Devlog #2: your thumb was covering the game

Noctivore is a text RPG for your phone. You hunt by night, take gear off what you kill, level up, and take on rival hunters in an async arena. When your energy runs out, there's a shelf of ten small arcade games to pass the time. It runs in the browser at noctivore.app.

What happened

Since the last devlog, four bug reports came in. None of them was about the rules. Every one was about the phone in the player's hand.

Your thumb was in the way

In six of the arcade games, only the playing field took a tap. On a typical phone the field ends a little past halfway down the screen, so your thumb sat on top of the thing you were trying to jump over.

In Dawn Flight, Coffin Stack, Midnight Run, Thrall Procession, Catacomb Chase and Blood Drop Catcher, taps, holds and swipes now count anywhere below the field, down to the bottom edge. In Blood Drop Catcher the lower screen works like a touchpad. The field itself looks exactly as before.
The other four games are unchanged, because there the thing you tap is the move.
The game-over card stays outside that area, so tapping Again can't also count as a jump.

iOS 27 blurred your name

On iOS 27, a game added to the home screen gets a soft blur under the status bar. It reaches about 30 points below the space iOS says it reserves, and your hunter's name sat right in it. I hadn't updated to iOS 27 yet, so I didn't see it at first.

Every screen now starts a little lower in the installed app. In a browser tab nothing moves, and the main screen still fits without scrolling, down to an iPhone SE.

The flask that jumped

The Descent is the deep dungeon: one fight per floor, as deep as you dare. After a fight, your flasks sit right above Continue. Between floors they sat in the middle of the page instead, about 270 pixels higher. A run switches between those two screens on every floor, so the flask moved every time you reached for it. Now it sits right above Descend, in the same spot as after a fight.

Leaving a game kept nothing

If you left an arcade game halfway through, your score was thrown away. Only a finished run counted. Now leaving keeps the score you reached, if it beats your best. That's safe because a score only goes up during a run, so quitting early can never earn more than playing on would have. Closing the app mid-run still loses the run.

A new face

The game also has a new logo: a thorned silver N across a blood moon. It's on the browser tab, the home-screen icon, notifications and the link preview.

What I learned

The game has over a thousand automated tests, and none of them has a thumb. They check the rules: damage, prices, scores. They can't tell that a thumb covers the field, that one iPhone blurs the top of the screen, or that a button moves between two screens. Players can, and they told me.

Your turn

Which phone do you play on? If anything on screen hides under a notch, a blur or your thumb, tell me in the comments.

— D4rkF1r3fly