TWILIGHT

Survive beneath an impossible sky.

Twilight is a survival sandbox set in a procedurally generated world beneath a sky that changes in ways it probably shouldn’t.

During the day, a massive white hole hangs over the world.

At night, it disappears and a black hole takes its place.

That change affects more than the scenery. Daytime is mostly populated by passive wildlife, while hostile creatures begin coming out after dark. Explore while it’s safer, gather what you need, build somewhere to stay, and try not to get caught too far from home when the sky changes.

Twilight is being developed independently alongside the custom engine that powers it. The game is still growing, but the core sandbox, crafting, building, survival, multiplayer, dedicated server hosting, and day/night ecosystem are already playable.

Explore. Build. Survive.

A world stuck in Twilight

Twilight isn’t supposed to feel like a normal wilderness survival game.

The world is procedural and open-ended, but there is always something strange hanging above it.

During the day, the landscape sits beneath an enormous white hole.

When night arrives, it disappears and a black hole takes its place.

Day and night aren’t just lighting changes either. The creatures you encounter and the amount of danger around you change with them.

Daytime gives you room to explore, gather materials, hunt, craft, and build.

Nighttime is when the world becomes hostile.

I want Twilight to feel peaceful in one moment and deeply uncomfortable in another, especially when you realize sunset is coming and you’re nowhere near whatever you built.

The world changes with the light

The day/night cycle is one of the main parts of Twilight’s survival loop.

During the day, passive animals roam the procedural world.

Current daytime creatures include:

Chickens
Small passive animals that help make the wilderness feel less empty.

Fluffy_Wuffy
Twilight’s sheep. Fluffy_Wuffy wanders the world during the safer daylight hours along with the rest of the passive wildlife.

Pigs
Another passive species you can find while exploring during the day.

Daylight is your opportunity to get things done.

Explore, gather resources, hunt, craft equipment, build shelter, and prepare for what happens when the white hole disappears.

Because once night arrives, the ecosystem changes with it.

What comes out at night

When the black hole takes over the sky, Twilight becomes considerably less friendly.

Hostile mobs begin appearing throughout the world, replacing the relatively peaceful rhythm of daytime with something much more dangerous.

The current nighttime monsters include:

Stitchbou

A satanic, demonic goat that emerges at night.

Stitchbou is deliberately very different from the passive animals you encounter during daylight. Once creatures like this start appearing, wandering around without a plan becomes a much worse idea.

Starmark_Wolf

A possessed wolf resembling Snowpaw, but corrupted into something much darker.

Starmark_Wolf is part of Twilight’s nighttime creature roster and helps turn areas that seemed harmless during the day into places you may not want to travel through unprepared.

Hexed Heifer

A satanic cow that joins Twilight’s hostile mobs after dark.

Like the other nighttime creatures, Hexed Heifer is meant to make the change from day to night feel like an actual change in the world rather than simply making the screen darker.

More passive animals, monsters, behaviors, and encounters are coming as development continues.

The basic rule is pretty simple:

Explore during the day. Prepare before sunset. Survive the night.

You can stay near your shelter and wait for daylight to return, or go out beneath the black hole and see how that works out for you.

The white hole and black hole

The sky is one of the main parts of Twilight’s identity.

I didn’t want the astronomical objects to just be background decoration.

During the day:

A white hole rises over the world.

At night:

A black hole takes its place.

The change affects the appearance of the landscape, visibility, atmosphere, creature spawns, and the general rhythm of survival.

The white hole marks the safer part of the cycle.

The black hole means the monsters are coming out.

I’m planning to keep expanding this system with additional astronomical events, environmental effects, creatures, and other things tied to what is happening above the world.

Survival and crafting

Twilight already has a working survival and crafting sandbox.

You can gather resources from the environment and turn them into tools, weapons, equipment, construction materials, and other useful items.

Current equipment includes things like:

Hatchets
Pickaxes
Shovels
Hunting bows
Arrows
Torches
Campfires
Beds
Sleeping bags
Building blocks
Stairs

There is also an inventory and hotbar system, stackable items, multiple material types, crafting recipes, and persistent world saves.

More recipes, resources, tools, building materials, and progression are being added as development continues.

Build into the world

The terrain isn’t just scenery.

Gather materials, craft construction pieces, place blocks and stairs, and build directly into the procedural environment.

Your base can be somewhere to store your work, experiment with building, or somewhere you’d really rather be standing when the sun goes down.

The building system is still expanding, especially when it comes to materials and available pieces.

If you’d rather ignore survival entirely, singleplayer also includes God Mode.

Sometimes you just want to build something ridiculous.

Multiplayer and dedicated servers

Twilight supports multiplayer, and the game package includes the tools needed to host your own server.

When you download Twilight, the package contains both:

The Twilight game executable

and

The Twilight server hosting executable

The server executable runs a dedicated Twilight server on:

Port 7777

That means one player can run the dedicated server separately and let other players connect to it instead of requiring the host to run the world entirely through their normal game client.

For local network play, players can connect to the machine hosting the server.

For hosting across the internet, you may need to allow port 7777 through your firewall and, depending on your network setup, configure port forwarding on your router.

The server software also has its own command and operator permission system.

Server operators can control access to things including:

Gamemode commands
Teleportation commands
Item giving
Administrative commands
Other privileged server actions

Normal players do not automatically have access to these.

The idea is to give server owners actual control over their worlds instead of making multiplayer administration an afterthought.

Both the multiplayer side of Twilight and the dedicated server software are still being expanded, with more commands, controls, and server features planned.

Built on my own engine

Twilight does not use Unity, Unreal Engine, or Godot.

The game runs on a custom engine I’ve been developing specifically for it.

A lot of what sits underneath the game is stuff I’ve had to build myself, including rendering, procedural terrain, chunks, entities, world management, saving, gameplay systems, visibility systems, level of detail, foliage rendering, multiplayer infrastructure, and optimization.

That definitely makes development more complicated.

It also means I get a ridiculous amount of control over how the game actually works.

One area where that has mattered a lot recently is performance.

due to the engines current design, it requires Twilight game assets to compile for now. i will work in the coming days to decouple the engine from this project, so others can build their own games in my engine! for now, the code is live, but wont compile without assets from the game. I will focus on bugfixing as users find them, and ensuring the engine can be used for other projects!! 

Link to Github: https://github.com/necat101/stfsc

Performance on older hardware

One of my low-end test machines is an old laptop with:

Intel Core i5-6200U
Intel HD Graphics 520

The current build can reach roughly:

~120 FPS at 768p

under my current test settings.

That’s a dual-core laptop processor with integrated graphics from the mid-2010s.

Earlier versions of Twilight were dramatically harder to run on the same machine, so a lot of work has gone into reducing rendering costs and optimizing the engine itself.

Performance will vary depending on your resolution, render distance, graphics settings, world conditions, and hardware, so I’m not claiming every HD 520 machine will hit exactly the same number.

But making Twilight work well on hardware like that is something I care about.

I don’t want owning a gaming PC to be the entry fee.

Graphics and engine settings

Twilight exposes a lot of its rendering options through the settings menu.

Current options include things like:

Render resolution
Render distance
Brightness
Shadow-map resolution
Block LOD range
Block culling distance
Block view-cone optimization
Grass and foliage
Music volume
Sound effects

Some of those options make a very noticeable difference on slower machines.

I’ve spent a lot of development time working on chunk visibility, culling, foliage cost, LOD behavior, and other parts of sandbox rendering that can get expensive very quickly.

If you try Twilight on an old or unusual computer, I’d genuinely like to know how it runs.

Redesigned interface

Twilight’s interface used to be one of the rougher parts of the project.

A large part of it has now been rebuilt.

The main menu, pause menu, inventory, crafting interface, settings, world management, hotbar, and HUD now follow the same visual style and are considerably easier to use than the early versions.

There is still more work I want to do, but the current UI is a massive improvement over where the game started.

Controls

WASD — Move
Mouse — Look around

Left Click — Punch / attack
Right Click — Place / use

I — Open inventory
B — Open crafting

F4 — Change gamemode in singleplayer
F5 — Toggle third-person view
F6 — Save the current world state

Number keys — Select hotbar slots

When typing on a sign:

Ctrl + Enter — Finish editing the sign

What’s already in Twilight?

Procedural worlds
Explore terrain generated by Twilight’s custom world system.

Day and night ecosystem
Passive animals roam the world during daylight. Hostile monsters emerge after dark.

Current passive mobs
Chickens, Fluffy_Wuffy the sheep, and pigs currently populate the daytime world.

Current hostile mobs
Stitchbou, Starmark_Wolf, and Hexed Heifer currently come out at night.

White hole / black hole cycle
The white hole dominates the daytime sky. At night, the black hole replaces it and the world becomes considerably more dangerous.

Survival
Gather resources, prepare during daylight, and survive what appears after sunset.

Crafting
Turn materials into tools, equipment, weapons, and construction pieces.

Building
Place blocks and stairs and reshape your surroundings.

Inventory and hotbar
Manage resources, equipment, and item stacks.

Tools and weapons
Use equipment for harvesting, digging, hunting, construction, and survival.

Persistent worlds
Save a world and come back to it later.

God Mode
Ignore normal survival restrictions and use Twilight as a building sandbox.

Multiplayer
Play with other people instead of surviving alone.

Dedicated server hosting
Every Twilight package includes the dedicated server executable, which hosts multiplayer servers on port 7777.

Server administration
Operator permissions gate teleportation, gamemode switching, item giving, and other administrative commands.

Detailed graphics settings
Scale the engine down for integrated graphics or push it further on stronger hardware.

Custom engine
The technology powering Twilight is being developed alongside the game itself.

Still in development

Twilight is still under active development.

There’s plenty more I want to add.

More passive animals are coming.

More monsters are coming.

The current chickens, pigs, Fluffy_Wuffy, Stitchbou, Starmark_Wolf, and Hexed Heifer are only the beginning of what I want wandering around this world.

I’m also continuing to work on more resources, crafting recipes, building pieces, procedural generation, environments, animations, sounds, music, survival progression, multiplayer features, server tools, optimization, and additional astronomical phenomena.

There will be bugs.

Things will get rebalanced.

Some mechanics will probably get torn apart and rebuilt when I figure out a better way to do them.

That’s part of building Twilight.

Found something broken?

Tell me.

Performance reports are especially useful if you include your:

CPU • GPU • Resolution • Render distance • Relevant graphics settings

I’m also interested in crashes, save issues, multiplayer problems, dedicated-server problems, strange mob behavior, broken terrain, confusing mechanics, or anything that just isn’t fun.

If you’re hosting a server, telling me what kind of connection and hardware you’re running it on is useful too.

About Twilight

Twilight originally started as experiments with rendering, procedural generation, and building my own engine.

Eventually it stopped feeling like a collection of engine experiments.

It started feeling like a game.

Now there’s a survival sandbox built around a world where chickens, pigs, and Fluffy_Wuffy wander around beneath a white hole during the day, and things like Stitchbou, Starmark_Wolf, and Hexed Heifer start showing up once the black hole takes over.

You can survive alone, build whatever you want in God Mode, or start the included server executable and give your friends their own terrible decision-making opportunities on port 7777.

There’s still a lot I want to do with it.

If you play Twilight, I’d love to know what you built, what you discovered, which monster got you first, what broke, and what you want to see added next.

And if sunset suddenly makes you realize you wandered much farther from home than you meant to, the game is doing what I wanted it to do.

Thanks for checking out Twilight.

Gameplay trailer: 

Explore. Build. Survive.