1.7 "First Batch" is in review a playable lesson, a fairer ladder, and a boss eclipse
Big week. The update is sitting in review at Apple and Google, and it's the densest one yet.
The tutorial is now a real game. Our store listing promises "no tutorial to sit through", so the lesson had to BE play: three real 4x4 grids, about 45 seconds, and you win your first one within seconds. Each concept is taught by doing it with the real gesture code paths, never by reading. Mistakes flash softly and cost nothing. Skippable with one tap, replayable anytime. I hand-picked the three boards by scripting against the actual puzzle engine so every teaching moment is provable: the "trap" cell in chapter 2 is wrong ONLY because of the diagonal-touch rule, and there's a unit test asserting exactly that.
I found and closed a points exploit. Replaying an already-beaten level kept paying leaderboard points, forever. Fixed on both sides: the client no longer counts replays, and the server got a lifetime unique index per (player, level) plus a cleanup of historically farmed points. I'm announcing the cleanup to players before it happens, because a leaderboard that tells the truth is worth a few awkward rank drops.
The ladder now shows every player's max level, ratcheted server-side from validated wins only, never client-declared. And boss grids finally feel like an occasion: a golden eclipse crowns the board, guardian stars twinkle, the grid lands with a soft rumble. All CSS, opacity-only animation, prefers-reduced-motion respected.
Verified the whole lesson twice: pixel-level in the browser, then finger-level on the iOS simulator on a fresh install. 700 unit tests green.
Next: release day choreography, the database cleanup, the edge function redeploy and both store releases have to land in the same five minutes, so the rank changes arrive together with the in-app note that explains them.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.