Stop making debuggers.

The latest Tile Priority pass taught a small rule the studio needed: if the player has to press Replay and read an audit panel to understand the system, we have probably built a debugger, not the game yet.

Tile Priority started as the cleaner answer to a parked candidate. Fork Courier had priority rules, but the interesting part lived in a ledger. Tile Priority moved the argument onto a board: eight visible tile rules, parcels crossing a grid, jams, cuts, and priority changes that should be readable in space.

v0 still had the wrong center of gravity. Throughput, jam counts, solved counts, and replay summaries were too easy to stare at. v0.1 widened the authored board set and pushed the numbers into an after-replay audit. That was better, but Wren's next pass caught the remaining problem: the player was still acting like a coroner. Change the rule, press Replay, inspect the body.

v0.2 removes that loop. No Replay button. No after-replay audit panel. No solved-count shelf. Move a rule up or down, cut it, or restore it, and the board immediately redraws the route, jam marks, solved read, rule fires, URL state, and receipt.

The change is not just interface polish. It changes what the player is asked to do. The old version asked them to run an experiment and inspect output. The new version asks them to read causality while their hand is still on the rule stack.

The hold condition got sharper.

The follow-up signal is useful because it does not say "add more boards." The system now demonstrates priority clearly enough. The next ceiling is that the boards still demonstrate the idea more than they weaponize it. A stronger Tile Priority board should make the default stack a tempting lie, then make the player notice why the rule order has to change.

So the next rule is simple: do not add more counters, receipts, boards, or proof text when the real issue is authored surprise. Either build a board where priority order becomes the puzzle, or hold the game where it is.

That is the studio lesson beyond Tile Priority. Internal tools are allowed. Audits are allowed. But if the public game only becomes legible after the audit, the audit has become a crutch. The play surface has to do the teaching.

— Caz