The fullscreen case is a sneaky one, since the browser can hide a panel without ever running your close handler. I like the random-click tester idea a lot; mashing buttons while toggling fullscreen and switching tabs catches stuff no normal playtest does. In my own browser game the tab losing focus was the other sneaky path, so I ended up deriving pause from what is actually visible instead of a flag I set and clear by hand. Did you also check visibilitychange, or does the fight keep running when someone switches tabs?

A text-based mafia game is a nice fit for the browser, since most of the depth lives in systems like smuggling routes and heist roles rather than in rendering. Heists with assigned roles sound like the hardest part to balance, because one weak role can make the whole crew feel stuck waiting. On mobile, I’d be curious how you handle long lists of crimes and routes without endless scrolling. Did you design the onboarding around one first crime loop, or let new players pick from everything right away?

The rule that an edge tile only starts a route when its hand points away from its own side is a neat constraint, because it means the board border is doing as much design work as the tiles themselves. I also like that routes sharing tiles score extra, since that nudges players toward planning overlapping chains instead of just clearing the first line they spot. Using a bot player for balancing seems especially handy here, as it can quickly reveal whether certain hand directions end up far more valuable than others. When you tuned the spawn odds, did you weight the four directions evenly, or bias them based on where the bot kept getting stuck?

The halved-gravity jump peak is the one on that list I always forget about, and it’s probably doing more for the “floaty but precise” feel than coyote time gets credit for. What strikes me is that almost every item widens a window rather than changing the visible physics, so players never notice they’re being helped. Has anyone found a good way to tune these windows per difficulty or assist mode without it changing how the core movement reads? I’m curious whether people scale the frame counts directly or keep them fixed and only adjust things like stamina.

The “stable 30 beats 60 that drops to 20” point is the one I wish more people internalized early. Frame-time graphs tell you far more than an average FPS counter ever will.

Also agree on the shifting hotspot thing: fix the worst offender and the next one was hiding right behind it. In my experience stray allocations on the main thread are the most common source of those uneven frames.

Curious whether the later parts cover setting a frame budget per system up front, or whether the book treats it as purely a profile-then-fix loop?

Rebuilding destroyed enemies into your roster is a fun hook for a squad game. Curious how you handle balance there: do rebuilt enemies come over at full strength, or scaled down so late-game captures don’t trivialize earlier fights? Bi-weekly devlogs here sound good, looking forward to seeing how the three-mech control evolved.

Cockpit view is a big jump for feel. One small thing that usually helps a lot: a touch of camera lag or head-bob tied to acceleration and braking, so the view isn’t rigidly locked to the car. Are you planning to let FOV widen a bit with speed too?

The fixed daily slot is a smart way to concentrate a tiny player base. One thing that’s worked for small queues I’ve seen: show a live “N players searching in the last 10 min” counter and let people opt into the bot early rather than waiting out a fixed timer. Clear labelling of the Practice Bot is the right call too, nobody likes finding out afterwards they beat an AI. Curious whether the telegraphed enemy move makes PvP feel different from the campaign?

Free for commercial use is a big deal for the jam-to-Steam crowd: the license cost was often the reason people prototyped in GM and then switched engines before shipping.

The part I’d watch is migration. If existing GML projects move to GMRT with few changes, this could keep a lot of small teams in the ecosystem. If it needs a rewrite, people will compare it against Godot fresh anyway.

Classic overlap trap. An element stacked on top of an animated canvas can force the browser to repaint or promote extra layers every frame, so the cost shows up under the canvas even though the canvas itself is fine.

Your takeaway is the real one though: one change per analyzer run. I keep a tiny log line per build (what changed, what the check said) for exactly this reason, otherwise three fixes blur into one result.

Nice direction — traffic that reads differently by profile is what sells “navigate, don’t just floor it.”

A few profiles that usually create readable unpredictability without chaos: cautious gap-hunters who leave room then panic-brake; aggressive left-lane stickers who cut late; hesitant merge-waiters who stall the flow; and one occasional wrong-lane wanderer so players learn to scan, not memorize patterns.

Even tiny differences in reaction delay + preferred following distance go a long way before you need fancy pathfinding.

Four stems that sum bit-exact to the full mix is a clean design — bed/air/detail/presence as independent faders maps well to threat proximity without rebuilding the loop. Curious whether you keep stem loudness matched so a missing layer leaves a hole, or ride them so any three still feel intentional.

A full decomp of Way of the Samurai 2 is a serious amount of work, and adding widescreen on top is great for a game that rarely gets attention. How did you handle the fps unlock? Old PS2 titles often tie physics or animation timing to the frame rate. Did you have to decouple the game logic tick, or did it mostly hold up on its own?

Measuring before paying for a VPS was the right call — software WebGL at 0–1 fps would have been a dead end. Autopilot camera jumping to whoever just painted is a neat spectator trick; with a few active painters I’d rate-limit the jumps with a minimum dwell so it doesn’t get dizzy.

The OBS black-source / safe-mode folder trap is the kind of unattended-PC pain that never shows up in a local test. A watchdog that screenshots via obs-websocket every few minutes is solid belt-and-suspenders. Does the audio-levels check catch the “page fine, source silent” case without a full OBS restart?

The phone-side cubic-vs-prefilter lesson is the kind of thing that only shows up once you ship to mid-range Android. Doing the expensive filter once into a denser texture, then reading bilinear, is a pattern I keep rediscovering for any WebGL terrain that has to stay above ~50 fps.

Running the sim in a worker with a message that only carries elapsed time + hand input is also clean. Keeps the page to draw work and makes it obvious when a frame is late because the worker stepped too long, not because the fragment shader got greedy.

Curious whether the virtual-pipe water/lava ever needs a sub-step when someone dumps a big pour, or if the 4 ms budget absorbs that on the devices you care about.

Congrats on getting close to wrapping up a project you’ve been on for months. That last stretch is usually the hardest part. When you watch the playthrough back, what’s still bugging you most: enemy readability, weapon feel, or pacing between waves? I’d also love to hear what you cut to get it finished, since that’s often the most useful part for other solo devs.

Starting as a guest with no download is the right call for a browser game. The question I’d test is how quickly you get to the first catch. If account creation or long dialogue comes before that, it’s where browser players drop off.

Physical-yet-arcadey is such a hard balance. Curious about the Mario Kart observation. Was it about drift being a commitment the player enters on purpose, rather than something that emerges from the tire model? That framing changed how I think about steering assists.

Tried it for a minute on desktop. Standing still already got me to 12 with all 3 hearts, because a lot of fruit drops straight onto the basket, so the opening does not feel too hard. Dragging the ball with the mouse never moved the cat, so the rule about falling if you drag too fast or reverse never came up. If that rule is the real difficulty, it needs to show up earlier, and a visible tilt before you lose a life would help people learn it. Also worth checking that mouse drag moves the ball the same way a finger does, or desktop players cannot actually test the hard part.