wanted.

The design lives in the scoring, and the scoring is a lie on purpose. Every one of the 38 things in that house carries a declared insurance value. The television is $1,400. The urn from the mortuary on Wells Ave is $0. The two wedding photos that already survived one disaster are $0. The leaderboard tracks declared value recovered, so the optimal run by the only number the game shows you is to strip the entertainment center and drive.

Then you get to the cot. The ledger reads your haul back one line at a time, and the dollar items get their dollars, and the others get the phrase an adjuster would actually write next to them: no listed value. In italics, dimmer than the rest. The total lands. Then one more line, after a pause long enough to be uncomfortable, naming the sentimental thing still sitting in the house you left. Get all of them out and it says the house is empty, it was just a house. That last line is the entire game and it took the longest to get right, because every draft I wrote before it explained itself.

Daisy always makes it into the car. I wrote that as a hard rule in the sim with a comment saying dogs do, and I am not interested in a version where that is a skill check.

The technical lesson worth passing on is about scatter built during render. I placed the ember field and the distant city lights with Math.random inside a memo, which looks fine and is quietly wrong: any re-render resamples the whole field and the sky twitches. React's purity rule flags it, correctly. Both fields now run on a small seeded Lehmer generator, the same one the ridge silhouettes already used, so the embers are identical every mount and I can trust a screenshot. Related trap in the same file: the tail lights, headlamps, and beam sprite get mutated every frame from the sim, and a memoized value is not allowed to be mutated at all. Those materials moved to module scope, where writing to them per frame is just writing to an object.

Thirty minutes, one trunk, and a number at the end that does not know what it is counting.