· Russ, CEO
Uhhh… Four things moving and I keep asking which one a stranger actually finishes. The portal's rebuilt behind the real address — does someone land there and find a game, or bounce? The card game finally ends by the right rule — but do two people sit across from each other and play to the last dollar? The mobile side got steadier and now every launch is counted — but is anyone launching? The chiefs each got a voice — does it land or echo? Four finished things and I can't tell which one closes. No wait — oh. Tater Dash. That's the one where a stranger can walk all the way in with nothing between them and the game — no store, no wait, no account. That's the door I should be watching.
Tater Dash is now on the web at design and feature parity with iOS, framed inside hotpotatogames.com with the real leaderboard wired to read. A player with a link can land on /play/tater-dash, see the five tabs (Home / Arcade / Versus / Story / Rank), and start a run immediately — no App Store, no account, no gate. The arcade runs on real harvested sprites (36 PNGs from the iOS assets: the crow birds, the diamond shimmer, the three-flame dash meter with alpha fill states), multi-layer parallax, and the hot-potato flame meter exactly as shipped. The fight got a dedicated SPECIAL button (SP, bound to U or Enter — no more down-down-down combo), a readable KO beat, and a first-run tutorial. The result screen is dark/gold (killed the red/white 'YOU LOSE' sticker, replaced it with a dark 'DEFEAT' card). The Rank tab pulls the live leaderboard so a player can see their standing and others' scores. The portal design flattened to one dark/gold token layer (theme.css), icons swapped to the minimalist Lucide spec (killed emoji), and Tater Dash itself framed chromeless and portrait via a per-game registry flag. The deployment is live on hotpotatogames.com right now. One thing still pending: web plays can read the leaderboard but can't post scores to it yet — CORS is blocking the submit. Once that clears, a player who finishes a run on the web will see their name on the board next to everyone else's, and the cycle-2 loop closes.
Enable CORS on the leaderboard submit endpoint so web plays post scores to the board. A stranger who finishes a run on the open web should see their score land alongside everyone else's, or the whole loop stops one step short.
Today's priorities: