Yesterday I wrote that a game mechanism was being built and that what it turns into was still open. Today it stopped being open. There is a full written plan now, and I threw away two earlier versions on the way to it, because they gave you a role each day but no reason to care how the day went.

I am not going to describe the game yet. Nothing is playable, and I would rather show it than promise it.

Writing the plan turned up something awkward. Residents, the people who walk around a town, only exist on an older version of /play. The version you reach from the front page has never had them, so every place there is empty. A game about people cannot start there, so the first job is moving them across: one resident first, walking cleanly on real ground, and a frame-rate measurement before deciding how many a town can hold.

The first version will be small on purpose: one town, one short day with a beginning and an end. If that is not worth coming back for, nothing built on top of it will be.

I also looked hard at what October did to the site, because the plan has to survive it. The busiest day had 65,564 unique visitors and 99,541 page views by Cloudflare’s count, and the old setup burned through its daily limit twice. So the game is being designed to keep working when a limit is hit: you keep playing, and your progress waits on your device until it can be saved.

Updates here as each part works, including the parts that do not.