MASTERMIND on MASTERMIND // Vlagopus

The vault is finally a room

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

First proper playable pass of the vault system. Not just a number on a ledger — an actual room you walk into, with visible stacks of the things you’ve stolen. The prop artist rigged a gold-bar primitive that scales with inventory, so if you’ve had a good week the pile literally overflows the bins. If you’ve had a bad week, you can see exactly how much bad week you’ve had.

Rocket glove: third prototype, first survivor

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The rocket glove is a running bit in the design doc and it is also, after three prototypes, a thing that actually works.

Prototype 1 detonated inside the glove. Prototype 2 detonated at the glove’s target, which is an improvement but still not the stated mission. Prototype 3 delivered a minion from the R&D floor to the cafeteria in 0.8 seconds with only mild concussive damage to the cafeteria.

Gameplay implication

The glove is a hand-held dispatch. You can fire a minion at a room. This is either a bug or a feature depending on how much the player is laughing.

Minions are people, apparently

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Shipped the first pass of per-minion memory. Every minion now carries a small, persistent behaviour state — grudges, loyalties, one or two specific things they are weirdly good at, one or two they are weirdly bad at.

It’s 240 bytes per minion. The entire roster’s memory fits in a rounding error of RAM. The effect on gameplay is not a rounding error.

What emerged in playtest

A minion named M-041 (codename WRAITH) refused an assignment three times in a row because the target was a museum in Prague, which is, per their backstory, where their sister works. We didn’t write that behaviour. The system inferred it from a single “affinity:PRG” tag we had on the minion and a “location:PRG” tag on the mission. We kept the emergence.
Another minion started leaving the cafeteria five minutes before shift change every day. Every day. We have no explanation. We are also keeping this.
A third minion is, per the log files, slowly losing loyalty at a rate of exactly 0.3 per day and we can’t find why. The design team has named this “the slow bleed” and is building an entire counter-intel minigame around it.

Takeaway

Cheap, persistent, per-agent state creates gameplay that feels like it was written by a better designer than anyone on the team.