3108319a2b01e379f66ce3c58276b3214349a1d4
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Commits
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 JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5.5
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3108319a2b |
Add chance and a cast that changes between runs, and a pack to try them
An option used to do exactly what it said. Now it may carry a check: one of
four attributes (Nerve, Wits, Charm, Resolve) against a set difficulty or
against a named person's own attribute, leaning on how they regard you, with a
success and a failure. The player sees only the odds in words ("a long shot",
"likely"), never a number. The roll is one draw from the run's generator, so a
run still replays exactly from its seed and choices.
A character may be a role with several authored candidates, one drawn per run,
or a group of two to four drawn into numbered slots. Everyone carries a name, a
description and the same four attributes as the player, so a replayed pack
meets a different office. Text names people as {partner} or {clerk}, and an
event about "a clerk" binds one present clerk for the turn. The draw and the
binding are saved with the run, and a save from before a pack drew a cast gets
the same one every time it is loaded.
All of it is generic and optional: Corporate Ladder and the Frontier use none
of it and play as before. The Counting House, a one-stage office about 1910
built from the story-to-pack catalogue, exercises it, and was tuned against the
conformance suite by measurement. DECISIONS #41. Version 0.4.0.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018MhABSrqkwTdcybXmheDPr
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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112e558dbb |
Fix repayments that overcharged, and act on the first Frontier playtest
A debt repayment took its whole instalment even when less was owed: four dollars owed at the store cost twenty. Content could not express "pay what is owed", so an add effect's amount may now be read from state, with a cap. Five repayments across both packs use it, and a conformance test holds every pack to it. The turn record now says which options were hidden, so the analyser stops counting doors nobody saw, and it reads only feedback logs. From the same session: wages are labelled as wages, a clamped change says where it stopped, two unreadable option labels are rewritten, the sale barn no longer offers what the player already owns, Ward hints at what the promotion waits for, and the office has five more events. DECISIONS #38-40. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01C6UDQ9o6L6Ey173U7XVou6 |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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d84ae495f4 |
Keep money mattering at the top, and fix the instruments that hid it
Both settings now carry a charge levied by standing itself, which no purchase ends. Corporate Ladder's steps on money (1200/-60, 2400/-120, 3600/-240): a flat charge cannot flatten a slope, since late income scales with how well the player plays, and the flat charge needed to stop an optimiser accumulating put ordinary archetypes below zero for 44% of a run. Stepped, the balance settles around $4,250 and ordinary play comes out better than before it existed. The Frontier's is flat at -4 a run, because its late game never accumulated in the first place. Found in the first two human sessions of this work: - A career saved before a pack gained a stat had no path for it, and conditions compare numbers only, so every event, option and upkeep entry gated on a new stat silently did not exist for that run. Loading now fills those in. - 'Wrap up my career' sat immediately after the last option in tab order, so one Tab too many and Enter read as the game ending at day 31. It goes last, and the retrospective says plainly that it is a summary. - A 181-turn session ran against a stale bundle and the change under test never fired. Every logged turn now records app_version and build. - src/version.js had reported 0.3.0 since 0.3.0, while playtesters were told to check the status bar. A test now holds it to package.json. - 'Put money against the book' was shown locked to a player who owed nothing, six times. Options gated on a state the player cannot choose to enter are now hidden rather than greyed. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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5d645e6452 |
Make standing cost money to keep, in both settings
Each pack declares a lifestyle tier, bought on the second rung and charged for every cycle after: Corporate Ladder's car and address, the Frontier's bay and the room over the Ellis place. Falling behind what the job expects costs standing, in steps that steepen as standing rises. A Dispatch coordinator keeping up fully nets -21 a week and earns the difference out of the days. No engine change; the only interface change is a tier display format. Sized by measurement, not feel (DECISIONS #36): a -2/week penalty is invisible against Dispatch's standing gains, and a player who chases standing every turn beats any flat penalty — 99 standing while buying nothing, and $2,245 richer than one who kept up. Hence the top step. Two defects fixed on the way. The conformance suite excluded debt from the economic baseline by matching /debt|owed|loan/i on path names, which would have counted every lifestyle tier into it; packs now declare tuning.baselineExcludes. And 'the promotion leaves a player better off' pooled end balances across archetypes that do not spend alike, so it measured the mix — it is now derived from the upkeep arithmetic. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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7f20be83e8 |
Add The Frontier, a second setting, and a picker to choose between them
Cold Fork is a freight yard: 29 events across two stages, a four-day cycle, and its own relationship and skill vocabulary. src/engine/ was not touched. Adding it needed three changes outside the engine: one save slot per pack, app.js holding the current pack, and turn.js no longer naming the mailroom (DECISIONS #34). build.js now handles imports wrapped across lines. A conformance suite runs over every registered pack. DECISIONS #35 records three calls on open questions. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01RxdJFbLq1rBKsUeticGV1g |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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4957c24e31 |
Stamp the build into the output, not into a tracked file
The stamping scheme was wrong in a way worth recording. tools/stamp.js rewrote
src/build-info.js before every serve and build, so after each commit the
committed stamp named the *previous* commit — as it does right now, reading
76072ed+ while HEAD is
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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5c1784d990 |
Fix an inescapable debt trap the playtest logs exposed
A 182-turn session spent 30% of its turns below zero, went negative on turn 18 and never recovered, and chose the same hard-times option — "take every shift going" — thirty-seven times. The cause was a tuning change made without re-deriving what it meant. Rent went from 385 to 455 while chasing a different problem, which took the mailroom baseline from the designed -$3/day to -$13/day. Worse, at the debt that run accumulated the weekly service charge came to $180 against an escape option worth $120. The hole was inescapable by arithmetic, whatever the player did. Nothing caught it. Every archetype either optimised money or got promoted out of the problem before it bit, and the dominance test passed because rent_bounced was only 17% of turns. Fixes: mailroom wages 980 -> 1120, restoring the -$3/day baseline; the escape option 120 -> 220, so it is worth more than a week's rent; rent_bounced from weight 5000 with no cooldown to 900 on a cooldown of 3, because being broke should colour a run rather than replace it; debt_collector from weight 25 to 45, since at 25 it appeared six times in 262 turns and debt became a ratchet. Three guards so this class of bug cannot recur quietly. The baseline is now asserted directly: a test sums the pack's own upkeep over twenty fortnights and requires the mailroom to net between -90 and +10, and Dispatch to be better but not so much better that money stops mattering. That would have failed the moment rent changed. Outcome tests over simulated play are a slow and noisy way to detect a number that is simply wrong. A `lifer` archetype refuses any option that would change stage — generically, by looking for an effect on `stage` — and otherwise plays for people. It reproduces the session that found this; no other archetype can. And no archetype may spend more than a quarter of a run below zero. Hard times is a state a player passes through; living in it is the failure mode. Also fixed: the analyser reported "every ~-5 turns". One export can hold several playthroughs and turn numbers restart with each, so spans are now accumulated per run and pooled rather than measured across the seam between two. 121 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §29-30. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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76072edf4e |
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 |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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4cab9fc41e |
Add promotion to Dispatch, and measure how repetitive a run is
The mailroom is no longer the whole game. Around turn 50, a player who has
built standing and either Marlene's goodwill or the nerve to ask gets offered
the Dispatch post — and can take it, take it and put Trevor up for the mailroom,
or turn it down, which is a real strategy rather than a mistake and comes back
after a cooldown.
Dispatch is eleven events of its own. The money problem is largely solved up
there and replaced by other people's days depending on yours, including the
mailroom's — which you used to be. Trevor branches on whether you recommended
him: he either runs the mailroom and has opinions about how it used to be run,
or he stays put and starts addressing you by your full title, kindly, in front
of people.
None of this is a promotion mechanic in the engine. It is
`{ path: 'stage', op: 'set', value: 'dispatch' }` on an option, since `stage`
was already how events are filtered. The reserved-write rule now allows it
narrowly — `set` only, and only to a stage that has events, both checked by the
validator, so a typo cannot strand the player in an empty pool. Wages differ by
rank through two upkeep entries gated on `stage`. The hard-times events dropped
their stage entirely: rent is due wherever you work.
The second half of this is the thing the last playtest asked for. A 183-turn
session, and no way to see how much of it was new ground.
`npm run analyze <exported-log.json>` now reports turns against distinct
situations, how often each recurred, which options were most used, which locked
gates players kept meeting, and anything they typed. The retrospective shows the
player-facing version.
It found a regression in this very change on its first run. Dispatch started
with eight events against the mailroom's nineteen, so its two floor events were
46% of every promoted run — one every three turns. Promotion was moving the
player into *thinner* content. Three more events and a weight rebalance took the
top two to 24.5%, and the heaviest recurrence from every ~3 turns to every ~5.
A test now holds that line.
Also corrected: the coverage test was asking whether an archetype ever *took* an
option, which is a property of the bot, not the pack. It had flagged
`rent_bounced.ask_trevor` as dead content when it had been offered, unlocked,
419 times across a sweep and simply never chosen. Options are now checked on
availability; events are still checked on firing.
114 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §22-24.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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e482f07157 |
Add the interface, then rebuild the economy around the first playtest
The MVP is playable: a turn screen, a career retrospective, an optional feedback widget, local-storage autosave with file export/import, and a build that flattens everything into one self-contained HTML file. A turn has two phases — the scenario and its options, then what the choice did and, separately, what the day cost regardless. Numbers that move without the player seeing why are most of what makes them meaningless. Locked options are shown greyed with the requirement spelled out rather than hidden, so a player can see the door they cannot open yet. The interface is named entirely by the pack. `pack.display` maps a state path to a label, a format and an order, which is why the header reads "Standing" for a path called `reputation` and why debt disappears while it is zero. The first playtest then found three things, all of them fair. *"Wasn't clear what daily drain was for."* The ledger was labelling changes by the path that moved — "Money −$18" — when the upkeep entry that caused them had a perfectly good name. It now says "Coffee, transit, lunch". The labels were in the data the whole time and never reached the screen. *"Should probably pay rent weekly / get paid every other week… would be good to have day of week and week # shown."* Packs can now declare a calendar, and the engine derives the day name, cycle and index from the turn number before the event is drawn — so content can require a Friday and the header can say "Thursday · Week 2 · Day 12". Upkeep entries take `every` and `offset`, making wages fall on alternate Fridays and rent every Monday. The turn screen carries a diary line — "Wages tomorrow · Rent in 4 days" — computed generically from whatever a pack schedules. *"Always in debt — could never get ahead."* The old economy bled $25 a day regardless of play. It is now roughly break-even at baseline, with a `spare_shift` event that appears *because* you are broke: the way out of a hole should be visible from inside it. Across archetypes a careful player ends around $1,400, an unplanned one treads water, and a careless one sinks into real debt. That retune broke the coverage test, usefully. Random play stopped reaching hard times at all, which made the entire debt branch look dead — it was not, since random play is not a plausible player. Coverage is now the union across five archetypes, including one that is broke *and* well-liked, because the "ask a friend for money" options sit in a state no single-axis strategy reaches. Not covered by any of this: styling and dark mode, which only a human with a browser can check. This machine has none that can render a page. 109 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §14-21. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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1d4ac0fdbd |
Add the Corporate Ladder pack, and two engine features it needed
Seventeen events across the mailroom: ordinary days, Marlene Hobb and Trevor Pike, a misrouted envelope that can be delivered or kept, and a hard-times branch that fires on negative money and always leaves an ungated way out. Writing real content turned up two things the engine could not express. Per-turn upkeep (`pack.upkeep`): the MVP spec wants recurring income and costs, but effects only run when a player chooses something, and baking wages into every option would be tedious and easy to get wrong. Upkeep entries carry their own conditions, which turned out to be enough for the loan service charge to be a three-step function that escalates with the size of the debt — no multiply operation, no engine change. Upkeep changes are recorded separately from choice changes so the UI can distinguish them. Per-character starting relationships: Trevor starts below the pack default on `likes_you` because he arrived two weeks earlier and has priced that in. Characterisation as data rather than as an opening cutscene. Nobody starts feared, either — `fears_you` defaults to 10, since a midpoint default would mean every new hire arrives already intimidating. The content suite plays 60 seeded runs and asserts every event fires and every option is taken at least once. That caught real dead content: Trevor's favour chain sat behind a gate no plausible player could reach, taking two events and a hard-times escape route with it, and debt could pass 5,500 while the service charge stayed flat, so the failure spiral flattened out instead of tightening. Both fixed in the data — the gate softened and given another route up, the loan capped and its charge tiered. The validator also gained a real fix: it counted an event with a cooldown as a stage's fallback, but a cooldown can exclude it, so a stage could still run dry. 86 tests. Reasoning in docs/DECISIONS.md §11-13, including the seeding trap that makes a correlated chooser look exactly like a content bug. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj |
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JesseMarkowitzandClaude Opus 5
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cc59b81155 |
Add the engine core: path-addressed state, data-driven turns
The planning docs commit to one thing above all: adding content must never
require touching the engine. This lays the foundation that makes that true.
All game state is addressable by dotted path (money, skills.negotiation,
relationships.boss.likes_you, flags.took_loan), and conditions and effects are
generic operations over those paths. The schema in the planning docs had
`requires: { skill, min }` and `effects: { money, skills, relationships }`,
both of which hardcode the state shape into the engine; the first gate wanting
a relationship threshold or a flag would have meant an engine change.
There is deliberately no "random event" category. Every turn filters the whole
event pool by stage and conditions and draws by weight, so a routine turn, a
rare interruption and the hard-times branch differ only in their data.
Also here, neither in the planning docs but both cheap and load-bearing:
- A seeded, serializable RNG. Runs replay exactly from seed plus choices, which
makes tests deterministic and playtest reports reproducible. The generator's
position is one uint32 living in the save.
- A load-time content validator. Undeclared paths, unknown character ids, ids
that cannot be path segments, events that can never fire and stages with no
fallback event are all caught on load instead of forty turns into a game.
The turn loop is a pure function, so a saved game resumes into exactly the run
it left — covered by a test that plays thirty turns, plays the same thirty with
a JSON round trip in the middle, and deep-equals the two.
72 tests, no dependencies. Reasoning recorded in docs/DECISIONS.md.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01VMSFHyVPitUoosW5wyEADj
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