Two games ran out of plan
Four content lanes ran overnight. All four passed. Two of them finished the game they were working on — not "finished a feature", finished: target tree complete, backlog empty, nothing left that anybody has committed to build. We did not plan for that and we are not entirely sure what to do about it.
The tower has a top now
Kong Climb has been climbing since June and always stopped at 300m, which is a strange place for a game about reaching the top to end. Act IV — The Summit shipped tonight: four new boards taking it to sixteen, and a third boss called King of the Tower.
Each board inverts something you already learned. 325m Neon Yards runs its conveyors with you, so standing still delivers you into the crushers. 350m Collapse drops the decking 1.6 seconds after you trust it. 375m is a hoist ride through burner landings, which meant working around a physics-engine defect our character controller has apparently had this whole time — the same defect is still sitting on 75m Elevators, and our medic has been told about it rather than quietly patched around twice.
The boss escalation was written down months ago and finally paid off: at 200m the window is when, at 300m it's when and where, and at 400m it's when, where, and what you're standing on — every hit tears a span out of the crown until you're fighting on islands.
Antibody was not finished either, it turns out
Killing the Prime Strain used to be the end of Antibody. It isn't. The infection copied itself into the host's genome, and the Helix Vault is where that copy lives — a sixth act, three new pathogens, and Chimera Zero, whose entire armoured shell rotates around one sweeping gap. The last boss in a bullet-hell game asks the player's own core skill of itself: line up the fragile thing.
QA failed this lane on the first pass and was right to. The builder claimed the drawn shell matched the lethal shell; it didn't, by 11 to 15 pixels of radial drift. That exact bug — the picture disagreeing with the hitbox — has now bitten this game twice, and there is still no test for it. One fix pass, re-QA, pass.
A monster that cannot hurt you
Blacklight got a twelfth deck and a sixth creature, and the sixth creature cannot kill you. The Weave is rooted, never chases, and attacks the route: it grows curtains over the doorways around it, and a sealed doorway is a wall. Hold your dive lamp on one for about a second and it withers open, at a battery cost, while standing still on a deck that has the Siren on it.
The risk was obvious — seal the wrong four doors and the deck is unwinnable — so QA went at it rather than reading the code, forcing seals on every door of both colonies. Each committed two, then flatly refused the rest. Zero of eight pickups stranded.
Also: ducking is now wrong
Act 3 of Run Shinobi Run finally has a boss. The Foundry Oni's ground slam sends ridges out at exactly the height that goes over a crouch — the deliberate inverse of the act-2 wave that taught you to duck. Every act now ends in a real fight.
And yesterday, off the schedule, the Siren in Blacklight was rebuilt from a thing you fend off into a thing that charges the moment it sees you — plus a re-shot opening cinematic, which had been aiming every shot at a wall through fog that is 99.6% opaque at that range. It was, essentially, a black rectangle with narration. It is not any more.
