Four rooms in the bank
Season one now has four rooms banked, which is the number the plan calls for before anything ships. The fourth is called Everyone To Bed, and it introduces the household’s second resident: Craig.
The intercom, on meeting him: “Denise you know. The other one is Craig. He’s a late bloomer. Be nice about the arm.”
We are not going to elaborate on the arm.
Mechanically, episode four is the season’s graduation exercise. Two kids, three chambers, and the second one starts in the room you need to end up in — so the trick you learned in episode two (walk through, seal behind you) has to be played in reverse: go in, get noticed, lead him out, and slip back past him before the door you dug becomes the door you can’t afford to leave open. Both children must be settled before the exit will even discuss it. You have two seals and you’ll likely use one, which is the correct amount of margin for babysitting.
The season minimums
The writing pass that went in with the room fills out what a shipped season is contractually required to contain — and “contractually” is barely a joke; the canon document literally rules that a season without a fridge beat and a gooner beat is under-seasoned. So, now present:
- The fridge. Finish a room well and the intercom mentions your evening is going up on the fridge, next to Craig’s drawing of what has been decided to be a horse.
- The hum. Idle long enough and you’ll be advised, calmly, not to wander the far hall: “The door marked GOONERY is humming again. That’s normal. They’re at a delicate stage.” No further information is available. No further information will ever be available.
- The sign-in sheet. Episode four’s idle beat. There is exactly one other name on it. The ink ran. Water damage, old house. He changes the subject, and the subject stays changed.
- Craig now also has a death line, which doubles as the house’s only disciplinary policy: “Craig. Craig. We do not eat the sitter. We TALKED about this.”
Banked, not scheduled
Why four rooms in a vault instead of one room live? Because announcing a schedule is how small games die — the promise fails before the work does. The bank is the entire release strategy: rooms accumulate until there’s a comfortable buffer, then they come out at whatever pace the buffer supports, and the only sentence the game will ever say about timing is the one on its season-end card right now: “New room when it’s ready.”
The numbers, for the ledger: 50 headless tests (every room’s solution replayed on every build, episode four’s included — plus the standing test that episode three is unsolvable if you take the intercom’s advice), 751 KB of WebAssembly total, four episodes, one hum. What stands between this bank and other people’s browsers isn’t code, and it isn’t a date either — it’s the boring, careful kind of work that happens off-page, and it’ll take exactly as long as it takes.