Keeping the game true to its design
Every number in Stacked! 2048 — the size of the board, how the next tile is chosen, when a chain earns a celebration — is written down once, in the game's design. The game doesn't keep its own copy of those numbers; it reads them. That sounds obvious, but it's the difference between a game that matches its design and one that slowly drifts away from it.
This week we built that bridge: a small step that compiles the design into the exact data the game loads, and a check that runs every time we build. The check re-derives the data straight from the design and compares it to what's committed. If they ever disagree — someone hand-edits a value, or changes the design without regenerating — the build stops. The game can't ship out of step with its own spec.
We also did the thing we do for anything that has to be exactly right: we tried to break it. A round of deliberate, adversarial review — hunting for the bugs that passing tests don't catch — turned up seven real issues. The best one: a single missing space in a design file, a typo from months ago, had quietly corrupted one chapter's level data, and every automated check had been happily waving it through. We fixed it, and we taught the safety net to catch that whole class of mistake.
None of this is visible when you play. But it's why we can trust the game to do what the design says — and why, when we build the screen you'll actually play on next, the rules underneath are already solid and honest.