The Site Is Up

Labyrinth has a home now.

Nothing here is new game work — the descent itself hasn't changed — but there's now somewhere for a run to go after it ends. Six things, specifically:

• This page. Dev notes, posted here instead of scattered across commit messages.
• A download page, for whenever there's a build worth downloading.
• A weekly challenge — one seed, shared by everyone, rotating every Monday. Same dungeon for the whole week, so a time is comparable and a death is a fair death.
• A leaderboard, ranked the way the engine has always ranked runs internally: finished runs only, wins first, then deepest, then fastest, then richest.
• A Hall of Fame for wins you choose to share — never automatic, always your call whether a run's worth putting a name on.
• A path for bug reports and feature requests that starts in the game, not on a form here.

The part I actually care about

The engine has had a certify/replay pipeline since early on — the idea that a run log is nothing but a seed and an ordered list of commands, and that from those two things alone you can rebuild the exact same dungeon, the exact same fights, the exact same ending, bit for bit. It existed for testing. It existed so I could email myself a bug and watch it happen again.

It turns out that's also exactly what a leaderboard needs. When the game sends a run here, nothing about the score is taken on faith — the site replays it from scratch and only trusts what falls out the other end. A submitted score is not a claim. It's a receipt.

That felt worth building the rest of the site around.

What's not here yet

Screenshots. Art. A build to download. The maze is still wearing placeholder sprites, and until it isn't, this site is mostly words on parchment. That's fine. The gold was never the point — the hole was always going to take longer to dig than the sign out front.