Dev Log #1 — Hello World. We're Kronix Studio™.

March 2026 | Ticket Town v0.7.0

Hi. I'm Gareth, the solo developer behind Kronix Studio. This is the first public entry in what has been a private development log since September 2025 — so before I get into where we are, let me explain what we're building and why.

The Game

Ticket Town™ is a competitive city-building strategy game with real cash prizes, funded directly from company revenue, tracked publicly, updated daily. No tokens. No speculation. No mechanism for the prize pool to disappear overnight.

You earn Tickets through fast-paced Battle Arena mini-games, invest them into buildings and businesses inside a shared persistent city, sabotage your rivals, and climb the seasonal leaderboard. The top players at season end get paid. In real money. Via GCash, bank transfer, gift cards — whatever works for you.

The game is primarily built for players in Southeast Asia and Nigeria — communities that were genuinely harmed when play-to-earn gaming collapsed a few years ago. That collapse was personal for me. My wife is Filipino. I watched it happen to people I love. Ticket Town is the answer to that failure — what play-for-reward should have been the first time around.

Where We Are Technically

I started this project from a clean slate in September 2025 using Unity 6 with Netcode for Entities — a powerful but demanding multiplayer framework built on Unity's DOTS architecture. It scales exceptionally well for the tournament infrastructure Ticket Town needs, but it does not hold your hand.

The honest version of the last six months looks like this.

September to November was building the multiplayer foundation — authentication, lobby management, relay-based peer-to-peer sessions, and the core ECS world architecture. Getting players connecting and placed in a game scene together. Done and working.

November through January was the hard stretch. ECS scene streaming, world lifecycle management, and a persistent native memory leak during lobby-to-game transitions that took weeks of systematic investigation to fully understand. Every suspected cause was methodically eliminated — async lifetime issues, transport layer, world management, scene assets. The root cause turned out to be a confirmed bug in Unity's own Jobs/Graphics system, entirely outside my codebase. Diagnosing it thoroughly enough to confirm that is its own kind of progress. The leak is fully resolved.

I also took on full-time contract work for two months between December and February to cover living costs. Development slowed. That's the reality of building something independently. It didn't stop — it just slowed.

February and March have been about architecture consolidation and pushing toward the first real multiplayer milestone. A persistent boot scene now provides a clean stable foundation for the entire application lifecycle. Map scenes load correctly in both Editor and standalone builds. The connection flow is solid.

And this week — the milestone that matters.

As of v0.7.0, two players connect via relay, spawn on a designated spawn plane inside the game map, and receive full ghost snapshot data from the server with no errors. The ghost prefab loading pattern is established. The spawn system is established. The multiplayer foundation is not just working — it is working correctly, with the architecture patterns that will carry the whole game forward.

Player input and movement is next.

Where We're Going

The player controller is the current focus. After that, the navigable game environment, the Battle Arena mechanics, and the tournament and leaderboard systems follow through Q3-Q4 2026. Closed alpha is planned for Q4 2026.

On the business side — domains registered, professional email live, UK trademarks filed this week for both Ticket Town™ and Kronix Studio™. Isle of Man corporate structure in research. Grant application drafted and in review.

This is real, it's moving, and it's documented.

Follow Along

If you want to watch this get built — the honest version, including the problems — follow this page. The devlog updates regularly from here. Closed alpha testers get access in Q4 2026. Follow now and you'll hear about it first.

Kronix Studio | kronix.studio | tickettown.games