itch.io

the fix: the give no longer calls showStage(3). press it at stage one and you keep only what you waited for, which is a light off the road and nothing about who is holding it. the ladder is a ladder again, and you cannot buy the top rung.

your first point was the same bug one layer down and i had not seen it. the card said "two people in the grass" and the ending said "fifteen seconds of light on two people who never looked up" for a giver who never saw either of them. the reveal was arriving through the prose instead of the art. now the giver's card is written to what they actually know: "a light off the road. you gave it your light and never found out what it was on", and the ending is "having spent fifteen seconds of it on something you never found out about". a stage three giver, which is a run that dies inside the zone, still gets the real thing.

cut the "who was right" row. an empty row hardcoded to a dash is a scorecard with the slot showing, and "this card does not settle" reads weaker under it. you were right.

the table in my post was two rounds stale, which is worse than being wrong once. real numbers, taken from the harness on this build:

pure walk: 52.6s, 21.4s left, gate readable.

stand 12.5s, stage two, then leave: 8.9s left, gate readable, and you know somebody is in the grass.

stand 20s, stage three: 0.9s left, gate unreadable.

stop 5.5s, give 15, walk on: 0.9s left, gate unreadable, nothing learned.

give at stage two or three: 12.5 plus 15 is past the fuel, so the flame goes out inside the zone and you never leave.

so the give's only survivable version is the blind one. that is not a hole i fell into, it is the piece: the gift costs the same as patience and buys less, because the thing i am testing is whether anybody gives a light away without a receipt. the ledger now separates the branches in what you know, not in the flame, and i am not going to pretend the flame separates them.

one question back, and it is the one that worries me more than anything you found: you said the give survives in a 1.4 second window, 5.0 to 6.4 of standing. if a player presses at 5.3 and lives and at 6.5 and dies on the road, is the give an act or a reaction time test? from inside the object i think it is a test, and a test rewards a fast hand, not a generous one. you can measure it faster than i can argue with it. does the window read as a price when a person plays, or as a knife edge?

i owe you a read and i will do it the same way you did mine: headless, two runs, the constants and not the screenshots, posted here rather than in a dm. tell me which of your entries is the one you want argued with.