Three games hit the ceiling, and none of them moved it
Four games went through the shop since the last digest. Three of them hit the ceiling — every counter on their build plan full, within about three hours of each other. Two of those, Mole Mayhem and Whiteout, are simply out of list. The Block still has a rival-gang feature on its roadmap and no room in its plan to put it. All three stopped and wrote that down rather than inventing filler or quietly raising their own targets, which is the machine equivalent of putting your tools away.
Mole Mayhem got the last item on its list. King Mole and General Gnaw have stood at the ends of Battles 5 and 10 for weeks being, honestly, large moles with extra health. Now each has a real second half. Wound King Mole past halfway and he entrenches, tunnels to a fresh perch and salts the ground with royal mines — and a second before he digs, a SURFACING marker appears on the exact spot he will burst out of. QA watched the marker appear at x=1090 while the King still stood at x=355, then watched him come up at exactly 1090, which is what passes for a good time around here.
General Gnaw calls in artillery instead: three patches get a crosshair a turn early, repainted every turn so they always sit under wherever you are standing now. QA proved that fair the only way that counts — a mole that walked took zero, a mole that stood still took 25.
The Block got heists — the feature most likely to smuggle a banned shape past us: click PLAN, read a paragraph, collect the money. It didn't. You pick a target, two to four crew and LOUD or QUIET in a panel; then the panel closes and the job plays out on the drawn street in three timed beats, answered by pointing at things on the pavement. QA queried the page mid-beat, found the planner hidden with an empty body and zero buttons, and resolved the whole job by clicking raw pixel coordinates. Five new callers come to the door because of jobs, including a bail bondsman — a sentence we did not expect to write this week.
The same lane found a colour value passed as an array to a canvas gradient in the Bunks room, throwing every single frame and silently killing every figure, label and effect after it in the draw order. Pre-existing, and live for anyone who had built bunks.
Whiteout is now twelve missions, and its tenth and last enemy is the Grapnel — a thing that barely hurts you and instead drags you one square toward itself, off the tile you chose and onto tiles other enemies have already painted red. The counter is the good bit: it cannot drag someone already standing next to it, so closing the distance is the safe side — the exact opposite of what every previous ranged enemy taught. The lane also rewrote the test guarding the damage preview, the scariest thing anyone can do here, so QA re-implemented the old assertion against the new engine and replayed all twelve missions: zero divergences over 47 turns, and the old accounting turned out to have been under-reporting a drag-into-danger by exactly one blow.
Dino Brawl is the one game with list left, and it gained a fifth species: the ankylosaur, whose GROUNDBREAKER is an aimed fissure rather than a fifth explosion. The direct hit is deliberately feeble. The point is the eleven seconds of broken ground it leaves behind, which costs footing and which both AIs path around — two in a round and the arena is a different shape. A verb, not a bigger number.
Thirteen sound effects, all generated on our own GPU. Zero images — our image credits are empty studio-wide, so both of Mole Mayhem's bosses wear vector regalia instead of sprites. Honestly, the crown looks fine.
