The Chronicle

Forest is tier 1 and unlocked from the start, which makes it the first dungeon a new player walks into — and it was the worst-looking tile pack in the game. The floor was a perfectly regular 2px checkerboard over four near-identical variants, with a dirt strip running off the tile edge, so a room folded itself into a lattice. The wall was horizontal green dashes: no light, no depth, nothing that reads as you don't go through this. The fallen log was a brown rectangle with two tan end-caps.

What changed

• The floor and the wall were repainted from scratch. Same painter and same rules as the hub and Ruined Halls rounds: light always from the north-west, discrete shading ramps instead of smooth gradients, per-pixel hash grain instead of a repeating dither lattice. floor 4–5 → 24–29 colours, wall 5 → 16–21, with flat 2×2 blocks down from 38% to 6–13% of the wall.
• The wall is four variants now, not one. Harder here than in the dungeon: stone could hide its seams behind mortar and a brick bond, a forest has no joints, and the variants are scattered by an (x,y) hash so any one can land beside any other. Two rules hold it together — the floor's base field is a single wrapping noise field with no per-variant tone shift, so the ground stays continuous whatever lands where; and leaf clumps that straddle a tile edge are placed from a seed shared by all four variants and drawn wrapping, so the half on one tile's left edge always meets its other half on the neighbour's right.
• Five new props: boulder, deadwood, fern, flowers, stump. The game scatters up to five props per room and the forest only had three, so every clearing was the same mushroom, log and vines. Materials picked so a roomful isn't five green things. Forest: 3 → 8.
• The hub picks up the same pack. The fallen log by the river — flat, shadowless, flagged as an open defect two releases ago — is repainted along with everything else. The woodland belt now rotates the shade-dwellers (fern, stump, deadwood) and the meadow gets flowers and boulders instead of borrowing undergrowth that belongs under a canopy.

Every one of the eight props was confirmed in rotation on a live forest floor, not just present on disk. Gameplay is untouched. 🌲

The last round repainted the floor and the wall of Ruined Halls. What was left was everything standing on that floor — and everything you walk through to reach it. The chest was the last cartoon in frame, the stairs and doors were never images at all, and every room entrance carried two complete doors in a single hole.

What changed

• Doors are single now. Corridors are carved two tiles wide, so a room entrance was a pair of tiles, and every tile drew the whole door — two frames, two ring handles side by side. An opening now keeps one door and the rest is bricked up. Across 400 generated floors: 987 door tiles instead of 2096, with one floor in 400 still wider — on purpose.
• Bricking up is policed, not assumed. A tile may only be sealed when it removes exactly itself from the reachable map. When two corridors arrive side by side, both stay doors — a stranded wing of the floor is a broken run, a double handle is only a blemish. Across those 400 floors: zero unreachable rooms, stairs, chests or orphaned tiles.
• Stairs, doors and chest are painted PNGs. These were the last four textures drawn at runtime by Phaser Graphics — and they aren't decoration, they're what the player walks up to on every floor. Before: stacked flat bars with a coloured chevron, and a brown rectangle inside a brown rectangle with a yellow dot for a handle. Now cut from the same stonework as the walls: stairs_up 3 → 214 colours, door_open 2 → 117, chest_open 4 → 119.
• The boss chest looks like a reward. The everyday one has iron bands, rust where the iron has been sweating into the wood, and a modest handful of coins. The reward one is brass, no rust, twice the hoard. They used to be identical, which wasted the moment.
• Six new dungeon props: rubble, bones, crate, pillar, sack and chains. The dungeon had two props while the game places up to five per room, so every hall was the same barrel and the same sword. Materials picked so five props in a room aren't five brown things. Dungeon: 2 → 8.

Gameplay is untouched. What changed is what you walk through and what you look at. 🚪

The hub got its pixels over the last few rounds. Ruined Halls — the first dungeon everyone descends into — was still from the old batch: the floor had five colours, the wall five as well, and seventy percent of its surface were flat 2×2 squares of a single tone. The four floor "variants" differed by a handful of pixels, so a room assembled itself into a regular diagonal lattice visible half a screen away.

Same treatment as the hub, this time on tiles.

What changed

• The floor is slabs, not wallpaper. The tile border is now the mortar joint, so detail no longer runs onto the neighbour and the lattice is gone. The four variants divide the slab differently: whole, split down, split across, quartered — each time off-centre, so the eye finds no rhythm. Every slab has its own tone, per-pixel grain, and cracks that read as cracks rather than as a signature.
• The wall is laid in running bond. Bricks shifted half a brick per course, with mortar, chamfers catching the light from the north-west, and spalls. Five colours became twenty.
• Walls finally have variants. The engine loaded the wall as a single image, so an entire hall was one tile repeated hundreds of times. Now it loads like the floor — four variants, picked by the same position hash. In a live run, 5899 walls split into roughly 1475 of each.
• Barrel, sword and torch repainted. The barrel has staves and a lid that reads as a lid rather than an open hole. The sword in the stone rusts only where it isn't buried. The torch got an iron collar and a binding ring — the bracket used to disappear under the flame.
• Everything casts a ground shadow, offset south-east, under the same light as the rest of the game.

Gameplay is untouched — room layouts, monsters and loot are the same. What changed is what you're walking on. 🏚️

Every entry in this changelog carries a label badge: Fix, Feature, Polish. The style map knew five labels; the content files use nine. The missing ones resolved to undefined — and that undefined went straight into the class attribute. The result was a badge with no background and no colour, rendered in the page source as class="… tracking-[0.15em] undefined".

It affected 56 of 138 entries, including the Fix badges on yesterday's releases. The Polish label alone covers 40 entries and had been like that for a long time — nobody had looked.

What changed

• All nine labels have a style now. Fix, Polish, Content and Performance joined the map.
• A typo in frontmatter can no longer break the page. The map is keyed by plain string and has a fallback, so an unknown label renders like Polish rather than like nothing.
• The type stopped lying. The label union now covers what the content actually uses — previously badge was cast straight out of frontmatter, so the compiler had no way to notice the four missing ones.

Not a single word of any entry changed. What changed is that you can see the badges next to them at all. 🏷️

The hub's terrain is painted pixel by pixel. The things standing on it were not. The river bridge had seven colours, and three quarters of its surface were flat squares of a single tone. The cairn by the crypt was topped with a white cube bearing four black dots: meant to be a skull, read as a die.

This round covers everything in the hub that doesn't move — and occasionally flickers.

What changed

• The bridge was rewritten from scratch. Each plank has its own grain, the top arris catches the light, the seam bites into shadow, nails sit every fourth row and the rails stand on posts. Water runs underneath, and the deck casts a shadow onto it. Seven colours became seventy-five.
• Lanterns actually give off light. The "glow" used to be a semi-transparent rectangle. Now the glass brightens towards the wick, the flame changes shape between frames, and there is a pool of light on the ground.
• Animations that weren't animations. The volcanic vent has three frames that differed by two pixels; the crystal four that differed only in hue. Now embers rise from the vent frame by frame, and the crystal's pulse brightens its core from within.
• The cairn is a stack of stones with a skull. Hand-placed, shaded under the same light as the rest of the hub, with moss on the shaded side.
• And a bug nobody spotted, because it was hiding itself. The lore stone stood on a river tile — precisely the one the central bridge is drawn on. A two-tile monument standing in the water swallowed the entire deck. It has moved to the meadow north-west of spawn.

Nothing about play has changed — the bridge leads where it always led. What changed is that you can now see what you're walking on. 🌾

Yesterday's release landed in the wrong place. 1.10 showed up underneath 1.9, and the pulsing "latest" marker stayed on the older entry — so the page was quietly telling you the newest thing here was the one before it.

The versions were being compared as text rather than as numbers. Read character by character, v1.10.0 really does fall below v1.9.0: at the fourth character, 1 is less than 9. It never mattered across eleven releases, because until now no version had a two-digit part. Both entries also carried the same date, so that comparison was the only thing deciding their order — and it decided wrong.

Versions are now compared segment by segment as numbers. This entry sits above 1.10 despite sharing its date, which is the whole point.

On a phone you could not scroll any page outside the game. The changelog holds over a hundred thousand pixels of content and you could reach the first six hundred — the rest was physically out of bounds. Same for the lore page, the leaderboard, and the main menu, which in landscape hid its lower options below the edge of the screen.

Two CSS rules were to blame. Both were written for the game's HUD, and both were declared globally: one pinned the document to the height of the screen, the other switched off finger dragging for the page and everything inside it. Both are needed in the game — without the first, a growing body pushes the bottom HUD controls off-screen on iOS; without the second, a double tap zooms the canvas mid-fight. Now they only apply while you are actually playing.

What changed

• Content pages scroll. Changelog, lore, leaderboard and the landing page — with your finger, normally, all the way down.
• The main menu shows every option, including landscape on shorter phones.
• Text is selectable again outside the game.
• A real mobile navigation. The top bar never fit on a phone — PLAY / LEADERBOARD / LORE / CHANGELOG plus the language switcher and login ran to 638px inside a 390px window. Nobody saw it, because the same lock was clipping horizontally too, so the tail of the bar simply vanished past the edge. The bar now collapses to the logo and a menu button, with the links in a drawer underneath — language switcher and login included.
• The drawer closes the way you'd expect: on a link, on Escape, on a tap outside, on navigating away, and when you rotate far enough that the ordinary bar fits again.

Under the hood

The viewport lock now hangs off a class the game shell applies when play starts, instead of bare html and body selectors. The width at which the bar folds into a drawer isn't eyeballed either: the bar measures what it actually renders. Signed out it needs 992px; signed in, with the account pill and logout, 1248px — so the boundary moves with the content instead of fitting one layout and breaking the other.

The hub had thirteen gates and the same problem thirteen times: however ornate the façade, "inside" was one flat rectangle. Black, navy or red — but always flat. And since the opening is the largest shape in each of those gates, it dragged the whole sprite down: the crypt had twelve colours, the abyss ten, the sewer fifteen. Next to terrain painted pixel by pixel, they read as holes cut with scissors.

Now every gate is something you can look into. Past the threshold there is space that recedes: a brighter crown, a darker sill, jambs keyed to the same north-west light the rest of the hub is lit by, and floor slabs running away into the dark.

What changed

• Every gate has its own interior. The sewer is a vaulted pipe with a drain and water streaking down the brick. The hellpit is lit by lava from below, so its shadows fall the opposite way to everything else. The city gate has one-point perspective and two colonnades fading into haze. The crypt — ossuary niches, three steps down and cobwebs.
• The abyss was deliberately left dark. Brightening it would have been the quickest route to "prettier", but an abyss should be an abyss. It got a barely perceptible ramp instead — enough for the eye to read depth rather than a cut-out hole.
• The ice gate stopped being a chequerboard. The snow at its foot was literally a white-and-blue grid, and the dome of its arch one flat blue peppered with black and white. Now the snow is a drift with a crest, and the ice has compression layers, trapped air and fracture planes.
• Measured, not eyeballed. The poorest gate had ten colours; the poorest one now has a hundred and ninety-four. The flat patches that gave away "this is a solid rectangle" fell from eighty percent of the surface to fractions of a percent.

Nothing about play has changed — the gates lead where they always led. What changed is that they now look like entrances to somewhere. 🚪

The last two releases gave the hub painted ground and objects that cast shadows. The cost was that this map has to be computed somewhere — pixel by pixel, all at once — and it was doing that by freezing the browser the first time you loaded the page. Nothing responded, nothing moved, the cursor turned into a spinner.

The map bake now hands control back to the browser dozens of times along the way, and you get a progress bar instead of a hung window.

What changed

• No more freeze. The longest single moment where the page stops responding went from one long lock-up to a fraction of a second — the rest of the work runs in slices that fit inside a frame.
• A progress bar. The loading screen now shows how much of the map is ready. The flickering torch looked identical after one second and after ten.
• The map is pixel-for-pixel the same. Only the way it's computed changed, not what comes out. Verified by comparing all 28 million bytes of the finished texture, not by eye.

The whole thing now takes slightly longer than the freeze it replaced — a fair price for being able to move the mouse and see what's happening while it works. The bake runs once per page load; every later trip into the hub is instant. ⏳

The last release gave the hub real ground. The trouble was that everything standing on that ground still looked like a cut-out laid on top: gates, trees, the memorial and the lore stone all hovered, because nothing sat underneath them. The earth had become a world; the props were still icons.

Now every object in the hub casts a shadow — a soft patch offset to the south-east, because the whole world is lit from the north-west. It's one change, and it's enough to stop things floating and make them stand.

What landed

• Locked gates no longer stain the grass. The dimming on a locked entrance was painting the entire rectangle around the gate, ground included. It now darkens only the gate itself — which you notice immediately, since ten of the eleven gates in the demo are locked.
• Trees have canopies, not checkerboards. Leaves now clump into ragged-edged masses, shaded underneath and lit from the light side.
• Stone that looks like stone. The memorial and the lore stone gained grain and streaks of weathering instead of one flat grey.
• The lore stone's glow stopped being a green square — it now falls off radially from the source.

Play is unchanged: same gates, same paths, same walls. The hub just stopped looking like a board with stickers on it. 🌳