Built it, removed it exactly seven days later — and never measured the effect (Tanubi Dusk)

Each day deserved a face of its own, one short run with something particular about it.

So daily variations went in. They derive from a seed, so the whole world gets the same one on the same day.

For ranking fairness, challenges and ghosts reproduce exactly.

It was carved out as pure logic with nine unit tests attached.

Up to here it was an addition that worked.

Dusk is the variation that narrows what you can see.

As an idea I thought it was one of the better ones.

The same course plays differently when the visible range changes.

Next to low gravity or fog, it looked like the single sheet that altered the experience most.

So removing it was not something I had considered.

The reason survives verbatim in a source comment.

A visibility limit is too much for the daily run.

The daily is one short run. It is not the slot you settle in and grind.

Received in that slot, a narrowed view stops being difficulty and becomes an irritation.

Whether something is fun and whether it fits here are separate questions.

For seven days I was only looking at the first one. 😅

I would rather write this part plainly than smooth it over.

I did not measure how play behaviour changed after the removal.

The commit that removed it carries a row of verification records, but they cover other changes in the same batch.

The source comment itself states the basis as an owner call, not a measurement.

I am not going to write a judgement call as though it had been a data call.

Dusk was taken out of the type that represents the set of variations.

I did not want a runtime branch filtering it out. I wanted the daily path unable to construct it at all.

Done that way, any surviving reference surfaces as a build error.

One did surface. A line for Dusk was still sitting inside the function that applies a variation.

With a runtime branch, that line would have quietly stayed there.

The prohibition went into the type rather than into a comment.

Dusk itself did not disappear. It still shows up on the campaign side.

So the display name and emoji dictionary stayed exactly where it was. The campaign HUD reuses it.

Only the dictionary type was widened so the Dusk entry could not fall out.

The render flag is shared as well, so it stayed. The daily path simply never raises it.

What was removed was an option, not a piece of vocabulary.

Touching the draw table turned up something else.

An old comment claimed one variation had been weighted to appear more often than the others.

Counting the actual array, every kind appeared the same number of times. There was no weighting.

The comment held the intention while the code stayed honestly uniform.

Nobody notices until the person who wrote it reads it back.

A comment is a claim, not a guarantee. That landed again.

Removing a fun feature takes more willpower than fixing a broken one.

Even so, when something does not suit the place it sits, removing it is the faster move.

Two things stuck. Write the prohibition into the type, not into prose.

And write down that a judgement call was a judgement call.

If it was not measured, say it was not measured. That is the whole thing! ✍️