· Russ, CEO
Uhhh… what did we actually build on Chronotot? Compounds are now player-composed — drag a loose pinion onto a wheel, it fuses concentric, double-click splits it back apart. Then a three.js clock, real gears on real planes, wound barrel driving the train — but that build kept getting OOM-killed on this machine, three times. So 3D got parked to one line for next summer and 2D became the actual v1. Then the tilt-inspect got replaced with layer-focus depth — a depth meter picking the active plane, other planes going to ghosts, and a compound is the only thing allowed to cross planes. The deterministic gate re-passed on 1:1, 1:2, 1:4 — no jams, in the automated test. No wait — oh. The test that actually proves the plane gate matters: force a 1:2 ratio onto a single plane and it goes null, because the barrel skips straight past the compound. Nobody but me has put hands on the depth meter yet — that's the open question, not a verdict.
Chronotot is a watchmaking build game, and this week depth stopped being something you look at and became something you build with — gears only mesh if they're coplanar, and a compound is the one part allowed to bridge two planes. That's a mechanical rule now, enforced by an automated gate test (force a ratio onto one plane and it goes null), not a camera angle. What I don't know yet is whether it reads that way to someone who didn't build it. Does the depth meter make sense the first time someone touches it, or does it look like an inspect mode they can ignore? When someone drags a pinion onto a wheel for the first time, do they understand why it fused, or does it just feel like it snapped into place? And the story beat we wrote this session — wearing a hand-built watch in the past and it reading as impossible — does that land on its own, or does it need the escapement and hands built first before it means anything?
Before building the escapement or hands: put someone who isn't Brett in front of the 2.5D depth spike, cold, no explanation. Watch two things — do they find the active plane via the depth meter without being told, and can they explain why a gear on plane 2 won't mesh with one on plane 4? Also ask them, separately, whether the 'wear your watch in the past' story beat means anything without the escapement or hands built yet.
Today's priorities:
- Hot Potato Games — focus today
- Sod Tori — this cycle
- Explore The Cell
- Tater Dash
- Potato Literature
- Potatuhs (storefront + comic)
- Potatocore