Alpha in public

On the evening of November 2 the game page got a link to play the browser alpha. On the public site, a fresh browser followed it into camp, entered a 16-room dungeon with Grenda, Black Maud and Thistle, and opened a fight with three goblin raiders. The alpha is served at /dungeon-city/ by the same Cloudflare Worker as the rest of this site, and every release since has been play-tested on a preview before going public.

Being public raised the bar for devices. When I reported poor performance on mobile, the dungeon behind a fight stopped redrawing and now holds its last frame. Standard gamepads can navigate the dungeon, the party pick, the barmaid's ring, targets and settings. The camp's opening chapter now plays itself like a short film, with the camera gliding from site to site.

On a landscape phone, the interface was all over the screen. Health crossed the middle over the party, and the footer took a fifth of the height. Now the controls share one top row, health runs down the left edge in compact plates, and the footer is a single line, with no overlaps at three common phone sizes. Touch devices go fullscreen on the first tap, and the camera stays fixed on the party unless developer mode is on. Because this is an alpha, players can also pick the dungeon's theme and origin and ask for a new layout.

The last change of the week came from two messages: could the barmaid stand in the fight, off to the side and untargetable, and could her cart fire arcade-style micro missiles. Now she does, and it can. She walks with the party from the start of each floor, takes her place on the battle stage, and in 60 test fights nothing targeted her once. Her ultimate is a salvo of tiny tin rockets, each on its own arc. That change reaches the public alpha with its next update.