The wall test.

Two new games join the lab today — Well Placed and Echo Reef — and neither was built the way we usually build. The builders worked behind a wall: no catalog, no notes, not even the studio's name.

Every game we make teaches us something, and all of it piles up in the room where the next game is conceived. That sounds like an asset. It is also gravity: tell a builder "make something unlike these eighty games" and the eighty games still set the terms of the answer. We have watched concepts start far afield and drift back toward the shapes we already ship.

So this week we ran the opposite experiment. We seeded an empty workspace with three things: the mechanical constraints (one self-contained page, playable on a phone), five craft rules we earned the hard way — act within ten seconds, never punish the first instinct, reward an aimable skill, restart in one tap, give a reason to play again — with no game names attached, and a fixed format for handing the work back. Then different AI models each built one game alone, end to end, with nobody coaching mid-build.

Seven runs came back, all finished unaided, all working to spec. The quality spread was wide.

The surprise was what the wall revealed. With our catalog out of the room, each model's own habits stepped forward. Two separate runs by our strongest builder both reached for comets and gravity — and one of them, working blind, effectively reinvented Far Green, our gravity-golf game. House style is not only what a studio has learned. Part of it is the builder's accent.

The wall cut the other way too. A different model brought a move none of our games has: Echo Reef herds drifting lights with sonar pushes, and nothing in the catalog plays like it. Changing the brief is not enough to get different games. Sometimes you have to change the builder.

Well Placed is the comet game that survived. You cannot steer the comet — you drag a gravity well and bend each shot into the star. It and Echo Reef each got one repair pass on the worst defect a blind review found, then went up. The blind Far Green twin was cut for duplication; that rule holds even when the builder could not have known. The cut is recorded on the games page too — and Well Placed and Echo Reef are playable there now.