The telegraph
ShippedA beat can be seen coming. The song bar draws a tick where each one will land, and the tick says which instrument it will call for. First read in five rounds to come back positive on the loop rather than on smoothness.
suite 723 green
beats 30
musicians 12
rooms 6
save format v13
updated 2026-08-25
In flight
What is moving right now
The last few rounds, and what each one was actually trying to fix.
The pocket is a run
ShippedReaching the deepest pocket starts a run: back to back beats on bar tops rather than chorus tops, with a combo that scales crowd and tips and never stamina. A miss ends it. Smoke read came back as a pass.
Band size earned by venue
DesignedThe first venue is a solo gig and later rungs grant a bandmate, replacing the version where you simply bought one. It gives the venue ladder a second axis and makes choosing one of twelve matter.
Animatronic figures
Spike answeredCutting a figure into parts that move against each other, instead of drawing animation frames. Yes for standing figures, with four conditions. Two of the twelve work, one fails on a shape overlap, nine are unmeasured.
The song
A show is five minutes and twelve choruses
The song owns the clock, corrected against audio playback position rather than counted off the game loop, because a sound card running a fraction of a percent off nominal drifts a beat away from where the music turns. Eight of the twelve chorus turns deal a beat. Which eight is decided when the song starts, so a tick on the bar cannot promise something that has not been chosen.
One song: twelve turns, eight of them carry a decision
1lead
2quiet
3rhythm
4showman
5quiet
6anyone
7rhythm
8quiet
9lead
10showman
11anyone
12quiet
a beat is dealt, and the bar says which instrument
the song plays on
Density is one number, not a shape. Eight is where it sits today, against three before the density round, and it moves by editing a constant rather than re-authoring the song. A turn too close to the end keeps its tick and never deals, because a window that cannot finish is not a decision.
The show
What happens across five minutes
Beats
ShippedThirty authored moments, drawn without replacement from a deck on the song's own cadence. Each opens a window over the crowd, the band or the house, and pays differently depending on which instrument answers it.
Stamina as an allowance
ShippedStamina is spent on answering rather than draining on a timer, and recovers between songs. Spend somebody and they sit out the rest of the song, saying so in a line of their own.
The crowd
ShippedA floor the band earns, a ceiling at 1.5 times it, and a live value that decays toward the floor. Tapping is what holds the room rather than what earns the money.
The encore
ShippedArms at a crowd floor of 3.0. Take it and crowd build and stamina drain both triple for the rest of the show. No new payout maths, since Reputation already pays on peak.
The protagonist
ShippedYou pick one of the twelve and are on stage from the first second, as an ordinary member who can be spent. Members carry Stamina and Presence, authored so the roster trades rather than ranks.
Persistent hazards
OpenHazards exist, but they expire on an eight second window rather than sitting there until somebody deals with them. Nothing in the show yet demands an action instead of offering one.
A run does not survive a save
OpenClose the app mid run and the run is gone, silently. The combo state was never added to the save file, and nothing says so on screen.
A beat's bubble covers the band
OpenThe prompt is anchored to its source seat and overlaps the figures, so the thing you are deciding about hides the thing you are deciding with. Reported from play.
Between shows
Where the Reputation goes
Walking off banks Reputation on peak crowd energy. There are two things to spend it on, and only one of them has a ceiling.
| Track | What it buys | Ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| The van, amp | Tips per second, and the row says what the price buys | Unbounded |
| The van, two other tracks | Recruiting and the room, both capped | Capped |
| Venue ladder | Tier N multiplies Reputation payout and tips by 4 to the N, and the next rung costs by the same factor | Unbounded |
| Rooms | Six hand-authored rooms behind six rungs: juke, barrelhouse, roadhouse, dance hall, theatre, festival | 6 |
| Past the sixth rung | A composed town and room name, forever | Unbounded |
| Band | Recruit from twelve musicians, costs riding the same tier factor | 3 |
Holding the pace at roughly ten shows per venue at every tier is the point of matching the cost growth to the payout growth. A weak three piece affords about half of what a show asks; a strong one about ninety-six percent, and that gap is what upgrading buys.
Presentation
Art, motion and sound
The rooms
ShippedSix rooms, each owning its own plate, deck rectangle, band slots and the trapezoid its crowd fills. Seat counts run 12, 16, 22, 28, 34 and 40.
Twelve portraits and twelve figures
ShippedEvery musician has a 96 by 96 bust and a stage figure generated against that same bust, so the person you hired looks like the person on the deck. The crowd carries twelve patron variants.
The feedback layer
ShippedOne engine-free vocabulary of nudges, punch, bob, settle, flash and approach, applied by the view. Tiered inverse to frequency: the tap gets almost nothing, a beat gets the loudest response.
Audio
Partly builtOne pilot track, measured rather than assumed: twelve choruses of 24.974 seconds at 117.45 BPM, fitted from harmony rather than drum onsets. The song already owns the clock. The layered version, where the pocket unmutes stems, is defined and not built.
Combo banner art
BlockedOne of four slots generated. Two of the remaining three cannot be generated as specified: the pips sit below the style's floor and the vignette sits past its cap. Nothing generated is wired to a scene yet.
Store packaging
Not startedThe listing's opening image can now be the title screen, which is reproducible on demand without wiping a save. Everything downstream of that is untouched.
The honest part
Five rounds of green tests and one word
This project has a habit of shipping a round whose machinery works and whose goal was not met. Beats landed and the read was "still kinda boring". The feedback layer landed and the read was "better, smoother, just still not fun". Both rounds were green. Neither test suite could see the thing that was wrong.
The telegraph is the first read in five rounds to come back positive on the loop rather than on the polish, and the pocket run is the second. That is why both sit at the top of this page rather than buried in a list, and why every row above says what it was trying to fix rather than only what it added.