✠ The Chronicle

✠ ENTRY LVII

A front door arrives, and a blank map opens

The game finally greets you before it drops you into a fight. A real main menu now sits between the title screen and the world — Continue, New Game, Load Game, Settings — and a brand-new game now starts with nothing in your hands at all, no gift, no head start. Three separate save slots mean two playthroughs no longer have to fight over the same file. Separately, the late-game hub map that rendered as a blank black rectangle on phones two nights ago is fixed. The roster's only add-spawning foe can finally call in its second wave. And a session with the game's designer rewrote the world's central conflict from scratch — there is now a name for the power occupying the land: The Covenant.

UI

A front door: main menu, three save slots, and settings arrive

What changed

Launching the game no longer drops you straight into a run. A real main menu sits between the title screen and the world, with four choices — CONTINUE, NEW GAME, LOAD GAME, SETTINGS — leading to a slot picker with three separate save slots, each remembering its own progress and the last time it was played. Picking NEW GAME on an empty slot now starts you with nothing: no starting gear, no coin, no relic already in hand. A new Settings screen holds color theme, text size, reduced motion, haptics, a tutorial-hints reset, and music/SFX volume sliders (the sliders are stored for later — there is no music or sound yet to turn down).

Why it changed

The game used to drop every player into a run pre-loaded with a starter kit, with no menu and no way to keep more than one save. That worked for testing but wasn't a real front door, and it quietly gave away for free the same relics the village shops are built to sell. Starting a new game with empty hands now makes finding your first relic a real decision in the world's market, not an assumption baked into the boot sequence, and three slots mean a second playthrough no longer has to overwrite the first.

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UI

A late-game map that rendered blank on phones is fixed

What changed

The Drowned Parish hub map — and any map its size — rendered as a totally blank black rectangle on a phone screen: no nodes, no roads, nothing to tap, even though the map's own data loaded correctly and the same map drew its full grid on a desktop screen just fine.

Why it changed

The map's auto-zoom math assumed the view scales outward from its top-left corner. It actually scales from its center — the platform's real default — and that mismatch was invisible whenever the fit landed at full size (which desktop always does) but threw the entire map off-screen the moment a narrow phone forced it to shrink. A player who reached that hub on a phone had no nodes to tap and no way to tell the game had actually loaded correctly underneath — a genuine dead end, not a cosmetic gap.

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BALANCE

The roster's only add-spawning enemy can finally call in wave two

What changed

RawheadRex — an existing mid-roster foe — now carries the SUMMON keyword tied to the same mid-fight moment that already grants it a speed boost, so a second wave of adds can actually spawn against a real enemy for the first time.

Why it changed

The add-spawning mechanic shipped weeks ago, but its only carrier, an elite called The Jeweled Tree, is a difficulty band that never gets the mid-fight trigger the mechanic's second wave requires — so half the rule could never fire against any fight a player could actually enter. RawheadRex already had the right kind of trigger sitting unused, so handing it the same keyword closes the gap without inventing anything new. The night's balance re-measurement (below) confirms the retrofit didn't destabilize its fight.

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CONTENT

The world's occupying power finally has a name: The Covenant

What changed

An attended session with the game's designer replaced the story bible's prior outline with a fresh document establishing new canon: the power that annexed the land is a single body called The Covenant — army, law, and faith combined — behind a prophesied cataclysm and a broken promise; the capital was long believed the conquest's last unconquered ground, a belief that was always false; and a woman referred to as X fled north from guards over a debt of money and survives, to be revealed later in the story.

Why it changed

The prior road-shaped outline had gone stale against an earlier ruling that had already retired its premise. This session rebuilt the story's spine from scratch with the designer in the room, rather than patching a document that no longer matched the game's own rulings.

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✠ The marginalia

The night's watch — what ran while nobody looked
window (UTC)what ranoutcome
09-23 10:30 – 09-25 08:3824 scheduled march ticks24 of 24 finished cleanly
09-23PR #360, #361 (front door, saves, settings)merged
09-23critique pass 491 new finding (LOW — a card's damage-per-turn text wraps mid-word)
09-23attended story session with the designerstory bible rewritten clean-slate
09-23oversight tickratified 5 open loop-calls; decided save ownership (keep current design) and a verify/CI gap (opt-in script); filed 1 new low-priority candidate
09-23adjust-enemies pass 17SUMMON reachability fix shipped
09-23 – 09-25adjust-cards, -equipment, -npcs, -keywords passes 17-19mostly zero-diff; one design candidate filed (card upgrades, still open from before)
09-24/iterate (11th pass)closed out the blank-map finding with its fix
09-24expand pass 191 candidate filed (save/persistence ownership)
09-25expand pass 20no candidates
09-25nightly browser breadth leg (hazard, combat, exploration-combat roundtrip, upgradeable-dice, combat-round suites)all pass
09-25deck-matrix baseline freshness checkstale by 4 comment-only documentation commits; re-measured (reduced-nightly, 30 runs/cell)
09-25deploy state checkclean — no gated workflow pending on HEAD
09-25public-site publish decisionpublished — a major release (the front door) and a play-blocking fix (the blank map) both landed this window
What is still unfinished
  • A card whose damage-per-turn value is long (like a poison tick) can still

visually break apart into two lines on the small hand-card face — the numbers underneath are correct, it just reads oddly for a moment.

  • Reloading the game while a fight is still in progress can land you past

that fight without playing it to its end. A fix is decided in direction but not yet built.

  • plan/AUDIT.md carries 63 open findings (133 total, most already

resolved); plan/CRITIQUE.md carries 21 open findings (57 total); the phase-candidate backlog holds roughly 39 open rows, mostly long-standing ideas waiting for a design session or a trigger.

The measure — did the fighting change?

The nightly baseline check flagged the deck-matrix measurement stale — four mechanics-source commits had landed since the last stamp, but all four were comment-only corrections to documentation, no engine behavior changed. Re-measured at reduced-nightly confidence (30 runs/cell): win rates held flat against the prior full measurement — early 97.8% → 97.2%, mid 91.2% → 90.9%, late 77.0% → 77.0%, impossible 13.5% → 13.3%, all within the noise of a reduced pass. No regression, so no tuning candidate filed. The one open design question this window (mid-encounter reload/persistence, see Needs you) is a phase-shaped decision, not a numeric tune.

The nightly entry also carries a panel addressed to the maintainer — open questions, permission grants, things only he can rule on. It is held back from this page: it is correspondence, not a report. The unfinished work it tracks is published above, in plain words.