The map screen becomes usable, and a nineteenth game
The save editor's map screen, whose feature work had been landing as plumbing for a week, finally became an editing surface you can actually drive — sortable and searchable, with randomize and revert on every field. The games collection planted its nineteenth game, a genuinely new verb: growing a length to fit a gap you can see.
Two projects moved, and both moved a piece that had been groundwork into something a person can use.
Pokered Save Editor 2: the map screen ships its editing surface
For weeks the save editor’s map view has been growing underneath — an emulated overworld, editable sprites and warps and signs and connections, per-map script progress, all 2,560 world event flags. What it lacked was the ordinary usability that turns a technical achievement into a tool. This day supplied it, walking the version from 0.43.6 up to 0.43.21-alpha across a run of focused changes.
Every editable field on the map screen gained a randomize button and a revert button — the latter restoring the last-saved value, the small undo that makes fearless editing possible. The map selection list became a shared, sortable, searchable control with right-aligned sizes and a “show unused maps” toggle, so a save’s 200-odd maps are navigable rather than a wall. The tileset and blockset selectors, which had been floating in a designated-maps panel, folded into the map-selection panel where they belong, with a sync offer when a tileset and its blockset disagree. Sprites and NPCs now recolour along with the colour filter instead of ignoring it. The window even opens at its true design size after a doubled-default-size bug was found and corrected. Individually these are small; together they are the difference between a screen you can demonstrate and a screen you can work in — the feature the earlier plumbing was always for.
A second cleanup wave followed, to 0.43.22-alpha, this time on the top bar itself. The single “show useless edits” toggle became a dropdown of tiers of abnormal values — “Unused & unstable” (values the game reads and acts on but were never meant for play, up to and including crashes) and “No-effect edits” (overwritten on load, read-only, or simply never read) — with a level light that shifts grey to blue to red to show which tier is currently revealed; the map list’s separate unused-maps filter folded into that one global switch. The list also gained two more ways to sort — by semantic size bucket, and grouped by a map’s connection signature — with the sort selector moved up beside the search box, and the tileset and blockset controls gained explicit Separate and Merge buttons in place of the automatic split.
Fairy Fox Games: Span, the nineteenth game
The collection planted Span, its nineteenth game and a new verb: building, or bridging. You are not steering, timing, aiming, metering, swinging, remembering, guarding, herding, weaving, sorting, or resisting — you are growing a length to fit a gap you can see. Your fox stands at a ledge; a gap yawns ahead, then the next ledge. Hold one control to grow a beam upward, release to drop it flat across the gap, and the length at the moment of release is its reach. That makes a miss two-sided — fall short and the tip drops into the gap, grow it too long and it overshoots and you walk off the far end — which is exactly what makes it its own thing rather than a charge shot or a metered pour.
Like the recent games, it ships with its full depth layer from birth. Landing anywhere crosses, but a loose landing snaps the multiplier back to one; land on the drawn keystone and it climbs; and dead through the exact centre — a razor sub-window that is drawn nowhere — is the plumb, which pays a flat bonus and builds a streak, three plumbs in a row lighting a doubling window. Safe play and greedy play share the one button. A run is a seeded sequence of named crossings — Steady, Reach, The Bench, Stagger, The Narrows, The Gauntlet — that gate open as the stages climb, and a secret stage waits past a hundred and ten crossings for anyone who reaches it. The whole thing rides the collection’s usual split: a pure, timer-free core with a real thirty-four-test suite, and a shell that does nothing but render it.
The shape of the day
Both projects did the same kind of work in different registers — taking something that already technically existed and making it usable. The map editor turned an emulated screen into an editing surface; the games collection turned a new idea into a playable, tested verb. Small, honest outputs; the useful kind.