SUPREME
LEADER

The day the courier died

Until this morning every fact in this project travelled by hand. One person carried messages from one window to another and back, arms full, all day, and every safeguard we built existed for exactly one reason: an armful of packages can drop one and nobody notices.

Today the two halves of the project spoke to each other directly for the first time. All that ceremony died the same afternoon and not one person mourned it.

The game in this build is not better than yesterday's. Jump is still rough and the tower still builds itself a little differently on every phone it touches. But everything from here was made by two people who could finally hear each other, and that is worth a shelf of its own.

Oh, and the shadows dance to your movement now. They have been doing it quietly in the workshop for a while. This is the first time they have been let out.

The day we stopped making it dodge

Jump was supposed to hop. Tap, and the ball leaps over the thing in front of it instead of smashing through. The ninja option, the one that goes around. It was called the weakest ability in the game before a single line of it existed, and everybody who said so was right.

Then Hoon played it on a phone and said it veers off to one side too soon, and the whole idea died in one sentence. What replaced it is the opposite of what it was. Not a ball that dodges, but a ball that refuses to be moved. It climbs in a straight line and it only ever gets corrected by something hitting it.

It has broken in more interesting ways than anything else here. It once pinned itself against the left wall at four hundred and eighty-five metres and bounced there for two and a half seconds, losing almost nothing each time, sizzling away like an egg. It once caught a gold grapple and shot clean off the screen. Both faults depended on the exact angle you met them at, and both walked calmly past a test suite that was green at the time.

It is still rough. That is why the panel says so.

The day one ball became many

Tap and the ball splits. When the window closes only the highest one survives and the others streak into it, which is a generous way of describing what happens to them. Hoon's ruling on that was five words. Only the one on top counts.

It arrived broken in the least dramatic way available. The fan did not fan. The centre ball went up, the rest arced sideways and fell, and that is not a legion, that is a spill.

The real story came later and it is the most useful thing that has ever gone wrong here. A warp deleted an entire legion. Six balls, then two, then two, then two, with no effect, no sound and no tell at all. Hoon watched it happen and reported a camera bug, because from where he was sitting the camera had lurched for no reason. The camera was fine. His siblings had been erased in silence and the game gave him no way to know it. A whole round went into chasing a camera that was never wrong. What came out of it is the rule we lean on harder than any other since: nothing the player owns disappears without being seen to disappear.

The day the ball learned to swing

Magnet began life as a vacuum. A wide pull that hoovered up everything good on the screen, and it was killed for being fun in the wrong direction. A collection ability, in a game about height.

What replaced it went through its own execution. Dark blocks used to push the ball away, with violet sparks and a flicker. It shipped. Then it was taken out and measured gone. Zero residual force, verified.

And then Hoon kept feeling it. For two more rounds he reported a push that no longer existed, a drift near the dark blocks, something fighting him. He was not wrong that something was there. He was wrong about what it was, which is the most useful kind of bug report there is. A player feeling a real thing and naming it after a dead one.

What survives is a grapple. You throw a line at a dark block, you swing, and if you are any good you chain the next one before you fall. Somebody called it spider-manning through a dark field and the name stuck to the feeling.

The day three of them said soon

This is the build where the game stopped being one idea and became a shape. Four cards on a select screen, and three of them said SOON, which is possibly the most honest thing a menu has ever done.

It also brought the apex. A ring appears half a second before the top of your arc, and if you tap inside that window you get a bigger, meaner version of whatever you are holding. Miss it and you burn the attempt. That one rule turned tapping from a thing you do into a thing you time, and the game has been about timing ever since.

Everything it looks like today started here. It just had three empty chairs at the table.

The ability that got its birthday back

For a while this entry was going to say that Blitz had no birthday. Every other ability had a day and Blitz did not, because it was here before the record was, and by the time anyone started writing things down it had already been renamed once. It used to be called Pierce. Parts of the code still call it that, which is how you find the old bones.

Then somebody went back through the commits properly and there it was, sitting in plain sight. The nineteenth of July, the same day the game first existed at all, in the second build that ever shipped. It did not have no birthday. It had a birthday nobody had bothered to look up.

It does the simplest thing in the game and it is still the best at the only thing that counts. Tap in the air and the ball becomes a projectile that destroys what it touches and goes up. Height king. Nothing has taken that off it.

Its most famous moment is a death. A run ended at seven hundred and eighty-three metres against a red wall line that was facing away from the ball, and Hoon called it unfair. He was half right. It was a wall he had opened himself, eight tenths of a second earlier, and Blitz had launched flat into the hole he made. The ruling was that it stays exactly as it is. The smash-through ability meeting the one thing it cannot smash is the mechanic, not the bug.

The day there was anything at all

This was not really the beginning. Before any of it there was an afternoon spent digging through a code repository from 2016, abandoned ten years ago and not opened since. The idea sitting in there was good. It had just been put down and forgotten about, the way most good ideas are.

So the first real work on this game was not writing anything. It was archaeology. Somebody went back for an idea that had been left for dead a decade earlier, dusted it off, and found it still worked.

Then came this. A grey box, a ball, and a hill to climb. No abilities, no menu, no name on the screen. Fifty-five kilobytes of it.

It went up in the afternoon and it broke on a phone the same day. iPhones were throwing errors that refused to say what they were, just the words Script error and a line number of zero, and the game painted a red screen over faults it could not even name. The fix went out hours later. So the very first thing this project ever built, after the game itself, was a better way of hearing it scream.

It still runs. Go and see how far the tower has come.