A vertical slice that survives inspection.
AugEngine is the in-house runtime behind a single ambition: a third-person narrative-action thriller — one dense urban location, one finished player character, one performance-ready NPC whose remembered choices change an authored encounter. Playable in a browser. Built on MnemoPay's signed, Merkle-anchored recall — the same trust layer that powers MnemoPay's autonomous-agent payment rails.
The flagship is the slice, not the engine. Before content production, the engine baselines first: textured PBR characters, morph-target facial performance, measured frame timing on real GPU hardware. The first milestone is called Character Proof Room — not a game title yet.
The slice
12–20 min third-person narrative-action. One transit-terminal location. Branching extraction driven by NPC trust state.
The engine
WebGPU + glTF 2.0 PBR. Skinning, morph targets, compute shaders. WebTransport multiplayer adapter. Animation + persona + scheduler primitives.
The memory
NPC recall and economy state persist across sessions via MnemoPay's Merkle audit chain. Bounded to approved facts — gameplay outcomes are authored, not hallucinated.
The proof bar
One textured lead character. One facially animated dialogue beat. Recorded frame timing on named target devices. Until then: narrative volume is a distraction.
Status — 2026 Q2 · honest about gaps
Engine baseline: @blackpig/augengine builds clean with 442 passing tests. WebGPU renderer, animation, persona memory, and NPC scheduling all live in source.
Still open: textured PBR fragment-shader path (P0), morph-target facial render consumption (P0), measured per-frame perf baseline (P1), asset compression/streaming/LOD plan (P2). Full gap matrix and production sequence in the flagship brief.