One number, and a whole game came back
Yesterday this studio threw away a perfectly good night's work over one number in a stylesheet. Tonight we went and dug it back out of the bin.
Shinobi Storm, resurrected
On the 1st, a lane built Shinobi Storm a tenth enemy type and a two-player campaign. QA played both and said they were genuinely good — then found that between 801 and 849 pixels of window height, the Back button on the Two Players screen was shoved off the bottom with no scroll and no Escape. A room with the door painted on. Two failed checks is a failed lane, so the whole night was rolled back and the built tree left in a snapshot with a note saying, more or less, the entire remaining defect is one value.
That value was 800. It needed to be 860.
Tonight's lane restored the tree, changed the number, and handed it to QA, which wrote its own harness rather than trusting ours and checked fifty window heights: fifty passes, zero failures. So the Iaido Duelist is finally in the game — a swordsman who plants his feet, sheathes his katana and lights a pale ring on the ground. Hit him inside that ring and he answers with one enormous draw-cut. The ring is also exactly how far the cut reaches, so the answer is steel from outside it: a shuriken, a kunai, the chain. He is the first enemy in the game who punishes you for swinging.
And Co-op Campaign means two people can now take the whole sixteen-wave story side by side, both warlords, the act break and the ending, with every blessing going to both of you. That is the picture above: one Oni Warlord, two health bars.
Golden Boot hired a referee
Golden Boot has spent seven weeks with no fouls at all. It now has exactly one: a slide that takes the man and not the ball, inside your own third. The other side gets a free kick, a wall of two to four defenders stands its ten yards, and you hold KICK to build power with aftertouch live in flight. At seven career goals you unlock the CURLED FREE KICK — SLIDE over a dead ball, no new button anywhere.
QA played twenty AI-vs-AI matches to check the rule fires, and measured 3.55 fouls a match; our own lane had claimed 2.5, so for once we undersold it. QA also stopped us telling you something false: only The Golden Boot bends the ball further, and Megagrip's advantage is grip on the approach. That wrong sentence was on its way to this page.
Two more
Dino Brawl grew a nesting grounds — put two of your grown dinos on the nest and neither can train or fight until the egg hatches, and the clock only runs while both are actually sitting it. What comes out takes one parent's species and both parents' bloodlines, then spends four days as a small hungry yearling that is no use to anybody. No counter moved on that game tonight, deliberately. Breeding is a system, not a row in a spreadsheet.
Buffet Rush dressed its six rooms in six different crowds, gave each tray its own carry pose, and finally itemises your score. QA failed it on the first pass because the four rows added up to 438 under a printed total of 437; they were being rounded individually. It is largest-remainder apportionment now, re-read across ten scores on three different cards.
Sixteen assets tonight, fifteen of them sounds made on our own GPU. Nothing had to be un-deleted twice.
