Cloverfold — Glødkeeper

Devlog

Build notes

What we're making and how it's actually going. Filter by whether you care about the game or the machinery behind it.

Platform

Registration is open for the closed alpha

Glødkeeper's closed alpha is taking registrations. What an alpha means here, how places are given out, why accounts will be reset, and what we'd love you to tell us.
Game

Your collection, from day one

A new player now starts with a squad that is already built, trinkets have one clear rarity ladder and an album to fill, and new generations of cards are on the way.
Game

Playing people who aren't there (yet)

Most of your opponents today are ghosts, so why does the game need a connection at all? A fair question with three answers, an honest admission, and live play on the way.
Platform

Built for a phone on a train

Tapping a button on a bad signal and nothing happening, so you tap it six more times. What we did about that, and about batteries, small speakers and closing the app mid-game.
Game

Stories you play where they happen

Illustrated stories in chapters, with games along the way that you play at the place the story is set. How a story gets made, and what changed this autumn.
Game

A box of mini-games

Thirteen games now share one collection, from a card battler to a football manager. What each one is, why they are small on purpose, and the two newest.
Platform

Glowlings is now Glødkeeper

Two renames in a month, one strange letter, and a logo that had to be typeset because image tools can't draw it. Why the game and its creatures changed their names.
Platform

Thirty of thirty

Every action from the August review is closed - deployed, verified against live traffic, and logged in public. What we changed about HOW we build mattered more than any single fix.
Game

Cards that provably do what they say

Glødstone abilities used to run by pattern-matching their printed rules text - reword a card and it silently did nothing. Now every card compiles to a tested manifest.
Platform

Seventeen thousand lines lighter

Dead pages, orphaned endpoints, a whole subsystem nothing called - found by evidence, verified twice, then deleted. Less surface, fewer places for bugs to hide.
Platform

Day one of having tests

Four years, zero automated tests. Now every economy guard is pinned by a suite that runs on every edit - and every test had to prove it could FAIL before we trusted it.
Platform

The database went on a diet

1.5 GB became 430 MB. Finished matches were carrying a frozen copy of both full teams forever; now match history keeps what matters and lets the rest go.
Platform

We commissioned a review of ourselves

A full, independent, area-by-area technical review of the entire codebase - architecture to compliance - with every finding tracked publicly on this site until it was fixed.
Game

Ratings that add up to zero

Seasonal ratings were quietly leaking points. Now every match transfers rating between the two players - nothing minted, nothing burned - and history got re-anchored.
Game

Hello from Cloverfold

A studio name, a website, and a plan to build the rest of this in public.
Game

The week we attacked our own game

Five parallel audits of our own economy - every way to mint gold, duplicate spends or complete a match twice, found and closed before players could.
Platform

Every reward goes through one door

Why we routed every reward in the game through a single gateway, and what it saved us when we audited for exploits.