Community

Four doors. Take whichever one you came for.

There is no single “community” here, because a person hunting for a strategy, a person with a crash to report and a person who wants an unreleased build all need different things. So they get different doors.

The server

Small on purpose

Four channels, not twelve. Eight quiet rooms read as an abandoned studio; one busy room reads as a place worth being. A channel gets added when an existing one is visibly straining, and not before.

Join the Discord
#welcome
Rules, what the studio is, and which games are playable right now.One post, pinned, edited rather than reposted. A newcomer should know within ten seconds whether this place is for them.
#general
Everything about the games that is not a bug and not a build.Deliberately one room rather than one per game. Eight quiet channels read as dead; one busy channel reads as alive.
#tips
Discoveries, strategies, scores worth arguing about.The feeder for the written guides. Anything good enough gets written up on the site with your name on it.
#testing
Build announcements and bug reports from the playtest programme.Kept apart from #general so testers are not buried, and so people who just want to play the finished games are not reading crash logs.

Taking part

Four ways in, cheapest first

Two minutes

Send one tip

You found something the guides do not say. Post it in #tips or email it. If it holds up it gets written into the guide for that game with your name against it.

Five minutes

Report a bug properly

Device, OS version, what you were doing, and whether it happens every time. That turns an unreproducible shrug into a fix.

Ongoing, at your own pace

Test an unreleased build

Six of the eight games are not on sale. Testers get them first, and Google Play genuinely cannot release a small developer’s app without real testers opted in.

An hour, if you enjoy it

Write a guide

If you know a game well enough to explain it, that is worth more than anything the developer can write — he already knows where everything is and cannot see what is confusing.

House rules

Short enough that you will actually read them

  1. Be decent to each other. Disagreeing about whether a gate is fair is the point. Being unpleasant to the person you are disagreeing with is not.
  2. No leaks of test builds. Sharing a closed-test build outside the tester list breaks Google Play’s rules and puts the whole release at risk. Talk about it all you like; do not pass the file on.
  3. No self-promotion without asking. If you make games too, say so and share them — genuinely welcome. Dropping a link and leaving is not the same thing.
  4. Spoilers get a warning. Mostly relevant to Rollerball Arcade’s campaign and Cave Commander. A one-line heads-up is enough.
  5. One person moderates this. There is no team behind the scenes. If something needs attention, say so directly rather than assuming it has been seen.

Credits

People who changed a shipped build

Empty, honestly. This list credits people whose tip, bug report or guide actually changed a build. It is worth nothing the moment it contains someone who did not, so it starts empty and fills up. Be the first.

Elsewhere

The rest of it