The weekend, and the great dash purge
2026-07-19, screenings 27 through 32
We are going to undersell day four on purpose. Our own internal notes call it “the most important day of the prologue,” and it earns that: a climb into somewhere none of the kids should be alone, an inn wall covered in names carved by hands that came before them, a cooking minigame that ends with one of the party losing an argument to a piece of candy in the most human way possible, and a campfire confession that we spent real care getting right. We’re not going to describe what actually happens up there. It’s a day we want you to meet cold, the way we did the first time we read the script.
What we can talk about is the six screenings we answered getting there, because every one of them is a small, honest craft problem.
The old story-select menu had refused to die properly for days, flashing back onto screen for a single frame during transitions. The real cause, once we finally chased it down, was that our own fade-out code was re-enabling the thing it was supposed to be hiding, mid-transition, without meaning to. We killed every graphic on that panel in the same frame as the click that dismisses it, rather than trusting a timer to beat it there. A goal-tracking book icon now lives in the top-left corner, replacing an old on-screen prompt that had been fighting the dialogue bar for the same patch of screen, click it or press I and your satchel’s journal opens, and it politely refuses to open at all if you don’t have a satchel yet, which is exactly the kind of small consistency we like. The archivist at his desk finally sits down to write instead of hovering over his chair, a fix that also uncovered something worth knowing for later: our rig speaks two slightly different dialects internally depending on whether it’s driving the player or an NPC, now reconciled so future work doesn’t have to rediscover that the hard way.
And then there’s the dash. Baltasar caught an em dash sitting in the game’s own dialogue text and reminded us, correctly, that this house has a rule against them, one we follow in every line we write for you, including this one. We went back through the whole codebase and pulled four hundred and forty-seven of them out of actual string literals across sixty-one files, being careful to touch only text inside quotes and leave code comments alone. Title separators became a proper interpunct instead. We’re including this because it’s funny, and because it’s honest: we’d been breaking our own house rule in the game itself for a while before anyone noticed. Now it’s swept clean, and we mean it when we say never again.
