Small things, early June

A run of small ones, back to back, the kind of week where nothing is a headline but a lot of little things get better.

The one I am gladdest about is fixing how updates reach you. The app could quietly hold on to an older version and never refresh itself, especially once you had added it to your phone's home screen. That is sorted now. It checks for the latest version each time you open it, and still works offline if you lose signal.

That fix landed with its own small hiccup. It gave every screen a softer way of arriving, easing in rather than popping into place. Except it gave them two ways of arriving: each screen would ease in, then quietly do it all over again half a second later. Harmless, but not what I meant, and once you saw it you could not unsee it. Fixed the next day. Screens settle in once now and stay put.

Then a more practical one. For a while the only way to find me outside the game was a couple of links buried in a paragraph at the bottom of the About screen, written out longhand the way you would read an address off an envelope. I tidied those into a small row of icons instead, so you can follow along between updates if you would like to. A Ko-fi link went up alongside them too, after a few of you asked kindly whether there was a way to chip in. Perpetūra is free to read and it is staying that way. The link is there if you ever want to use it, and easy to ignore if you do not.

Behind the curtain, the feedback tool got sturdier. When you send a note from inside the game, it tries to tuck a screenshot in alongside it, so I can see what you were looking at. Most of the time it was quietly failing to take the picture at all, and neither of us would know. I chased down the cause, a few hairline divider lines in the layout that were tripping up the part that draws the image, and taught it to cope with them and to leave me a note when something still goes wrong.

Last, an honest little trim. A turning point near the end of one of the threads reached half a step too far and tried to spell out a feeling that lands better left alone. I cut the sentence that was doing your feeling for you. The scene says the same thing now. It just trusts you to arrive there on your own, which was the idea in the first place.

Nothing for you to do with any of it. If Perpetūra lives on your home screen, it will freshen up the next time you open it.