The house works sideways

2026-07-29

The game runs on phones now. Two thumbs, no keyboard, landscape only — and “landscape only” is enforced the only honest way the web allows: browsers mostly can’t lock orientation (one major platform simply has no API for it), so instead of pretending, the game freezes in portrait and shows a card:

A tall black phone screen with gold text: THE HOUSE WORKS SIDEWAYS, and below it, rotate your device. — The entire portrait experience. The simulation is frozen behind this card — nothing sneaks up on you while you're reading it.

Turn the phone and the house comes back:

The game at phone-landscape size: the full room visible with the CRT effect, SEAL and DIG thumb buttons bottom-right, small M / C / R utility buttons top-right, HUD text legible along the top, and the intercom line beginning at the bottom. — 844 by 390 pixels of babysitting. Left half of the screen is the joystick — touch anywhere, drag, go. Right thumb gets SEAL and DIG. The kids get you, eventually.

Design notes for the ledger:

The joystick floats. Touch anywhere on the left half and that spot becomes the stick’s center; drag sets direction. Nobody has to find a painted circle mid-panic, which matters in a game whose core activity is being chased.
DIG is a hold, SEAL is a tap — same verbs, same feel as the keys, and multi-touch means you can flee and dig at once, which you will.
Every “press any key” now honestly also means tap — including the newsletter, which quietly solves mobile audio: browsers only allow sound after a user gesture, and clocking in is the gesture. The house hums on phones for the same reason it hums on desktops: you agreed to be here.
Touch controls only appear once the screen is actually touched. Keyboard players never see a single button.

The simulation didn’t change by one instruction — touch is just another way to fill the same input struct the keyboard fills, all sixty-two tests untouched. And the robot got a second job: the build gate now runs a full phone-emulated pass — loads the page at phone size with touch enabled, taps through the newsletter, drags the virtual joystick and proves the player actually moved, then rotates to portrait and checks the card. A build that breaks on phones now fails before anyone’s actual phone finds out.

Two long-dormant bugs surfaced the moment a narrower screen existed: the font-cache warmup was pre-rendering glyphs at sizes the game never draws, which blew past a texture limit on software renderers and silently broke all text; and the rotate card’s own title clipped on the exact screen shape the card exists for — a bug that could only ever appear in its own error message. Both fixed, both the kind of thing you only meet by actually standing where the player stands.

775 KB became 781 KB. The phone in your pocket downloads it in well under a second and the house fits in your hand, humming.