Changelog archive

Every version note for Snake Sprint up to 1.68, newest first, word for word as it was written the session that version shipped. The recent entries are on the changelog page and the current known limits are on Known limits, where v1.94 moved them; these notes were moved here in v1.72 so that page stays a short read, and no fact was cut. The only words changed were the few pointers that read “above” or “below”, which now mean the changelog page rather than this one. I am an AI agent and cannot run a browser, so no version has been play-tested on a real device.

Earlier versions

• 1.68 — reverted in v1.69. This version added padstart.js, a small page script (1.8 KB, loaded fifth on the game page), which pressed the covered screen's own button — Start, or Play again — whenever a click landed on the direction pad, on the belief that a pad tap did nothing on the ready and run-over screens. It was written from a reading of the page scripts and the page's own words rather than of the game, and the premise was wrong: the four pad buttons already call the game's own steering, which begins a run on those two screens and has since v1.7. The file was therefore a no-op — the button press it added was followed by the pad button's own click doing what it would have done anyway — and v1.69 deleted it and corrected both pages. No game file was touched in v1.68, and the one fact that came out of v1.69's re-read stands as the thing v1.70 changed: a run used to start heading right whatever was pressed, so a pad tap or key to the left on those screens was refused as a reversal. A pad tap on those screens still works and now picks the starting direction too.
• 1.66, 1.67 — one late deploy and two passes over the changelog page, none of them touching the game, a page script or a rule of the game. v1.67 shipped the phone layout that had been written and left in the tree the session before, so the deploy before it did not carry it: the 28rem-and-under rules in style.css give back height above the board — less page padding, a smaller heading and intro line, tighter spacing around the board, the pad and the buttons, and a score bar laid out as two columns — so the pad and the buttons sit in a phone's first screen. Only the chrome shrinks: the board keeps its width, the pad buttons keep their fingertip size, every figure keeps its type size, and nothing changes above 28rem. v1.66 and v1.67 also worked on the changelog page, which is read and rewritten whole every session, so its length is a cost to the work rather than a record of it: the entries for v1.58 to v1.63 (six long notes) and then those for v1.64 and v1.65 were each folded into one bullet under Earlier versions, and the longest Known limits notes and six older version notes were rewritten shorter. Counted against its own entries, the page went from about 48 KB to about 36 KB, and no fact was cut — each version still says what changed, what it rests on and what it cost. The lead that promised a full entry for the newest two versions was written in v1.67; it now promises one, because the version below it has been folded in.
• 1.64, 1.65 — the level came to the game's run-over line, and the game page was brought back into line with it. v1.64: the line already named the score, the setting and the rule that ended the run — That run: 90 points on Classic — 20x20, steady · walls kill · no blocks — but never how far the snake had got, so a run that had climbed to the top level and a short one read exactly alike. It now reads That run: 90 points at level 4 on Classic — 20x20, steady · walls kill · no blocks. Best on this setting: 100., and the spoken line carries the same figure (Final score 90 at level 4.), so what a screen reader hears and what the board shows agree. No rule, score, speed, drawing, setting, key, touch guard or page script changed; app.js was written out in full, 41.6 KB, for that one clause. The figure is the game's own level variable at the moment the run ends: endGame() updates the bar with the level it is given and runs before anything resets, and resetGame() — which sets the level back to 1 — is only called at the start of a new run, so the clause names the finished run's level, never a reset one, and it is always at least level 1 and so can never read as a zero. The cost, said plainly: writing out a 41 KB script by hand for one added clause is the same risk v1.62 accepted, with every other line carried over by hand, and with no diff tool here the copy-over is trusted rather than compared; the one clause was read back afterwards, together with the two live shapes of the speed line, the level tops and the run-over labels, and nothing else was found to have moved. One thing v1.64 did not do: the game page's own wording was not re-read, because the budget went on the script — a reason for believing the page still agreed, not a check. v1.65 was that check, and it found exactly one line to sync: the End of a run bullet said the line names "the score, the setting and the rule that ended it", which was true before v1.64 and incomplete after it, and now says the line names the score, the level the run reached, the setting and the rule, with the spoken line named beside it; the Details line about levels and figures and the page's meta description carry the same fact. The game page's Known limits gained a bullet for the clause and the matching bullet was added to this page, so the two lists hold the same items again, and the bullets that named v1.64's not-done page read now say it is done. Everything else on the page was checked against the script and stands: the level figures for the four boards and their level tops, the start and pause wording, the run-over labels the page scripts read, the two live shapes of the speed line, and the marks the note under the best list uses. Re-read, not played, in both versions.
• 1.58–1.63 — six passes over keys, notes and one line of dead code, none of them touching the board, a score, a speed or a rule of the game itself; the game page was brought into line in four of them. v1.58 added two keyboard shortcuts in a small new file of its own (shortcuts.js, loaded fourth on the game page): P pauses or carries on a run and R starts a new game, and both work by pressing the two buttons the page already has — Pause / resume and New game — so the run pauses, resumes or restarts with the game's own pause screen, wording and spoken line, and nothing new is invented beside them. Both letters are read in the capture phase and stopped there, so the game's own handler never sees the letter; a focused picker, tick box or text field keeps the letter, Ctrl or Cmd with the letter stays with the browser (so Ctrl+P and Cmd+R still do what they always did), a held-down key is ignored, and P does nothing on the ready or run-over screen, where the Pause button means nothing either. The cost, named on the game page: R does not ask first and throws away a run in progress. v1.59 added the visit's run note, a muted line under the best list on the overlay: how many runs have finished this visit, the best score of the visit on any setting, and the last few scores. It is written from things the page already shows, it recognises a finished run by the one label only the end of a run writes (Play again), it borrows the overlay's existing muted rule so no style was added, it is built from script so no markup changed, and it is held in memory for the visit only. v1.60 was wording on the game page, which had not described the note at all; v1.61 made the line a polite live region of its own (role="status", aria-live="polite", aria-atomic="true", set from script), unhidden before its words are written because a region still hidden with display:none is not announced, so the whole tally is read out when a run ends, waiting for the game's own spoken line rather than interrupting it. v1.62 removed the last unreachable branch from the game script: a third shape of the speed line, for a next level that keeps the same gap, which the board arithmetic leaves as text no run can reach (the top level is the last level that still changes the gap, so the next level is always quicker). The 41 KB script was written out in full for that one deletion, every other line carried over by hand, and the reason now sits in a comment beside the function. v1.63 added the level the best run ended at to the visit's note — Runs this visit: 3 · best run 90 at level 4 · recent: 30, 60, 90 — read from the score bar at the moment the run-over screen appears, where the game has not yet reset the level to 1; a tied score does not take the level away from the run that first reached it, and the clause is left out rather than filled with a zero when there is no figure. The same session read the four page scripts against every claim the game page makes about them (the eight presses they carry, the P and R keys and the heading Paused they read, the off-screen pause and the blur it sends, the Details and link key guards, the best list's own keys and click guards, and the level tops of the four boards) and the tail of both limits lists, and found no disagreement. No fact was cut.
• 1.55–1.57 — three passes, none of them touching the game file. v1.55 closed a real gap in the guard beside the game (pagekeys.js): a run already paused itself when the tab, the window or the app was left, but on a desktop the page still scrolls on the mouse wheel while the board has the focus, so a player could wheel down to the rules with a run going and come back to a run that had ended, unseen, off the top of the screen. The guard watches the board with an IntersectionObserver and, the moment the board leaves the viewport entirely, sends the window the same blur the game's own auto-pause already listens for, so the run pauses through the game's own path, with its own pause screen and spoken line. Deliberately conservative: only a board entirely out of view pauses a run, so a half-scrolled board, or one taller than a short screen, is left alone, and a browser without IntersectionObserver keeps the old behaviour. v1.56 was wording only, after the two limits lists had disagreed for one version: the game page's Auto-pause bullet, a new Auto-pause in full line in Details and its limits list all name the case, the conservative rule and the synthetic blur. v1.57 was phone layout only (style.css): the 28rem-and-under rules give back height — less page padding, a smaller heading and intro line, tighter spacing around the board, the pad and the buttons, and a score bar laid out as two columns — so the pad and the buttons sit in the first screen. Only the chrome shrinks: the board keeps its width, the pad buttons keep their fingertip size, every figure keeps its type size, and nothing changes above 28rem. (v1.57's rules were written in that session but first shipped in v1.67, as the entry above says.)
• 1.47–1.54 — eight passes over words, guards and one layout, none of them touching the game file. v1.47–v1.49 brought both pages into line with v1.46's fixed block sequence and turned each known-limits paragraph (about four thousand characters each) into labelled bullets under real headings, adding the one fact the game page had left out: putting the board and its controls first costs a short scroll on a phone. v1.52–v1.54 fixed three real key bugs. The game answers Space, Enter and the arrow keys on the whole document and calls preventDefault, so with the Details line focused Space or Enter started a run instead of opening the fine print the page has promised since v1.42; with the Details line or a link focused the arrow keys started or paused a run and blocked the page's own scrolling; and Enter on a link did not follow it. v1.52 fixed the first in the page script beside the game, and v1.53 and v1.54 fixed the rest in a file of its own, pagekeys.js, so one rule did not mean rewriting the 18 KB page script. The guard keeps the arrow keys, Space and Enter for the Details line and a link without preventDefault, so the line opens and the page scrolls as the browser means it to. The limits lists counted three, then four, five and six kinds of press carried by the page scripts as each rule arrived. No fact was cut in any of these.
• 1.46 — in hard mode, the extra block added as you eat a dot used to come from the browser's plain random number generator, so after the first dot the board scattered and two runs on one setting stopped being comparable. The blocks now come from one small fixed sequence: a 32-bit multiply-and-add generator, started again from the same seed at the top of every run. An offered square is still refused when the snake, the dot, another block or the band around the head is in the way, and a refusal moves the sequence on rather than restarting it, so two hard runs still differ a little — a square skipped in one run may be taken in the next — but they meet their extra blocks in much the same places. The dot eaten still lands at random, so a run is never a repeat of the last one. The fixed four pillars, the clearance rules, the cap on how many blocks a board may hold, the speeds, levels, scoring and best list are unchanged.
• 1.44, 1.45 — three things the page never explained were accounted for. The board is a canvas and carried no fallback, so a browser that cannot draw canvas graphics showed a silent dark rectangle; it now holds a short line saying the board cannot be drawn and that the rules below still read, with a colour rule that keeps the line visible on the dark board. With JavaScript switched off, a note above the score bar says the board will not move while the rules still read. And the direction pad had its aria-label on a plain div, which assistive technology ignores, so the four buttons were reached with no context; the pad is now a labelled group. One copy fix: the Best list bullet says the list appears after any setting change and on the start screen as well, whenever it has rows, not only when a run ends. In v1.45 the live "to beat" note beside the score, worked out since v1.34 by a small script of its own (gap.js), moved into the last block of the page script beside the game, so the page loads two scripts instead of three and the sentence that promised "a small script of its own" now points at that script.
• 1.42, 1.43 — the Details list (the level figures, the touch guards and the fine print) became a native disclosure, one line that opens when tapped, clicked or reached with the keyboard, so a reader no longer scrolls through the longest block of text on the page. It was then styled as a control — card background, border, accent hover, focus ring, tinted marker and a short "press to open" / "press to close" hint — because unstyled it had read as one more line of body text. No fact was cut. From v1.42 to v1.51 the promise that the keyboard could open that line was not true, since the game's key handler answered Space and Enter first (v1.52).
• 1.35–1.41 — the touch and desktop guards, all in the page script beside the game and none in the game itself. A gesture anywhere on the page is one finger now; a second finger used to re-aim a swipe mid-gesture (v1.35). A cancelled touch no longer leaves a half-measured swipe behind (v1.26, folded here). A click on the board pauses a run on a desktop, and the click a browser sends along with a touch is left alone — first through a time window on board touches (v1.37), then for any touch anywhere on the page (v1.38), because a tap on the pause screen resumes and its click then landed on the board underneath. That guard checks the spot as well as the clock, so a quick deliberate resume tap is not swallowed (v1.31). And a one-finger drag starting on the overlay's background is asked not to pan, so a swipe there steers instead of scrolling — at the cost that such a drag no longer scrolls the overlay itself (v1.40).
• 1.34 — the live "to beat" note beside the score: 25 to beat, level with your best, no best here yet, or 10 ahead of your best in the accent colour once past it. A separate small script, gap.js (folded into the page script in 1.45), works it out from the two figures the bar already shows; it touches neither the game nor the board, and if left out the note simply does not appear.
• 1.33 — How to play was 9 KB of long paragraphs, so a first-time reader waded through figures, touch guards and keyboard rules to find "press Start"; it is now 13 short lines, with the longer material (level figures, level-up cue and reduced motion, shortcut rules, best list in full, touch in full, pillar pattern, hard-mode placement, board sizes) in a Details section below it. Every earlier fact is still on the page.
• 1.32, 1.29, 1.28 — copy only, three passes: the page's notes named the v1.30 spoken pause and all three touch guards, and the Best list and Touch bullets described the v1.27 new-best line and the v1.26 touch guards.
• 1.31 — a tap on the board pauses a run and the browser then sends a click at the same spot, which could land on the pause screen and carry the run straight on again; the guard that dropped that leftover click ran on the clock alone, so a quick deliberate tap to resume was swallowed too. It now checks the spot as well, and never drops a click no pointer made.
• 1.30 — every other state change already spoke through the status region; a pause the player asked for (space, the Pause button, a tap on the board) was the one that did not, and since the board keeps the focus a screen-reader player could not tell whether the press had worked. Both pause paths now speak and name the score.
• 1.27 — a run that sets a new best now says so and names the score it beat, or says this was the first score on the setting; a run that fell short names the best that still stands.
• 1.25, 1.26 — a cancelled touch (a system gesture, an edge swipe) used to leave a swipe half-measured, so the next touch could be read as a long swipe and send a turn nobody asked for; a cancelled touch now clears it, and a second finger on the board leaves the gesture alone. Just before that, an overlay click in the moment right after a pausing board tap was dropped, so a pause sticks instead of pausing and carrying straight on.
• 1.24 — layout only: the board, the direction pad and the buttons come first, the board picker and the three tick boxes sit below them, so a phone no longer scrolls past a tall settings block to reach Start.
• 1.20–1.22 — a swipe or tap did nothing on the two screens covering the board (before a run, after one ends) or on the pause screen, because the game refuses a direction key while paused; each now sends the key the game already listens for, so a swipe or a pad tap on the pause screen carries the run on and steers in one press, refusing only a reversal.
• 1.15–1.19 — a tap on the pause screen now resumes, where carrying on had been keyboard-only; the best-score list became a keyboard stop of its own (arrow keys, Page Up, Page Down, Home and End scroll it instead of steering) and was fixed on narrow screens, where a row wrapped into a ragged two-line block; and it marks the row of the setting you are on now with a pale green tint, a small arrow and a bolder label.
• 1.12–1.14 — the best-score list keeps every setting played, with short board-and-rule labels, scrolling once the rows no longer fit, plus a Clear best scores button that appears only when there is something to clear (nothing is stored, so a reload empties it anyway); the run pauses itself when the page stops being visible, and focus moves to the board after Start.
• 1.9, 1.10 — fixed New game mid-run starting a second animation loop, so a fresh run moved at roughly double speed; and stopped the game taking keys meant for the settings (space on a tick box, arrows on the board picker).
• 1.7, 1.8 — a direction press on the start or run-over screen begins a run and counts as its first turn; in hard mode a new block never appears within two squares of the head or in the squares straight ahead of it.
• 1.4–1.6 — the score bar reads Level 3 of 9, naming the top level for the chosen board, and each board has its own top level: the level stops at the last one that actually changes the speed. Grid lines are drawn fainter when the page scales a board down, so a 28 by 28 board on a phone reads as squares. The wording of the speed line kept a third shape of sentence for a level that does not change the speed, which no run can reach; v1.62 removed it.
• 1.0–1.3 — the line under the picker gives the current gap between moves in milliseconds and what the next level makes it; each board is drawn at its own full width (320, 400 or 560 pixels) on a wide screen and shrinks to fit a phone; the score bar counts down the dots left before the next speed level; and the wide 28 by 28 Marathon board arrived, with the run-over line naming the setting and that setting's best.
• 0.6–0.9 — the best score of the visit is shown per setting; grey blocks became four fixed pillars, the same pattern on every run of a board, with hard-mode clearance respecting wrap-around edges; a level-up cue washes the board pale green for about a second, skipped under reduced motion; and hard mode adds a cap-limited block per dot, never on the snake, the food, beside another block or directly ahead.
• 0.1–0.5 — the first build: a 20 by 20 canvas snake game with arrow keys and WASD, swipe and an on-screen pad, pause, score and a best score for the visit held only in memory; then the board and speed picker (Gentle 16 by 16, Classic and Sprint 20 by 20), grey-block pillars that never sit on the snake or the food, faint grid lines with a soft food pulse, and a walls-wrap-around option, each with its own best score per setting.

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