Show the build, play from the keyboard, and clean up the ledger

Five things from the second playtest.

A status line at the top of every screen: the game, the pack, your current
title, and the version plus the commit it came from. `tools/stamp.js` writes the
commit into src/build-info.js before serving and before building, so a
distributed dist/theladder.html states exactly which commit produced it. An
uncommitted working tree gets a `+` suffix — "4cab9fc+" is honest in a way a
bare SHA would not be.

The whole game is now playable on Enter. Every screen marks one control and the
app focuses it after each render: the first *available* option while choosing,
the next-turn button once the result is in, "keep going" on the retrospective.
Tab and Shift+Tab reach the other options. Locked options needed no special
handling — the browser's tab order already skips disabled controls, so they stay
visible without being in the way.

"What is notable? under What changed?" — two fixes. `notable` is the
retrospective's own list of moments; a display rule can now say
`inLedger: false` and it is left out, because "Notable — changed" tells nobody
anything. Flags are the opposite and stay, but as sentences the pack supplies
rather than as booleans: "The envelope is in your locker." instead of "the
envelope: now true".

Exported logs live in logs/, gitignored, and `npm run analyze` reads the newest
one there when given no argument. A log records what a real person did turn by
turn, including whatever they typed into the feedback box — committing one once
would put it in the history for good.

Version set to 0.3.0 on the reasoning that the engine was 0.1 and the interface
0.2; say if you want a different scheme and I will renumber.

119 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §25-28.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
This commit is contained in:
JesseMarkowitz
2026-09-10 05:41:32 -04:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
parent 4cab9fc41e
commit 76072edf4e
19 changed files with 416 additions and 25 deletions
+13 -2
View File
@@ -31,6 +31,8 @@ currently playable only from a test harness.
| Calendar, scheduled wages and rent | done |
| Promotion from the mailroom to Dispatch | done |
| Repetition analytics (`npm run analyze`) | done |
| Version and build shown on screen | done |
| Keyboard play (Enter / Tab) | done |
| Played in a real browser | done — first playtest 2026-09-09 |
The first playtest confirmed the interface, saves and the exported log all work
@@ -49,6 +51,11 @@ it.**
npm run serve # then open http://localhost:8080
```
The game plays from the keyboard: Enter takes the focused option, Enter again
moves to the next day, and Tab / Shift+Tab pick a different option. The top of
every screen names the game, the pack, your current title, and the version and
commit you are running.
A server is needed during development because browsers refuse ES module imports
over `file://`. If port 8080 is taken, run `python3 -m http.server <port>`
instead.
@@ -63,7 +70,7 @@ That is one self-contained file with the stylesheet and every module inlined.
It plays by double-clicking it — no server, no network, nothing installed.
```sh
npm test # 114 tests: engine, content, UI wiring, and the build
npm test # 119 tests: engine, content, UI wiring, and the build
```
To see what a playtest actually did — turns against distinct situations, how
@@ -71,9 +78,13 @@ often each recurred, which locked gates players kept meeting, and anything they
typed into the feedback box:
```sh
npm run analyze -- theladder-feedback-2026-09-10-11-04-22.json
npm run analyze # the newest export in logs/
npm run analyze -- <file> # a specific one
```
Drop exports into `logs/`. They are gitignored — a log is a record of what a
real person did, including anything they typed into the feedback box.
There are no runtime dependencies and no build step for development. Node is
used only to run the tests, the single-file build, and the log analyser.