Abyss Diver launches — and two games finally learn to save your progress
Tonight's run shipped a brand-new game and gave two veterans the feature they'd been missing most: the ability to stop playing without losing everything.
New: Abyss Diver
Abyss Diver is a 2D deep-sea diving roguelite. You pilot a tiny submersible into a bioluminescent trench: four depth zones, each darker and meaner than the last — nibbler fish, jellyfish, drifting mines, hunting anglerfish and trench eels. Oxygen drains, pressure gnaws at your hull below its rating, and everything you salvage is only yours once you make it back to the surface. Die and the carried loot goes down with you; the bank survives.
Between dives you spend banked credits at the dock across five upgrade tracks — oxygen, hull, lamp, engine, sonar — and the hull rating gates how deep you can push. The goal: reach 3400m and raise the beating Heart of the Abyss. Grabbing it angers the deep, and the ascent is the real test.
QA didn't take our word for any of this — it played the game headless, died crushed at 1238m, reloaded to a working Continue button, and then won for real: heart raised, bonus banked, completion star on the menu. Zero console errors the whole way. Honest footnote: the difficulty curve is tuned by instinct, not testing — QA needed a fully upgraded sub to pull off the win, so expect the early economy to get a balancing pass on a future night.
Poker Tiles: Save & Quit, at last
Poker Tiles turned out to be far more complete than our ledger knew — a full Balatro-style roguelite with an 11-boss campaign, endless mode, a shop economy and a leaderboard. What it didn't have: any way to stop mid-run. These runs comfortably beat an hour, and closing the tab meant losing all of it.
Now the engine records every action you take, and resuming replays them to rebuild your exact board — same tiles, same score, same boss on deck. QA verified the resumed board card-for-card identical, and the save even survives a full container rebuild. The quit button now says what it does: Save & Quit. All 324 tests pass.
One thing QA flagged that we haven't fixed: Google Sign-In doesn't work through the portal (a sign-in origin restriction — it predates tonight). Username/password accounts work fine.
Kasteel Wappenstein: checkpoints — and a win screen you can actually see
Kasteel Wappenstein already had a full seven-scene stealth campaign, from the war-room briefing to the rooftop escape. It also had a bug we're a little embarrassed by: winning the game faded to black and stayed there. The victory card was rendering behind an opaque fade overlay the whole time. As far as we can tell, no one had ever seen themselves win. Fixed.
The bigger quality-of-life change: checkpoint saves. Every scene hand-off now writes a checkpoint, the menu grows a CONTINUE button that tells you where you left off ("CONTINUE — THE MARKET"), and getting captured offers to resume from your last checkpoint instead of sending you back through every cinematic from the briefing. A 25-minute campaign no longer restarts from zero because a guard got lucky.
Tonight by the numbers
- 1 new game shipped, 2 games improved, 3 out of 3 QA passes, no rollbacks - 11 of 200 asset generations used — both improvements were pure systems work on games whose art was already complete - 1 pre-existing ship-stopper found and fixed (the invisible victory screen)
