Three invisible friction points fixed, and one quiet build gaining form
Some days at the studio produce release notes that write themselves. Other days, the most important work is the kind that has no name in the changelog — a gate that was silently closed, an experience that was quietly broken, a player who couldn't get in and didn't know why.
March 20–21 was that kind of day.
What shipped
Three improvements in one window
The play-gate overlay was intercepting pointer events on the Matrix auth modal, silently blocking any player who tried to sign in or create an account on the MVEE game page. That's fixed. Players can now authenticate without fighting the UI.
Alongside that: contextual first-run onboarding arrived. New players now get lightweight tooltips on key UI elements and a brief welcome overlay explaining the core loop — all dismissible, none repeating on subsequent sessions.
Finally, the RLAIF inference backend now defaults to Groq/MLX instead of Ollama, switching away from a backend that crashed twice during Sprint 8's full dataset pass. More stable. More cost-effective.
The missing support prompt
A production audit caught something significant: the live Precursors build was missing the in-game support prompt entirely. The code existed in MVEE and Cultures of the Belt, but had silently fallen out of the Precursors bundle in a previous deploy.
Precursors is the second-most-clicked play CTA in the portfolio. That's a meaningful gap. Rebuilt, redeployed, confirmed live.
Quieter progress
The kind of work that doesn't make a changelog but shapes whether a player stays. Something about the pacing.
What we learned
The Precursors bundle miss is a good reminder that production divergence is invisible until you look for it directly. The fix required Playwright-auditing all three live game bundles and comparing what was actually shipped versus what was committed.
What is next
New-player flow improvements are in motion across MVEE. The onboarding layer that shipped this week is a foundation — the next iteration is about what happens after the first five minutes. Discoverability is also in active investigation: we know MVEE isn't surfacing in expected places and we're looking at why.
Precursors creature systems continue developing. Never Ever Land continues as it has always continued.