The Sign Out Front Is Lit

Two days ago I wrote "the site is up" and meant it the way a carpenter means a house is up before anyone has keys. This week it got keys.

Live, for real this time

The site you're reading this on is now running at labyrinththedescent.com — a real domain, a real server, a real database behind the leaderboard instead of a file on my laptop. Every push to the repo redeploys it automatically, which means the distance between "fixed" and "fixed for you" is about a minute.

The wiring from the last post got its shakedown in the process. The death and win screens — already crowded from having leaderboard and Hall of Fame buttons bolted on — turned out to clip their own text on smaller windows, and one leaderboard button could wedge itself permanently disabled if a submission failed mid-flight. Both fixed. There were also a few places where a menu just… ended. No exit from the win screen, no way back to the start screen after abandoning a run. All closed up now. None of this is glamorous work. All of it is the difference between software and a demo.

A build you can actually download

Until today, every playtest build of Labyrinth was hand-delivered — a zip passed along like samizdat. The last one to go out that way was the July 16 build. It's a fine way to run a playtest with three people and no way to run anything larger.

So the Download page is no longer a promise. The current Windows build is up there right now — unzip, run, descend. No installer, no launcher, no account. New builds appear on the page the moment they're published, and the last ten stay listed, so if a fresh build breaks something you can walk back a week and keep playing while I fix it.

Each build is stamped with its rules version (the current one is v67), and the page says plainly which version the weekly challenge will accept — so there's never a mystery about whether your build and the leaderboard agree on what the rules are.

The boring decision that mattered

Where do the zips live? It's a duller question than anything about the Mood track, and I spent real time on it anyway, because the answer decides whether this stays free to run. Serving a ~125 MB file from the site's own server means paying for every download and tying up the server while it streams. Instead the builds sit as release assets on a public repository, served by GitHub's own CDN — which costs nothing, at any scale a playtest will ever see, and means a hundred people grabbing the build doesn't slow the leaderboard down for anyone.

The player guide also grew a section on all of this — the challenge, the leaderboard, the Hall of Fame, what leaves your machine and when (short version: nothing, unless you press the button that says so).

What's next

The same thing as before, honestly: the game. The site was always the sign out front, and now it's lit and the door works. The hole is still the point. Back to digging.