- Devlog: Nobody Writes To The Leaderboard Anymore - 19 September 2026
Droning On has global leaderboards on every level and in Endurance Mode, and the entire point of them is that the number next to your name means something. A leaderboard nobody trusts is just a list of people who found a memory editor first.By default, that's roughly what you get. The standard way a game submits a score is that the game client uploads it. Which means the thing deciding what your score is a program running on hardware the player controls, and eventually somebody points a debugger at it. That's not a knock on Steam — it's the honest shape of the problem, and it's the same shape in almost every game with a leaderboard in it.So I took the ability away from the game.Trusted WritesEvery leaderboard in Droning On is configured as trusted-write. In practice, that means Steam refuses score uploads that come from the game. Not "ignores if suspicious"; refuses, structurally, as po…
- Devlog: Skip Ahead - 5 September 2026
Bootcamp is twenty levels long, and it's the front door to everything else in Droning On. Puzzle Mode is behind it. Endurance Mode is behind it. So are the feature unlocks — collections, interactables, hazard detection, functions, classes — which the game hands you one chapter at a time as you earn them.That's the right structure for someone learning to code. It is a wall for someone who already can. If you write software for a living, being asked to demonstrate a while loop before the game will let you into the more exciting modes. That's not fun; we want fun.So Bootcamp now has a skip button.Per Chapter, In OrderThe skip isn't one button that eats the whole tutorial. Bootcamp is split into eight chapters — Movement Basics, Detection and Timing, Energy Management, Loops and Patterns, Collections and Scanning, Interactables, Hazards, and Final Integration — and each one has its own skip…
- Devlog: Bring Your Own Editor - 22 August 2026
Droning On ships with a code editor. It has syntax highlighting, error underlines, a console, a run/stop button, and it is a perfectly good place to write a solution. It is also, if you are the kind of person who has opinions about editors like me, somebody else's editor. We developers, are fickle.So the scripts aren't locked inside it. They're plain .py files sitting in a folder on your disk, and the game will happily let VS Code, PyCharm, Vim, Notepad, or whatever you actually work in be the thing you type into. Save in your editor, and the change is in the game before you've finished moving your hand back to the mouse.By the way, if you are a fellow VS Code user, I made a simple highlighter for you to use; you can find it here for free: https://github.com/Mythikos/droning-on-vscode-syntax-highlighter.Scripts Are Just FilesEverything you write lives in a scripts folder in the game's s…
- Devlog: Puzzle Mode - 8 August 2026
Bootcamp teaches you the language one idea at a time. Endurance Mode drops you on a virtual treadmill and speeds it up until you fall off. Puzzle Mode is the thing in the middle, and it's the part of Droning On I've spent the most time actually designing levels. Each level is built around a single idea, each one waiting to see what you do with it.Thirteen Hand-Built ProblemsEvery one of the thirteen was placed by hand, tile by tile. They don't share a theme, and they don't build on each other the way Bootcamp chapters do, or Endurance does. You can look at the list, pick the one whose name amuses you most, and go.They're sorted into four tiers — Easy, Medium, Hard, and Very Hard — and the spread is real. Currently, there are thirteen puzzle maps, but I am actively working on more, each with its own unique challenge.The Rules BendBootcamp establishes how the world works: walls stop you,…
- Devlog: You're Being Watched - 25 July 2026
A Droning On level used to be a quiet place. Walls, hazards, a grid, and Gizmo, who doesn't move until your code tells him to. Good for concentrating. Bad for atmosphere, and worse for the thing I was after, which is the sense that your maze isn't sitting in a vacuum. It's a test. Something built it, something is watching how you do, and you are not the only robot in the building. So I added drones, two kinds of them, to make the world feel alive and a little like you're under a microscope, without dragging your eye off the tiles you're counting. The ObserversThe first kind are observers. They fly the maze and watch Gizmo work, tracking him as he moves and hovering like they're taking notes on the run. They don't help and they don't interfere. They watch. That's the whole job, and the job is a feeling: you're not solving a puzzle alone in an empty room, you're solving it in front of som…
- Devlog: Endurance Mode - 11 July 2026
Bootcamp teaches you the language. Puzzle Mode hands you a problem and waits for a solution. Both have a finish line: clear the level, and you are done. Endurance Mode doesn't have one. It is a procedurally generated run that starts easy and gets harder the longer you stay in it, and it is built on purpose to end eventually. The only question Endurance asks is how long your code can keep Gizmo going, and where that lands you against everyone else. The Generator Scales With YouA run opens gently. The early mazes are the kind of thing a clean script clears without much trouble. Then the world generator starts turning the dial. The longer your run goes, the more it throws at you, scaling the difficulty in step with your run time until, around the 10-minute mark, it reaches the top of its range and builds the hardest challenges it knows how to build. Getting that far means you have written…
- Devlog: The Demo Is Live - 3 July 2026
The Droning On demo is live. It's free, it's the first ten levels of Bootcamp, and it's enough to learn the basics, meet Gizmo, and figure out if Droning On is your idea of a good time. What's In ItThe demo is Bootcamp, levels 1 through 10. Bootcamp is the teaching mode – it hands you the language one concept at a time instead of dropping you straight into the deep end. You write code that looks and feels just like Python to steer Gizmo through a series of grid-based mazes: your first move(), then conditionals, loops, energy management, and reading the maze around you. Gizmo does what the code says, and the difficulty climbs as the concepts stack up. By level 10, you get to see the concepts coming together.Use Your Own EditorYour scripts aren't trapped in the game, either. They live as plain .py files, allowing you to write them in the in-game editor or pull them into VS Code or PyCharm…
- Devlog: Why Gizmo Stopped Running Real Python - 28 June 2026
Droning On has one core promise: you write code that looks and feels just like Python, and Gizmo does what the code instructs. For most of this project, that code ran on real CPython, embedded in the game and executing your scripts line by line. It worked. It also quietly gave every player a way to run code that could reach out and interact with their machine. Doesn't sound too bad until you start to think about what that means. What "Real" Gave UsEmbedding CPython hands you the whole language for free. Real loops, real functions, real imports, the standard library, all of it. For a game about writing Python, that's the appeal. The trouble hides in the word "all." import os is real. The filesystem is reachable. The network is reachable. eval is sitting right there. None of that has anything to do with steering a robot, but a real interpreter doesn't care. You hand it code, it runs the c…
- Devlog: The MCP Server I Added and Subsequently Removed - 1 June 2026
For about two days in May, Droning On could be played without anyone actually playing it. I'd wired up a way for an external AI agent to read a level and drive Gizmo through it. No human, no typing, just a model calling the same functions you would. It worked... too well... then I deleted it.So before anyone panics, that capability is not in the game and isn't coming back. The short detour was interesting enough, and the impacts to the codebase were for the better, so I figured it was worth writing up.What I Actually BuiltThe feature was a bridge (technically, a Model Context Protocol server) that exposed Gizmo's command surface – move(), turn(), scan(), all of it – along with the current level and your code, to an outside AI assistant. The idea was a big-brother figure: something to look over your shoulder, explain why a script wasn't behaving, and point you in the right direction when…
- Devlog: A Place to Mess Around - 23 May 2026
Most of Droning On is structured. The Bootcamp mode teaches you the language one concept at a time. Puzzle mode hands you a problem that requires unique solutions. Endurance throws the maze-solving problem at you in a way that gives you an endless stream of challenges. All of that is great, but none of it is the kind of space where you can just... try things.The SandboxThe Sandbox is a single open level with no objective, no timer, and no failure state. It's split into a few themed zones, each built around a different category of mechanic. Most things in the level have a reset button right next to them, so once you've solved (or broken) something, you can reset them without needing to reload the level. Hazard Zone: Every hazard in the game is grouped into one zone. Want to see what move() does when you walk straight into a spike trap? Now you can, on purpose, as many times as you want.…
- Devlog: Teaching Python To Wait Its Turn - 2 May 2026
In Droning On, you write Python to control Gizmo. A script that says move() does what you'd expect: Gizmo walks one tile. Easy and intuitive. Except... not really. That single line of code is doing something a normal Python script never does. It's waiting for a robot to physically walk across a tile in a Unity scene before the next line of your code runs. And while it's waiting, the game still has to render, animate, play sounds, react to input, and stay responsive. None of that is how Python normally behaves.The ProblemBy default, Python runs as fast as your computer will let it. If you wrote a loop that called move() ten times, vanilla Python would happily blast through all ten calls in a millisecond and call it a day. That's great if you're crunching numbers. It's terrible if each one of those calls is supposed to represent Gizmo taking a step.There's also a second problem. Unity is…
- Devlog: Making Time Deterministic - 11 April 2026
If two players run the same script on the same level, should they get the same completion time? The answer should obviously be a yes... but getting there is trickier than it sounds.The ProblemWhile working on Droning On, I noticed a discrepancy in the amount of time a script would be recorded during a run. I further noticed that the same script on a higher execution speed resulted in a substantial inflation of the total time. Something that took 51 seconds on 1x speed returned 1 minute and 30 seconds on 10x speed.The root cause came down to how the game was tracking time. Like most games, the logic was tied to the framerate. Every frame, the game checks how much real time has passed and moves the timers forward accordingly. This works fine for most games, but in Droning On, we have leaderboards, and those must remain fair. Small floating-point differences in how time accumulates between…
- Devlog: Complete UI Rework - 27 March 2026
The old UI worked, but it wasn't winning any contests. It got the job done for early development, but it looked like it belonged in a prototype build, and if you were playing on a larger monitor... good luck. This update is a full UI rework across every screen in the game: main menu, level selectors, code editor, HUD, customizations, unlockables—all of it.What ChangedThe old UI had a flat look with hard borders and a lot of raw white/grey. The new UI leans into a darker, more cohesive theme that fits the industrial warehouse vibe of the game while keeping things readable and clean. Panels have depth, icons have character, and everything feels more intentional.Beyond aesthetics, the biggest functional improvement is resolution scaling. The old UI was built with fixed sizing, which meant it looked fine at 1080p and progressively worse at anything above that. The new UI scales properly acr…
