Short, dated notes about what actually got built. Entries describe
work that is done and verified at the time of writing — this is a log, not a roadmap.
Games now come with their pieces, and the paperwork got real
Until now a game's rules and its actual contents — how many pieces, which spaces
are on the board, how much of each resource — lived apart, which was a real gap.
Games can now declare their real "box contents" as part of the game definition itself,
editable right in the studio. That one change let our large economic test game run a
genuine self-play test end to end for the first time, real pieces and board data
included — which matters because the automated checks that keep the engine honest now run against
something much closer to a real game instead of a bare rules skeleton.
The AI co-editor from the day before also got a real quality check against that same
full game: five separate real edit requests, and every single one came back valid,
actually playable, and faithful to what was asked. Separately, on the boring-but-real
side: Terms & Conditions and a Privacy Policy are now live (ahead of formal legal
review, which both pages say plainly), pricing structure groundwork moved forward, and
the legal/privacy/abuse contact addresses are real, working inboxes now instead of
placeholders.
The builder studio took shape
This week the game-editing side of Ludira went from "hand-edit a data file" to an
actual visual tool. You can now draw a game's rules on a canvas — add and remove
states, connect them into transitions, drop in game pieces — and click rule conditions
together instead of typing them. A separate board editor lets you draw the board itself
as a graph and give each connection between spaces its own cost.
The biggest piece: an AI co-editor you can talk to in plain language — describe the
change you want — and it proposes a real diff for you to review before anything is
applied. Every proposed change is checked and played out by the engine before it's even
shown to you, so a broken change never reaches the review screen. Also new: push a rule
change to a live playtest and every connected player's board updates instantly, a proper
tabbed workspace with pinnable panels, and enough of it works on a phone screen for small
edits on the go.
What's not done: the studio itself isn't public yet — it's an internal tool for now,
not something a visiting creator can sign into and use.
The flagship game got played for real — and won
The economic strategy game from the acid test (auctions, a resource market, a
five-phase round structure) had already passed automated self-play, but nobody had sat
down and actually played it by hand yet. That happened this week: a full game, start to
finish, ending on a real winner's screen. Playing it surfaced three real bugs along the
way — a spending check that didn't account for the true cost of a purchase, a bot that
could freeze mid-turn without recovering, and a finished game whose screen kept saying
"waiting…" after the game had already ended. All three were found by playing, fixed, and
reverified.
What's not done: this win was solo against bots, not yet a full table of real people
at once — see the room feature below for that.
A zero-signup demo, now with rooms for two
The demo from last time now has a real public address: five public-domain classics,
playable against a bot in the browser, no account, no email field anywhere in the flow.
New this week: rooms. Start a game, copy a share link, send it to a friend — they
join and you play live, the board updating for both of you over a real-time connection,
every move still validated server-side by the same rules engine as everything else. If
nobody joins in time, a bot fills the seat so the game still runs.
What's not done: the room flow is new and has only been played by a couple of people
so far, not yet stress-tested with a crowd.
A zero-signup demo exists
Five public-domain classics — tic-tac-toe, connect four (on a compact 5×4 grid),
chomp, nim, and three men's morris — are now playable in the browser against a bot,
with every move validated server-side by the same rules engine that runs everything
else. No account, no email field anywhere in the flow, no third-party analytics; the
only telemetry is a short fixed list of named counters stored on our own server.
What's not done: the demo's public web address isn't live yet, so the "Play the
demo" button on the front page stays disabled until it is.
The engine passed its acid test
The whole premise of Ludira is that game rules are data, not code. The acid test:
define a full economic strategy game — auctions with bidding and passing, a resource
market, score-based turn order, a five-phase round structure — purely as declarative
rules, with zero custom program code, and have the stock engine run it to a real
winner. It does, now, verified by self-play across a dozen random seeds with the
final scoring cross-checked by an independent recomputation from the raw move log.
Getting there wasn't clean on the first pass: adversarial review caught the fuel
economy being quietly decoupled from scoring, and a tie-breaking inequivalence. Both
fixed and re-verified. One disclosed simplification remains (a uniform fuel cost per
city) and is queued as future work, not glossed over.
Ludira has a name and a face
The project (long known by its working repo name) is now Ludira. The name was
confirmed after checking domains and trademark risk, not just picked for sound. The
mark is a "live rule loop": a game-round circle with a teal live segment, a coral
patch segment, and an amber bolt for the moment a rule changes mid-game — which is
the one thing this tool is really about. Display type is Fraunces; the amber cue is
reused across the product as the "a rule just changed, live" signal.
