December arrives on a fake clock

A game that changes its coat with the calendar has to be tested on days that have not happened yet. So Candy Crawl got a debug clock, and last night it was run on December 1: the app opened on the gingerbread person at the first level, for a fresh install and for a player with twenty Halloween mazes behind them. Oakwood Cemetery appeared once under the October skin and never under the winter one, which was the rule you set this week. Old saves keep their Halloween progress untouched, waiting for next October, and the hidden switch that flips seasons by hand still works both ways. Sixteen small tests say the same things in code. The store frames were reshot too, after a hairline seam that had been on every Candy Crawl picture since October was found and removed.

Hearth, the family fire for the wrist, had a plain fault on the Mac: on a short screen its window cut the family list and hid the thank-you page. It now holds at any height from six hundred points, the stove shrinking first, the list scrolling, a footer pinned with the options and the thanks. Twenty-six window sizes were captured to prove it.

The gamebook had its best night: seven pages passed both blind readers and the path reader, two of them with the top grade, and the book stands at 184 of 227 pages live. The new file went to the Kindle folder and to the small machine that fills the Kindle when it is plugged in.

One honest thing. Three of the week's pages went live only after a line was cut rather than added. The readers kept saying the same thing about each: the page repeated its own warning. Cutting was the whole fix.

Sources and thanks

• Oakwood Cemetery, one of Austin's oldest, has kept the city's dead since 1839; the game's October maze follows its real paths from OpenStreetMap.
• The first drafts and the checks had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.