The polish pass, and a confession about the finale
Three passes of polish landed today, and the last one ended with the most honest sentence this project’s tooling has ever produced. In order:
The season reads as a season now. A full review caught that our episode order demanded mastery of the hide-and-seek trick two rooms before the episode that teaches it – so the running order changed (the rooms keep their internal production codes; the episode numbers are air order, exactly like television, which this project has apparently become). The season’s emotional close – a line we won’t spoil beyond saying it’s the first time he uses your name kindly – now actually closes the season instead of firing mid-run. And the phrase the intercom says when you die is now said at every death, because a ritual you only perform sometimes is not a ritual.
Fairness got its due. Death and victory screens now ignore input for four-tenths of a second, because a thumb mid-panic-tap was dismissing moments players never saw. Dig progress survives a wobble between two adjacent walls instead of silently zeroing. Settling a kid finally has a visible moment – a soft blue exhale over the room. The whole soundbank measured its own startup cost (about eighty milliseconds) and moved off the clock-in keypress anyway, because a hitch on your first interaction is the wrong first impression.
And the structure pass built the nets. The renderer got split into honest modules, the progression logic got its first real tests, the build now refuses to ship a binary over its size budget, and the game grew an input recorder: play a room, record every tick, and the test suite replays it forever against live simulation. Hide-and-seek is now proven beatable by a recorded run with its kid genuinely hunting the whole way.
Which brings us to the confession. We pointed the same machinery at the finale – three kids, one seal, one pocket with one mouth – and after every scripted strategy we could write, the recorder could not produce a winning run with the kids live. The lure works. The dig works. The final move – slipping back past three regrouped pursuers to seal the mouth behind them – defeated every heuristic we had. A human improvises better than our scripts, and the room may well be beatable by an actual person under actual pressure; but “may well be” is not a proof, and we ship proofs here. So the finale stands, for now, as the one room this project cannot vouch for – flagged, on the record, awaiting a human who’s better at being bait than our robots are. If no such human materializes, the fix is a wider doorway, not a kinder game.
903 KB, 147 tests, two of which are humble. See you in the pantry.