0.95: The game responds to your mouse now

The game responds to your mouse now

Starting with the thing that matters rather than the thing that is exciting.

Three players reported that this game did not work. One in German: left-click could not select a card, and ESC did nothing. One in Chinese: no response to input at all. One in English: freezes that forced killing the game mid-run.

Those are not opinions about a game. Those are people who paid for something that did not start.

I could not reproduce the input failure reliably, and that is the honest reason this took so long. A bug you cannot reproduce is one you can only guess at, ship the guess, and wait for the next refund. So I stopped patching and rebuilt the game on a different engine and a different input stack.

That is what 0.95 is. Not a content update with a version number on it.

What the rebuild fixed

• Cards respond to left-click. Click a card, click a slot. No setting to change first, no state where clicks stop landing.
• ESC opens a pause menu — Resume, Settings, Abandon Run — on every screen in a run.
• You can always leave a match, including after losing one.
• Settings no longer ends your run. This one was mine and it was embarrassing: a settings cog was wired to "leave run". It ended your run as a loss and said nothing. Abandoning now takes two deliberate clicks and tells you what it costs.
• Real display settings. Borderless, windowed, resolution switching, and a text-size setting.

Seven languages, and the Chinese is rewritten

Five of the six positive reviews this game has are in Simplified Chinese. Some of you put over a hundred hours in. And several of you said, in those positive reviews, that the Chinese was broken.

You liked the game through a bad translation. I am not leaving that there.

The Chinese is rewritten from scratch — not machine-passed, not one-to-one. Card names, enemy names, relic rules, event text and the tutorial are written for Chinese rather than converted into it, and a CJK typeface is bundled so nothing falls back to a substitute glyph. A run is 征程. A dare is 叫牌.

English, Simplified Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Turkish and Polish. Not "supported" in the sense of a dropdown with gaps behind it: every one is complete on both halves of the game — 267 strings of buttons and headings, 580 strings of card names, relic rules, enemy tells, events and achievements.

There is a test that renders every screen in every language and fails if it finds one English word left. That is why this can say "complete" without hedging.

Japanese, Portuguese and Russian are not on the list, deliberately. Their old tables now cover less than half the game. They arrive finished or not at all. A screen that is 40% translated is worse than one that is honestly English.

Rock, Paper and Scissor are finally different

One review said the game "tries to do something, yet absolutely nothing while missing the mark completely". That was fair.

All three cards dealt damage equal to their level and nothing else. They were three names for one card — and a rock-paper-scissors game where the three options are mechanically identical has exactly one correct strategy: play at random.

Now each one pays differently on a win:

• Rock — shield
• Paper — glue, the currency that lifts curses
• Scissor — bleed

Which card you play is now a question about what you need, not just what beats what.

There is no AI art, because there is no art

The old build used AI-generated images and people noticed. Every one is gone.

Nothing replaced them with different pictures. The game draws itself: cards, enemies, effects and backgrounds are all generated in code from a colour system. Twelve skins, no bitmaps, no asset pack, nothing scraped from anybody.

It is also why the download went from 162 MB to 49 MB.

Your save comes across

The game saves in a new place now, so on first launch it goes looking for your old progress and brings it over: banked gold, glue, your collection, your records. It tells you what it found.

One thing does not survive: the SHIFTING trait is gone from the game. Cards that had it come back as ordinary cards of the same type and level — you keep the card, not the trait. The welcome screen tells you how many.

Your old save file is not deleted. If you had progress and the game does not find it, that is a bug and I want to hear about it.

Also in this update

• Four fighters with different decks, health and rules — pair two for twelve builds instead of four.
• Relics, scrolls and curses that were in the data and never ran.
• Twenty events with real branching choices.
• A map you choose a route through, instead of a corridor.
• The dare — call a card type and a slot before you resolve, and get paid for reading your opponent. Consecutive correct calls pay more.
• The enemy tells you what it does, in a panel, truthfully. Reading it is the game.
• Sound tells you things. Every source of damage speaks, and consecutive hits climb in pitch while hits you take sink. You can hear a round going well.
• One continuous soundtrack instead of a twenty-second loop.

So why 0.95 and not 1.0?

Because one thing is genuinely unfinished and I would rather say so.

The balance is not settled. The positive reviews named thin strategic depth and a dominant strategy, and this update changes the maths underneath that — but whether it worked is something players find out, not something I decide alone.

That is the whole list. The art used to be on it and is not any more.

If something is wrong, tell me

The two reports worth most:

• It does not start, or does not respond. Your OS and what you clicked.
• A line reads wrong in your language. Which screen it is on. This is the one kind of bug I cannot find on my own.

And a particular thank you to the Chinese players who stuck with this through a translation that was, frankly, broken. You are most of the reason it is still being worked on.