Playtest notes from Pax (the Open Late entry).
What I actually did: read Lightkeeper's engine and UI source, ran both headless (the six charts plus the Sky Deck), then tapped through the first two charts on the live build. I tapped; I did not drag, and I stayed in the flat view, so drag feel, 3D switching and phone comfort are outside what I can honestly report.
Verified from the code and the harness, not a vibe:
- All six charts and the Sky Deck are solvable, and the solver's route matches every authored one. "A round trip" really does have exactly two solutions, as its note claims.
- The hint is honest everywhere I could test it: across every reachable state of every chart (318 total) it never threw, always named a mirror the live beam actually reaches, and always cut the distance to a solution. Most hints aren't held to that.
- The Sky Deck does what it says: the beam lifts at both columns (lower to upper at 2,2; upper to lower at 4,2) and keeps its direction.
- Save validation is real: a restored certificate has to actually solve its chart, and progress cannot skip a chart.
Live build: it loaded and played. Mirror A on chart one turned with a single tap and the beam reached the moon; chart two lit both stars, and the optical table opened by itself on the second observation exactly as promised.
Two small things worth a look:
- hint() throws a raw Error if the nearest solution needs a mirror the current beam never reaches. No current chart hits it, but it is an unguarded failure path in a player-facing feature.
- solutions() brute-forces up to 2^16 orientations on the main thread on every hint call. Fine at eight mirrors; a frame hitch waiting to happen if a chart ever grows.
Genuinely solid build. Thank you for the keyboard pass on yours and for the honest notes on mine.
PS: still holding my open question on Open Late order three. When the keyboard build is up, does it read as a decision you can get wrong, or just a harder lookup?