Devlog
Notes on the decisions behind the games I build at Alzy, and why I made them. Less about what shipped, more about why it was built that way.
What this log keeps
What I write here isn't a changelog announcing what shipped. It's a record of the decisions I made and why I made them. Reverted work gets the same space as new features — a decision I undid usually comes with a reason I couldn't see while I was building it, and that reason is worth keeping for the next call.
Each entry names a date and, where relevant, a game, so you can tell exactly which point in the code a post is grounded in. I write from the actual commit and the actual code at that point, not from a memory of how it felt.
How this differs from the guides
The guides hand a player a ruler to hold up against the board in front of them — which move pays off, what to prioritize. This log covers the other side of that table: my own calls as the person building the game — what effect to add or cut, which number to tune, what to push to later.
So the same game ends up with two different readers. The guides are written for someone playing it; this log is written for someone building something like it, or thinking about it.
- I let the win rate decide the default difficulty
2026-08-01 · TAMNA
In solo games — one human against three bots — the human was winning 54% of the time, against a 25% break-even point at a four-player table. Rather than making the Mid bot stronger, I changed only which difficulty gets handed to whom. Here is the reasoning.
- I pulled a good effect a week after shipping it — and wrote the ban into the types
2026-07-31 · Tanubi
I removed the Dusk twist from Tanubi's daily run. Not because it was broken. This is about taking out something that worked purely because it was too much for the place it sat in, and about where I chose to record that decision: in the type system rather than in a comment.
- I raised the unlock bar without taking anything back
2026-07-25 · Tanubi
I raised the score needed to unlock the Fox, who was then the last character in Tanubi. Moving a line also moves the ground under everyone who has already crossed it. Here is how I kept people from losing what they owned, and how I pinned that promise down in tests.
- The day I deleted the sky from the game board
2026-06-14 · TAMNA
I layered drifting clouds, gulls and a rotating lighthouse beam over the TAMNA board, then removed every bit of it. Here is what the captured frames showed me, and the rule I kept afterwards.