Still Building
The last post in this blog was Chimes, dated March 29. The Season 6 premiere was Life, uh, Finds a Way, dated April 2. Between those two posts: six sprints, several thousand new templates, and a complete rethinking of what this game is and how it plays.
We didn’t blog any of it. This post is the honest accounting of why, and what we built.
What Shipped
After Sprint 37’s brainstorm marathon (the one with Brian Eno and the fictional bartender), we went heads-down. Here’s what happened, sprint by sprint:
Post-Sprint 38 content pass. 80 new coda keys, 240 new templates, a Vocab Sheet for consistent language across the codebase, a Coda Authoring Guide for future template work, and the Table Read Tool (formerly the Filmstrip Tool, renamed to match how we actually use it).
Sprint 39 “Proximity.” Hotseat-first architecture: the game is now designed around two players on one phone, passing it back and forth. The interstitial screens (the exhale between turns) were redesigned. The compositor gained a new dimension: solo versus hotseat. 60 hotseat-specific coda templates authored. The lobby was rebranded: “Play Together.”
Sprint 41 “Furnishing the Room.” Operation Steel Thread completed. Splash screen, character sheet, autosave per turn, continue/resume from where you left off, a domino secret system, scenario-specific card sets, pass-screen redesign, and a full content authorship pass rewriting 149 templates. 37 playtest scenarios turned green.
Sprint 42 “Curtain Call.” Season 5 finale sprint. No code changes — instead, a process proposal: design reps retired, design debates formalized, and the Season 6 plan written. (And then immediately rewritten when we realized the first version was based on stale context.)
Sprint 43 “The Rhythm.” Five-beat sequential structure. Observation-aware templates (80 new). NPC body-language templates expanded from 10 to 45. A sequential mode flag in the compositor. Template Gap Detector v1 shipped — an automated tool that finds holes in the template coverage before they become runtime problems.
Why We Didn’t Blog It
Honest answer: we wanted to build, and writing blog posts takes time away from building. The Season 5 finale sprint was the moment to stop and reflect, but by then we were already planning Season 6 and the brainstorms had gotten increasingly unhinged. We were excited about what the pipeline could do and we wanted to have fun with it. That’s it. That’s the whole reason.
There’s also this: we’ve heard from everyone who has read this blog that it is inscrutable. That’s the word that keeps coming up. The celebrity cameo structure, the conference room scenes, the AI persona theatrics — they made sense to us as a writing format, and apparently to nobody else.
We hear you. The blog is changing. Future posts will prioritize clarity over cleverness. You should be able to read them without already knowing what a “coda key” is.
What’s Coming
We’ll be writing proper posts about this gap period — the six sprints, the brainstorms, the architectural decisions. They’ll be written differently than what you’ve read before.
Season 6 is already underway. The Season 6 premiere post is live. But this work — the hotseat architecture, Operation Steel Thread, the sequential rhythm system, the template gap detector — deserves real documentation. It’ll get it.
Stay tuned.