THE GAME WORKSHOP

The 3D reel has been on the shot list since the beginning with one sentence attached to it, and the sentence was always about the camera rather than the dimension: a fixed, cinematic camera that behaves like a 1903 operator. So the prototype is a camera prototype. It is on its own page, it is the alley from Reel One stood up, and there is no 3D library anywhere in it.

That last part was the first decision and it went the opposite way to expected. The obvious move is to pull in three.js. But this site has no build step, no dependency in it, and a 1903 print needs none of what a 3D engine exists to provide — no textures, no lights, no shadow maps, no physically-based anything. It needs flat shapes, grain and a vignette, which is exactly what the 2D engine has been drawing all along. A pinhole camera, Sutherland–Hodgman clipping against the near plane, back-face culling and a painter's sort come to about four hundred lines, run offline, and cannot be broken by a CDN. Faces take their tone from which way they point and fade toward the ink with distance, and the fade is doing most of the work: it is what gives the alley depth without a single lamp in the scene.

It is two and a half dimensions on purpose. The cat plays in one plane on the same constants as every other reel; the world has depth so the camera has somewhere to stand and something to cut across. Moving her through that depth is a later problem. Framing her is this one.

The operator has seven locked-off setups, a preferred hold of 3.4 seconds, a hard floor of 1.6 between any two cuts, a rule against cutting while she is airborne, and an anticipation rule — it cuts when she has drifted sixty per cent of the way to the edge of frame rather than waiting until she is gone. Do something worth cutting to and it cuts to a close-up from the side she is facing, held just under two seconds; a close-up in 1903 meant physically walking the camera in, so that is what it does. Every cut gets dark frames and a new grain seed, because a cut is two pieces of film stuck together and early prints never hid it.

None of which could be looked at from where it was written, and a camera is the worst possible thing to write blind: every fault in one is obvious on sight and invisible in the source. So the faults became numbers. tools/check-camera.mjs lifts the camera code out of the game, walks the cat up the alley at sixty frames a second, and asks whether each setup points where it claims, whether a polygon straddling the lens clips instead of smearing, whether any ledge exists that no setup can frame her on — and then the only question that really matters, which is how long a shot lasts. A director that cuts every second is a strobe light and no syntax check would ever say so.

It found three genuine faults. The director could nominate the shot it was already running while she stood outside it, then do nothing at all — two and a half seconds of the climb with an empty frame. The fix for that introduced something worse: the emergency branch ran ahead of the cut floor, so mid-jump it re-cut on every frame, which the harness reported deadpan as two cuts zero seconds apart. And the test itself was wrong to begin with, teleporting her between ledges and inventing frame-departures that play never produces. What came out the other side: nine shots across twenty-seven seconds, three seconds average, worst single lapse thirteen hundredths of a second, and a deliberate third-of-a-second beat before the tripod ever moves — which is the difference between an operator and a security camera.

The shot list had drifted a number out of step with the projector, and it took somebody trying to press 6 to notice. Last week’s pass shipped one reel and crossed two entries off the list, so the list said “REEL 6 — playable” and then explained, in its own first sentence, that it meant reel five. The released itch.io build was also sitting in the list as “REEL 0”, which is where the extra number came from: count it and there are six reels, ignore it and there are five, and the page did both on the same screen. The build is now listed as BUILD 0.1, on its own, and every REEL n on the list is the reel you get by pressing n on the projector. Nothing else on the page counts reels two different ways any more.

And the entry it was pointing at has been built, because a roadmap that renumbers itself downward is not a roadmap. Reel six is the house on the corner, and it is the first world since the very first alley that is taller than it is wide: 2400 across, 2600 up. Every reel since reel two has widened — a street, roofs over the street, a premiere down the length of it, a block of neighbours at 4200 — and widening had stopped teaching us anything. Turning back upright did. A street is a sequence; a house is a stack, and the difference is that the rooms are over each other. The left-luggage office is in the back yard, the hat loft is over the front room, the projection box is at the top of the stairs, and the route between them crosses the front door four times.

It is also the reel that asks for every gate at once, which was the point of building it: an errand that is simply open, a three-link chain where each neighbour is holding up the next, a hat count in the loft, a noise count on the lamp room, and a meow count on the Watchman — who is asleep on the chimney pot with the green bottle under him and has been asleep, by his own account, since reel two. Five gate types, one reel, no new engine code: the gates have been data since reel three and this is the first level to prove it by using all of them.

Two things fell out of writing it. The hat gate wants six and only four are lying about the house, so two have to be bought off the Hatter with noise — and the first draft had the last two found hats up on the roof, above the loft, which meant climbing the whole house, falling back down it to shop, and climbing it again. All four are now on the way up, below the loft, so the trek is a climb rather than a lap. The other is the ending. The final errand is the entire descent: the fisik comes off the chimney and goes all the way down to the kitten on the front awning, and the reel ends on a spoonful of physic given to a sick kitten, which is the shot the 1903 film ends on and the reason any of this exists. The geometry checker walked it before anybody could play it — thirty-seven surfaces, all thirty-seven reachable from the doormat.

Two roadmap entries in one pass, and they turned out to be the same entry. Reel Five on the list was “the companion, properly”; Reel Six was “neighbours and the hat trade”. Both are about the same problem: the game had been telling you everything through the caption bar at the top of the screen, and the caption bar has no opinions.

The lantern-moth was an arrow with a glow on it. It is now a character with four moods and a patience meter. Leading is what it always did. Keen is new and is the best of them: when the thing standing between you and an errand is a noise gate, the moth stops following you, flies off to the nearest bottle still standing, and sits on it, beating its wings twice as fast. It is the difference between being told five things need breaking and being shown which five. Translating puts it beside whoever is talking, and adds a second block to the intertitle card — what the neighbour said, and then what the neighbour meant. Every resident in all five reels has a translation now, keyed by name so a reel can be written without thinking about the moth at all.

And sulking, which is the one worth building. Breaking something when a gate wants it breaks costs you nothing and earns a little credit; breaking something when nothing needs breaking costs a lot. So does meowing four times in four seconds, and so does startling a neighbour who was standing right there. Run the meter down and the moth quits: the lamp goes nearly out, the wings droop to a slow beat, it drifts back behind your shoulder, the arrow disappears, the translation on the card is replaced with THE MOTH IS NOT TRANSLATING, and the caption bar stops telling you where to go and says do something worth following instead. It forgives slowly on its own, faster if you run an errand, and fastest if you sit down and do nothing, which is a joke the game has been setting up since reel one.

The hat trade is the same idea pointed at the economy. Mischief has been a key since the first alley — break five things, a shutter goes up. Reel Five makes it a currency as well. The Hatter stands behind the barrels in the back alley with a rack over his head, and the rack draws itself: whatever is still for sale, with the price under it in green if you can afford it and grey if you cannot. Gates keep reading the gross number of things you have broken, so trading can never lock a reel — it only spends the surplus. Then the reel leans on it: one gate wants five hats and only three are lying about the block, so two of them have to be bought, which means the reel cannot be finished without being a nuisance on purpose. Meowing at him talks; pressing E buys, cheapest first, so nobody accidentally spends twelve crashes on a lampshade.

The reel itself is eight residents and a chain: the wool goes to the Knitter, the Knitter vouches for you with the fishmonger, the fish gets the convalescent asking about the picture, and that is how the block remembers there is a reel of film in the hat loft. None of that is written in the caption bar. The only way to find out what happens next is to talk to somebody, which is the first time this prototype has asked for that. The geometry checker grew with it — it now finds the reel builders by reading the source rather than being told their names, so a new reel cannot quietly go unchecked, and it prices the hat rack against the reel's own supply of breakables to make sure a hat gate is payable at all.

Reel two's bet was that a level should be data and nothing downstream should know how many levels there are. Two more reels is the test of that, and it mostly held: reel three and reel four are builder functions and a line in a table. What they needed from the engine was small and specific — two gate types, one gauge, and a bird.

Reel three goes up. It is 2600 across and 2000 tall, which is the first world that runs both ways at once, and neither existing gauge answers "how far in am I" on it — the altitude bead says nothing about which end of the roofs you are on and the street bead says nothing about height. So a reel can now ask for both, and reel three wears both. The route out of a room turned out to be the one piece of level grammar that needed writing down: a room's roof hangs directly over its own floor, and the cat cannot land on something over her head, so every route out of an interior has to leave from the sill. The first draft of reel three's upper half jumped off a garret roof it was impossible to stand on, and nine ledges above that were quietly stranded.

Gates used to read the wreckage: break five things and the shutter goes up. There are two more kinds now, and both read a verb the game already had and had never asked for. The magpie counts hats before she lets you into her nest, which turns the hat collection from decoration into a lock; and the stall on premiere night wants five meows, which is the button that until now only ever startled pigeons. When a hat gate is what's outstanding, the lantern-moth companion leans toward the nearest hat still on a roof, because that is the only signposting the hats have ever had.

Reel four is the widest world in the prototype, 4800 across, and it is a curtain call: five errands at once, each one an object an earlier reel asked for, handed back to whoever wanted it the first time. The last of them is the green bottle of fisik from 1903, and it goes to the Understudy, who has spent three reels saying he could do it if anybody asked.

Neither reel could be played while it was being written, so the arithmetic was checked instead. The jump model from last time was wrong in a way that mattered: it asked whether the cat was high enough at the moment she crossed the gap, when what actually happens is she overshoots and lands on the way down. Modelling the arc as a window — the two moments she crosses a given height, rather than one — put reel one's own numbers back inside the envelope and turned up a real break in reel three. That checker now walks all four reels from the doormat and reports anything it cannot reach, anything resting on nothing, and any doorway a thirty-pixel cat won't fit through.

Reel one was 1400 pixels wide and 1800 tall — a shaft you climbed. Reel two turns that on its side: 3600 across and 1300 tall, a block of four buildings you traverse. Rotating the design rotated the problems with it. The altitude gauge that made sense pinned to the right edge of a chimney reads as nothing on a street, so it's a horizontal one now, printed under the caption line, and which gauge a reel gets is a property of the reel rather than a fact about the renderer.

The bigger change is that the level stopped being hard-coded. Everything that used to be a module constant — the world box, the solids, the door, the hats, the neighbours, the skyline seeds — is now returned by a builder function, and there is a table of them. The renderer, the physics and the ledger client all read whichever reel is loaded and none of them know how many there are. Reel one's numbers were copied across untouched, so the runs already signed into its book still describe the same alley.

Errands used to be one hard-wired sequence: break three things, the shutter opens, take the bottle, carry it to the door. That's now a small state machine — an item, a gate, and a recipient — and reel two runs three of them at once. Sardines for the tom are open from the start. Wool for the convalescent kitten sits behind the haberdasher's shutter until five things are broken. The spool of film for the pigeon only appears once the sardines are delivered, so one errand is the key to another. Reel one is the degenerate case of the same machine: one errand, addressed to the front door, which is why finishing it and going home are still the same beat.

Two new verbs came out of the wider shape. Buildings have interiors now — a fishmonger, a haberdasher and the projection booth above a picture house — entered through a window gap in the wall rather than through a door, with the room lit from inside so you can see there is somewhere to go before you work out how. And a jump that nearly lands no longer just slides off: fall past the lip of a ledge while still pressed into it and the cat catches it and pulls herself over. It only fires on the way down and only within thirty pixels of the top, so the flue behind the picture house still has to be climbed the hard way, by kicking off one wall and then the other.

Verifying a hand-placed level with no browser to look at it meant checking the arithmetic instead. Two rules do most of the work: the cat cannot land on a ledge directly over her head — she meets the underside and drops — so every approach has to start outside the target's horizontal span, and a jump clears about 136 pixels of rise, buying less horizontal reach the higher it goes. Feeding the reel's solids through that as a graph turned up a gutter parked directly under an overhang and a chimney shaft with no way out of the top; both are fixed, and all thirty-eight surfaces are now reachable from the pavement.

Sideways play fixed the shape of the picture but not its scale. In a phone column a logical pixel of the alley landed on about a third of a CSS pixel, which made the cat sixteen pixels wide — readable as a smudge, not as an animal. The stage is still a fixed 960×540, so instead of re-composing the reel the camera now pushes in: the world layer is scaled up and the frame follows the cat more tightly, clamped so the framing never runs off the end of the alley. The burned-in captions, the altitude gauge and the intertitles are outside that scale and grow on their own as the picture shrinks, and the title cards are measured before they are drawn so a long line of dialogue can't spill off its card.

The thumb pad was five buttons, each listening for its own touch; it is one controller now, tracking pointers by id. A thumb can slide from ← to → without letting go, two thumbs can walk and jump at once, and a touch that iOS cancels mid-press releases whatever it was holding instead of leaving the cat sprinting into a wall. Touch users get a single button that takes the screen and starts the reel, and for a handset locked in portrait — where asking for landscape is simply refused — there is now a quarter-turn mode that rotates the picture instead of the phone, and retires itself the moment the handset is turned.

Everything above was shot in landscape and, until this week, was being watched in a column on a phone. Build 0.1 and the prototype both take the whole screen now, and both ask the handset to turn with them. The prototype is composed for a fixed 960×540 stage, so rather than re-lay the alley out for every screen it is scaled to fit and centred, with black bars where the shape doesn't match — the picture never stretches, and the skyline can't leak into the frame edge.

iPhone was the interesting case: Safari there won't hand fullscreen to an element at all, so the shell pins itself over the page instead and the layout is identical either way. In fullscreen the thumb pad splits into two clusters, out from under the cat, and the reel pauses itself if the phone ends up portrait rather than running where it can't be seen.

The prototype above is the first time the three influences are in the same build rather than in a document. The thing that surprised us: mischief works far better as a key than as a score. Shoving three objects off ledges to rattle a shutter loose gives the cozy verb a job, and it means the climb has a reason to wait.

Also settled this week: dialogue is intertitles, permanently. It solves the voice problem, it is period-correct, and a title card holding on screen is a natural place to stop and breathe in a game that is supposed to be unhurried.

Build 0.1 was only reachable on itch.io. It is now embedded at the top of this page and loads on demand, so the game and the picture it came from finally sit in the same place. The itch.io page stays the home for downloads and donations.