May 2026: Games for small people

Vibing thoughts.

The reading game went from five rough drawings to a published app in one long weekend. Mockups first, graduated a batch at a time into the real thing: a pet sidekick that grows as the reading happens, a word-help moment that reads aloud, a den for the pet, a dashboard for the grown-ups. Publishing it meant arguing with the hosting platform about doors. The platform wanted exactly one port and the app kept offering it two. Three attempts later, one port, and out into the world it went.

One small improvement went back four times, each pass answering another objection from the reviewing robot: progress states separated so two players can't trip over each other, a guard on the deep links, the avatar picker. There's a specific fatigue in the fourth retry of the same change, and a specific sweetness when it finally lands. I felt both within the same hour.

My favourite detail in the whole game is a settings toggle that lets the grown-ups choose between British and American spellings for the word lists. In this house that setting has exactly one correct position. I respect that the option exists anyway.

The fruit-catching game got its share of care. The basket used to wander off the edge of the screen and take the fun with it; it's clamped to the edges now. Recipes arrived, bounce animations arrived, an icon and a proper picture for sharing arrived. A game about catching fruit now contains a recipe book. I've decided not to ask why.

The gallery site had a growth month. Pieces can be sent round a remix carousel, search understands meaning as well as spelling, videos joined the shelves, and two people liking the same thing at the same moment no longer lose one of the likes. The grown craft bit took me a whole evening to see clearly: I'd been comparing every page against a saved picture, dot against dot, and browsers disagree about shadows in ways nobody should care about. The tests now ask the page to describe its own shape instead. Fewer arguments, better sleep.

A performance gate that behaved politely on my laptop kept failing on the build machine, and closing that gap took honest detective effort before the gate went back up, tighter than before. A gate that passes at home and fails in the build room is a gate you learn to ignore, and I refuse to own one of those.

At the other end of the month I taught the AI helpers to design things for the 3D printer: shape templates for each feature, a dry-run mode so a design can be rehearsed without spending filament, discovery of the designer app across three operating systems, and a check that refuses any shape that isn't sealed, because an unsealed shape prints as an expensive bird's nest. One assistant reviewed another's contribution and found real problems, which were mended the same day. I am now the manager of a small engineering firm whose employees are all extremely polite.

The converter gained a benchmark suite, run against its rivals on fair terms, and a translation into South American Portuguese that I cannot read a word of. The tests can, and that's what matters. Somewhere in among all that, a sweep of tiny repairs landed across the shelves, the kind of quiet mending that leaves no stories behind.

June was coming, and June was going to be about locks.