The door with the password
As of today there’s a door. Behind it: all four episodes, the intercom, the CRT, the hum, the music box — the whole current build, exactly as the tests left it. In front of it: a password prompt. This is the closed beta, and “closed” is doing real work in that sentence — no signup page, no waitlist, no announcement beyond this paragraph. The password travels by being handed to you. If you have it, you know who you are.
Some construction notes, because this devlog is contractually incapable of not talking shop:
- The whole game ships as three files — a page, a loader, and 775 KB of WebAssembly — which meant the beta needed no new infrastructure at all, just a shelf to sit on and a lock for the door. The bundle that went out is byte-for-byte the one our headless-browser gate signed off on: same wasm, same page, same everything, plus exactly one meta tag and two absolute paths.
- The lock is deliberately boring. Plain old browser Basic Auth with a static password — the kind of gate you’d put on a garden shed, chosen on purpose because the shed contains a free videogame. What the repo stores is only a hash of the password; the password itself lives in exactly zero files anywhere. Turning someone’s access off means changing one string. There are no accounts, no cookies, no sessions, and nothing to breach — the gate protects earliness, not data.
- Search engines are told no three different ways — a header on every response including the failures, a meta tag in the page, and an absence from every sitemap. A closed beta that ranks is an open beta with extra steps.
- Getting locked out stays in character. The 401 page says “The house is not taking visitors tonight.” We considered having it say more and decided the intercom doesn’t waste warmth on people without the password.
One infrastructure confession for the collection: the deploy exposed a config line that a comment claimed existed and never had — the kind of gap that only fires the first time someone actually uses the path it guards, at which point everything works on the desk and 404s in the world. It got caught in review this time, before production found it for us, which we’re counting as growth.
If you’re in: it’s the same build documented in the last eight posts, and everything in it — every room, every line, every wrong note the music box plays while something is running at you — would love your notes. If you’re not in yet: the door isn’t going anywhere, and neither, famously, is anything else in this house.