secrets of gloomrot was v rising’s first expansion — free, shipped on 17 may 2023, roughly a year into early access. two new regions, 13 legendary bosses, around 30 new monsters, castles that finally went upwards, and a spell system rebuilt around jewels. the codebase went from about 43k to 57k revisions on the way there.

the production problem: it was announced in instalments over nine public months, and almost nothing in it could be built or tested in isolation. this page is how that was held together — dependency mapping, release gating, and the live-ops work that followed.

what i worked on

game producer from 2022 to 2024. on gloomrot i owned the production side of a release where the studio’s own line was “expansion-level” — nearly every system upgraded at once. an expansion that adds content sits next to the game; one that upgrades systems sits inside it, so almost nothing in it could be built, integrated or validated in isolation. that was the job.

not one managed feature — overlapping streams inside a game that was already live.

how: nine months in public

gloomrot was revealed in instalments through dev updates long before it had a name, so every post was also a commitment and the date narrowed in public from “2023” to “may” to “17 may.” planning had to hold against that.

how: dependencies, not tasks

players got a sentence: you can abandon your castle and move it. underneath that sentence sat seven systems with seven owners — and six of them could each finish correctly while the feature stayed broken. the only test that counted ran through all of them, in order, on a build that contained everything else shipping that month.

castle floors were the same story. players noticed the floors; what made them possible was a rework of world topology, line of sight, servant ai and ui — systems that have nothing to do with architecture. my part was keeping that dependency list visible before integration rather than discovering it during it.

single-sentence patch notes hide the coordination that produced them.

how: safe to ship, then live

a system can behave correctly on its own and still break with another feature, a server configuration or an old save. readiness was therefore a phase, not a formality after implementation:

then live: first hotfix the next day, bugfix patches for weeks, and the one structural decision — official servers moved onto fixed wipe schedules, a save-compatibility problem turned into a published calendar that design, engineering, publishing and community all had to agree on. incoming reports were sorted by player impact against regression risk, every time, because speed matters more than elegance once a release is in players’ hands.

what it set up

the schedule after gloomrot held: v rising 1.0 on 8 may 2024, playstation 5 on 11 june 2024. an expansion is the cheapest rehearsal a 1.0 will ever get.

the rest is under nda

the internal side of the same release cannot be shown here: schedules, staffing, build and defect data, the reasoning behind cuts, and what was planned next.