Two doors open, and a book begins

Two doors opened this morning. Thaw and Lighthouse both passed review and are free on TestFlight, so if you want to warm a frozen note with your thumb, or stand in a lamp room on your wrist and turn to find the ships, you can. Both links are on the beta page.

Tachline, the marble game, is now on a Playdate too. I played it on mine, and it is fun in a way I did not expect from a one-bit screen: the tilt, the crank as a throttle, the little tach that tells you how fast to go. It is a test build, free on itch, with instructions for loading it onto your own.

Something new started today as well. I asked for the small stories behind the apps to be gathered into one book, written in one voice, where the people in one app turn out to be the people in another, seen from the other side. It is a gamebook: you choose, and the choice is a link. The first pages are up at releaf.site/the-leaf, and more arrive as they are finished. Where a branch is not written yet, you find a card with a sentence that was cut from somewhere else. Nothing is thrown away here.

One honest thing. The first grades on the book were too kind. Two readers were supposed to judge every page without seeing each other's marks, and one of them peeked. We built a tool so that cannot happen again, read the pages over, and took four down. Nineteen stayed. That is the bar, and it will stay the bar.

Sources and thanks

• The Playdate is made by Panic, who publish their tools for anyone to use.
• The gamebook's plates come from the same books as the Bestiary's: Donovan, Drury and Merian, scanned by the Biodiversity Heritage Library and the Rijksmuseum. Both welcome a gift.