We hit our first real milestone today: Proclaim boots. That might sound underwhelming if you've never shipped a game before, but getting from nothing to a project that actually launches — proper splash screen, main menu, music, pause menu, working input — that's the difference between a folder full of ideas and something that's actually alive. Here's everything that's in as of today: The boot flow. When you launch, you get the Providence Studios logo fading in, then the Proclaim title settling into the corner as the menu background and chrome come up. It's paced and intentional. Menu music kicks in right on the transition. New Game, Continue, and the main menu structure are all wired up and working. The pause menu. Resume, Return to Menu, Quit. Routed cleanly. Keyboard and gamepad both work. The save scaffolding. The save/load skeleton is in place. Not doing anything dramatic yet, but it's ready when the game needs it. We ran our first packaged build validation today — cooking and running the game as a standalone executable the way a real player would see it, not just inside the editor. Hit one crash on the splash-to-menu transition that we tracked down and fixed. After that, clean run all the way through. Underneath the surface, we also shipped something today that's going to matter a lot later. One of the things that makes Proclaim different is what it's tracking. Not just what you did — but what kind of person Ethan is becoming. Eight behavioral axes running silently underneath the game with no meters or labels. A full web of relationship dimensions for every major character. Story flags for the events that actually happened. Mission outcome records that can ripple forward through the entire campaign. That whole layer is in and verified working. We won't be doing much with it visibly for a while — there's a lot more infrastructure to build before it starts shaping dialogue and scenes. But we ran the full state dump in-engine today and everything is seeded and tracking correctly. This is the kind of work that isn't exciting to look at from the outside, but matters enormously when you're three acts in and a conversation goes differently because of something you did in Act 1. This is the layer that makes that possible. More soon.