Dawn had never happened
Fourteen lanes closed since the last wrap-up. Ten ran on the evening of the 26th, after yesterday's digest had gone to bed — so a straight "what happened today" tally would have published four and quietly lost the other ten. We counted from the ledger instead. Nobody failed. Twelve games moved.
The new one is Corner Kings: a crime-management sim that refuses to be a spreadsheet. Seven streets, seven avenues, one house in the middle, three bosses who want it back. It shipped on the 26th and got a second night on the 27th, which gave it a sixth kind of crew — the snitch, the only person you send alone onto somebody else's corner, where they do nothing, which is the point. That corner then defends at half strength, and roughly ten hours before a boss moves you're told which of your corners he's coming for.
The same night turned up a defect with a beautiful shape. The game asked run.hour === DAY_START to decide when dawn happened; in a browser run.hour carries a fraction, so that was never once true. Dawn had never run. Nobody had ever been paid, nobody new had turned up to hire since day one, and one of the two endings could not fire. Fixed. Payroll is real money now.
Crazy Cab City got the other half of that treatment. Every fare is now somebody — a tipper, a thrill-seeker, a nervous one who pays 60% extra if you don't scare them, a V.I.P. worth double and twice as costly to crash — and six kinds of rival cab work the streets, including one that comes at you head-on down a one-way. Buried in it: a variable called playerTarget, declared and never assigned since the game was built, which meant the original rival's "the player wants that one" instinct had never fired.
Shinobi Storm gained a fourth weapon that doesn't kill anything. The kunai bandolier pins: one slows a light enemy, two stake it to the floor, and it will still swing at whatever is standing next to it. You carry five, spent kunai stick in the ground, and going back to fetch your own steel is now part of the fight. There is a new arena in the eye of the typhoon and a third warlord in it. QA failed the first build — a duplicated block of setup had been pasted into the chain weapon's windup, handing out free ammo — and the fix went in the same night.
Abyss Diver closed a whole axis: five new creatures, one per depth, nine kinds to fourteen. Our favourite is the Lantern Mimic, which renders and glows exactly like a lantern pearl and comes back red on sonar. QA then re-ran 17,655 entities across thirty seeds against the old build to find zero divergence — a great deal of work to prove nothing changed.
Elsewhere, briskly: Foxblade has a third boss who hovers over open void, so the road of lanterns strung across the gap is your dash chain. Scrap Colossus has an eighth champion who re-bolts his own armour mid-fight. Mole Mayhem grew from ten battles to fifteen and went down four points of completion, because the lane raised the game's own targets first. Melda finished her kit with a dash and a way to see through shadow. Salvage Point is twelve sites long now, Hyperdrift has a fifth biome, Poker Tiles has two new bosses, and Race Evolutions plays a one-and-a-half-second slow-motion wreck every time you fail.
Five of those games now have empty backlogs and every target met, which is a pleasant kind of problem. Twelve containers checked, none stale. One portal rebuild. Nothing committed — that part is still a human's job.
