How Halation started | Halation devlog

First devlog. I’ll write one of these whenever something real changes, with screenshots straight from the game.

What Halation is

You play Scrappy, a small and badly broken maintenance robot. He wakes up alone in a sealed bunker on a coast that’s been swallowed by smog.

Everyone else left a long time ago, heading inland toward the Dome.

The lamps still work, and they’re the only safe ground. That’s the game in a sentence: read the dark, get from one pool of light to the next, rebuild yourself from salvage, and find your way home.

You can’t fight. When something big comes for you, you get out of it by being smarter.

Why smog, and why light

Early on, Halation was a much brighter game. It worked, but it didn’t feel like anything.

What I kept coming back to was a single image: a lamp in thick fog, with that soft glow blooming around it. Everything in the game grew out of that. The smog makes the world feel huge and unknown. The light makes it feel safe, briefly.

Scrappy under a dock gantry lit by sodium lamps in thick smog. — The image the whole game grew out of.

That glow has a name in photography: halation. It ended up being the name of the game.

The bunker you wake up in

The opening is the Sealed Berth, where the coast’s worker robots were charged and stored. When everyone left, Scrappy was left behind in his cradle.

The bunker has kept running ever since, for nobody: the same announcements, the same maintenance loop, a counter on the wall still ticking up the days.

Nothing in there can hurt you. It’s unsettling because it’s empty, not because anything jumps out.

The charging hall, two rows of empty cradles running toward a red-lit door. — The charging hall. Every cradle is empty except his.

Teaching without a single tutorial

I didn’t want popups or text walls. Every room teaches one thing by having you do it:

Waking up. Scrappy starts in pieces and pulls himself together, then limps on a bent pipe for a leg.
The repair bench. You build a new leg, and the limp goes away. Upgrades change how you move, not just numbers.
The flooded pump room. You winch a fuse cell up the wall with the rope hook, the tool the rest of the game is built around.
The radio. With the power back, a voice asks if anyone’s there.
The door. Smog pours in, and you get your first look outside.

Scrappy just after assembling himself in the dark hall.

Waking up, and the bench.

Scrappy small in the bunker doorway, looking out.

The first look outside.

Next up is the harbour outside that door.

Mason, making Halation at Mase Labs