Twenty-four hours ago RED GARDEN was a card-RTS with a one-hero proof-of-concept sitting next to it. As of tonight, the proof-of-concept is the product, it's playable over a real network against a persistent pool of bots, and a human can queue into it right now. Here's the honest shape of what actually happened, not the pitch version.
## The pivot
Somewhere in the middle of the day, the direction changed: the MOBA — what had been a small, additive side demo — became the product. Everything below is downstream of that one decision.
## From local demo to real multiplayer
The single-machine, no-networking arena demo went to real client-server PvP in one pass: a dedicated arena server, a `--connect` mode for the client, and the wire packets to move and cast abilities over the network instead of driving a local simulation directly. Verified by actually running it — which caught two real bugs in the process (a bot AI that would've hijacked a real second player's hero, and a match clock that could resolve before the second player even connected). Both fixed before anything shipped further.
From there it scaled fast: a real draft phase (no more hardcoded heroes), the sim generalized from two heroes to twenty, a real networked bot client with a persistent identity, and the matchmaker turned into one binary serving both game modes. A soak test running actual persistent bots through dozens of matches surfaced three more real bugs — bots re-registering a new identity every match instead of keeping one, match servers never shutting down and flooding the next match's socket with stale packets, and a UDP retry race that could spawn a match nobody ever joins. All three fixed, and the fixes were the kind you only find by actually leaving something running, not by reading the code.
The 10v10 path got its own separate verification pass — twenty real bot connections, a real draft, correct team assignment, combat, and a real team-wipe win condition — because "the same code as 1v1, untested at this scale" isn't actually verified until someone runs it at that scale.
## A human can join
A player-only matchmaking pool now runs alongside the bot pool, on its own port, with zero bots ever configured to enter it. And the client itself learned how to find a match without already knowing a server address — queue against the matchmaker the same way the bots do, get matched, get connected. Verified with a real human client queuing against a real bot and landing in an actual match together.
The one honest gap here: this box has no display, so nobody has actually *seen* a match render yet. The join is proven. The picture on screen isn't, from this end.
## Real identity, real stats
Bots stopped self-minting fake tickets and started registering actual identities with the platform's IAM layer. Match results get reported back at the end of every game. A public leaderboard now accumulates real win/loss records tied to those real identities — and tonight, what had quietly been running on self-minted (i.e. fake, untracked) tickets all session got switched over to the real thing. Not a new feature — a real gap in an existing one, closed.
## The roster, three times over
Four heroes became eleven. Allies got built into the arena sim (a real gap, not a nice-to-have — without them, half the existing hero kits' ally-facing abilities had nothing to target). A territory/node system landed, unlocking five heroes that needed ground to fight over. An eleventh hero arrived built directly from existing universe lore rather than invented from scratch. Along the way, two heroes that had been designed separately turned out to be the same character wearing two names — merged into one before either shipped, once that was noticed.
The territory system itself didn't stay put either: what started as ambient pressure got replaced outright, days into its own life, with something closer to a real capture-the-point mechanic — exclusive presence, interruptible channels, a stealth counter-play — plus jungle creeps whose difficulty and reward literally depend on who currently controls the ground they spawn on. Not a tuning pass. A redesign, because the first version wasn't the right shape for the game it turned out to be.
## What's still honestly open
Ranked play has a real design (plain ELO, a separate stats table, a documented queue shape) and zero code — a design gap flagged as exactly that, not quietly treated as done. A handful of heroes are still blocked on game systems that don't exist yet (a way to have more than one unit under a single player's control, mainly). And the firewall on this box doesn't yet know to let a real external player's connection through to the matchmaker — that's queued as a script for a human to run, not something built around.
251 tests pass right now, every one of them added because something specific needed proving, not as a coverage exercise. That's the actual state: fast, real, and still missing pieces that are named instead of hidden.
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