In-game event

The first ten minutes, rebuilt — and the bug that froze the table is fixed

GO, STOP Demo · published 17 days ago

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The first ten minutes

Median playtime on the demo was seven minutes. Four out of ten people closed it inside ten. The game wasn't too hard — people were leaving before they knew what they were building toward.This update rebuilds that first stretch, and removes a bug that could end a run outright.

The scoring wasn't hard to understand. It was printed wrong.

While cutting new footage for the store page I froze a frame and read the score line:130 × ×53Two multiplication signs. The separator between the chip count and the multiplier was "×", and the multiplier itself printed as "×53". It had been that way since the line was built — in the game, in all eight store screenshots, and in the trailer.A Japanese creator had told me the scoring was hard to follow. I heard "needs more explanation" and rewrote the tutorial. The equation itself was malformed. Nobody says "your formula is broken," because nobody expects the formula to be broken — they assume they're the one who doesn't understand.It reads 260 × 45 now.Two more things sat on that same line. When several scoring sets fired at once their labels stacked on the exact same spot and none of them could be read — the chain is what this game is proudest of, and you couldn't see what had chained. And the bar that shows how thick the deck still is was measuring the card in mid-flight too, so it stretched across the screen and snapped back. Both fixed.

The game now tells you what you're collecting

The tutorial taught you how to play a card but never what a scoring set was. Ten sets sat at the top of the screen in eight-point type. If you'd never held a hwatu deck, they were unreadable symbols.

A four-page opening sets up where you are and what you owe. It ends on the map — eight cities, twenty-four nights, Busan to Seoul. Interest can be paid anywhere; the principal is settled only in Seoul. That was never stated anywhere in the game before.
The tutorial now opens on the scoring sets, not on the cards. Three Brights ×5, Godori ×6 — both in one round is thirty times the pot.
It points at the codex and tells you the table waits. There is no clock. People weren't opening it because they thought there was one.
The first time each scoring set appears, the animation runs at about half speed. Once you've seen it, it snaps back to normal — you'll watch the same flourish hundreds of times, and slow forever is its own kind of punishment.

A run-ending bug

If you called Go and there were no cards left to play, the screen stopped. Nothing happened, and the run was gone.It took six or seven Gos to get there, which means the better you were playing, the more likely you were to hit it. About 800 of you downloaded the demo with that bug in it. If it happened to you, I'm sorry.It now resolves the way Go-Stop actually resolves. The round is void, you collect nothing that night, and the next round is played for double stakes. Win it and you take twice as much. Lose it and it costs you twice as much.

Also in this build

The score now grows with the multiplier. At ×23 it used to be the smallest thing on screen, and it was drawing underneath the red overlay.
The map between nights was unreadable. Every locked city carried its own "In the full release" caption — six of them on a map 264 pixels wide, burying the city names underneath. In Korean "Incheon" was swallowed by "Seoul"; in German the map was mostly text. There is one marker now, on the city where the demo actually ends.
"Learn it again from the start" in Settings only reset half of it. The coach came back, the opening did not. Both come back now.
At 1280×720 the "Sit down" button on the new-run screen sat below the fold in twelve languages. Korean fit, so I never saw it.
Retrying with "Back to the first table" wasn't being counted. You could sit down ten times and the ledger still said one.
The page you get on a phone still pointed at the old itch.io address and still said "no install needed." Neither has been true since the demo moved to Steam.
All of it is in fourteen languages, checked at 1280×720, 1600×900 and 1920×1080.

What's next

I'm still reading the demo numbers. If you drop out, I'd rather know where. The store page has a discussion board — that's the best place to reach me, and I read all of it. Thanks for playing. Especially the person who wrote in. — Moon, solo dev

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