The Chronicle Issue V April 18, 2026
On Cartography — Ruinkeep Devlog
Ruinkeep is a game about drawing a map, watching it fill with banners, and then watching most of those banners get torn down. It felt wrong that the website for it was a single scroll of feature cards.
So we rebuilt it as an atlas. Every page is a region of the chronicle: the home page is the title plate, the devlog is the chronicler’s ledger, the leaderboards are a map of the empires currently claiming the round, the history page is the prologue that explains how any of this came to exist.
Why the app isn’t an atlas
A fair question. The game itself keeps its dark-fantasy throne-hall aesthetic for a few reasons:
- Readability. You spend hours at a time staring at columns of numbers during a round. Parchment works for a 5-minute page visit; it’s fatiguing over an evening.
- iOS conventions. Dark mode is expected. A cream-paper app on a phone at night is an accessibility problem.
- Brand split. The website’s job is to attract and tell a story. The game’s job is to hold attention and disappear. Different jobs, different looks.
Think of the atlas as the cover of the book. The game is the story inside, and it’s printed on much darker paper.
What you’ll see
- The Chronicle. You’re reading it. Patch notes and longer posts, merged into a single feed with Roman-numeral issue numbers. Subscribe via RSS or check in here.
- Leaderboards. A live map of the top empires this round, pulled from the same server the app uses. Links out to individual empire profiles for shareable unfurls.
- Press kit. Everything someone writing about Ruinkeep would need — logos, screenshots, a fact sheet, contact.
- History of Promisance. The prologue. If you’re not sure what Promisance was, read this one first.
The map is still being drawn. More pages to come.
— THE CHRONICLER