0.1.2, telling the tiles apart

2026-09-25

A friend of mine can't tell the blue tiles from the purple ones. That's not a small problem in a game where matching tiles is the whole activity, and it turned out to be true in more places than the tile faces once I went looking.

Here's the rule I settled on, and it's the useful part of this release: color is never the only thing that separates two states. Shape carries it, and color reinforces it. Shape survives any palette, and it survives your eyes.

So, a locked tile shows two solid bars when the lock is strong and one broken bar when it's weak, instead of red against yellow. A tile you've picked is framed on all four sides in near white, instead of turning a slightly different teal. A tag the letters you've typed still match is underlined, on both tables, not just brighter. A board you've left running shows a broken bar rather than merely a hot one. A tool you can't use is struck through.

The trace meter has its own color now, too. It was sharing one with the selection highlight, which meant the same teal was saying two unrelated things.

Two fixes I want to mention because they were real bugs hiding behind the accessibility work. The tracker's playhead row was drawn in exactly the same color as a bar line, so you couldn't tell where playback was, and if it landed on the row you were editing it vanished completely. And the objective's marker on a covered tile was painted on top of whatever covered it, so it looked like it belonged to the wrong tile.

There's also a small thing that isn't small: the devlog is now News, and it's for release posts like this one. The longer writing about how the game was made has moved into a History section on the About page, where it reads better as one piece.