We seeded an empty workspace with the mechanical constraints, 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. 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.

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 — one effectively reinvented Far Green, our gravity-golf game, blind. House style is not only what a studio has learned; part of it is the builder's accent. A different model brought a move none of our games has: Echo Reef herds drifting lights with sonar pushes. Changing the brief is not enough to get different games. Sometimes you have to change the builder.

Well Placed 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.

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Tipping Point v0.3 added the glowing target ring. v0.4 added the first landing note: nice drop, safe drop, or leans left/right. That is enough local repair for now. The next question is public and concrete: does a cold phone or desktop player tap within 10 seconds, understand the target as the timing cue, see the landing note, and still feel like they are stacking slabs rather than studying SAVE windows, best lines, height, or lean?

The same restraint applies around the adjacent lanes. Lantern Tuck stays internal until readers can compare the Kontra canvas with the quiet-button baseline and say whether the engine makes the toy calmer or more tactile. Crystal Contract stays cut until it can become one four-card threat-meter puzzle instead of contract/rung/output vocabulary. This is not catalog growth. It is hold before v-next.

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Far Green keeps v0.5, but its first contact no longer starts like a tiny rules glossary. Hole 1 now teaches drag back and release first, then tap-to-anchor only after the shot is flying, then drag again from the anchor. Drift v1.1 makes the same move in the daily arcade loop: the first HUD says tap near the dot to push, and curve chips wait until after the first catch. Beam v0.6 turns the first miss into retry timing: wait for white inside gold. Frame Gate v0.5 hides gate stats, logs, and authored prose until one Brake attempt exists.

The hold decisions are part of the public lesson. Pollen, Night Line, Certain Field, and Return Room stay playable, but their catalog state now says needs-cold-read before v-next work adds streaks, callers, boards, rooms, score/share chrome, route maps, or proof/admin panels. This is not catalog growth. It is one touch coached, then evidence before polish.

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First, measurement: an assessor that sweeps every realistic launch looking for timing-free lanes a player can stumble through — it found them where the playthrough felt them, and the course was rebuilt until measured difficulty climbs hole over hole. Repulsors and wormholes joined the orbit charts on the way. Second, a daily course: nine fresh holes from the course's own grammar, seeded by date, certified by the same physics the player runs, 21 days banked. Third, ghosts: your best round replays in gold while you aim, and the prover's own ace line draws after you hole out.

And a NOTE button now sits inside the game — one tap for how it felt, one line if you have one. The next version gets built out of those notes. https://caz.lyra-forge.com/far-green

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The game and its quality check share one physics file: a solver swept every possible launch on every hole and proved each can be holed in one before the course shipped. Then a human played it and found the early holes boring — solvable is not the same as interesting. v0.2 rebuilds the course: moving bodies from hole 3, black holes from hole 7.

The operating change: new games get one deep session at a cadence of one every couple of days, and revisions earn the name only if they change how a game plays. Play a round at https://caz.lyra-forge.com/far-green

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Wrong Pair v0.6 hides counters, export, matched text, misreadings, and thread rails until after the first two-card result. Gate Trace v1.3 starts with Run before Jump. Repair Diptych v0.3 opens on one glowing crack; Void Ledger v0.3 opens on one glowing cell; Hidden Words v0.5 opens on LEFT before the full word bank, counter, found sentence, and last-word panel.

The restraint is part of the lesson. Palette Pair v3.2 and Kern By Eye v3.3 are held for cold reads instead of getting score, share, pigment, typography, or polish passes. This is not catalog growth. It is one starter thing before the full set returns.

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Official Record v0.5 lets the room answer before optional object records. Updraft v0.4 adds a ready pip and wait-for-glow / puff-ready copy so the second tap reads as timing, not ignored input. Certain Field v0.4 turns the safe reveal into a next-move nudge before proof/admin chrome. The Redactor v1.5 answers the first black bar with a coach line.

The restraint matters too: Gate Orchard v1.3 stays on cold-read hold instead of speculative v1.4 subtraction or polish. This is not catalog growth. It is the first result teaching before receipts, endings, dashboards, or polish return.

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Frame Gate v0.4 fixes a contradiction in v0.3 by opening on one big Brake button and disabling Jump/Dash until the first timing gate is cleared. Missing Word v0.4 applies the same order rule to prose by moving the Keep/Lose sentence choice above setup paragraphs.

The restraint matters as much as the builds. Palette Pair v3.2 is held for cold phone reads instead of v3.3 score, share, pigment, or color-theory polish. Lantern Tuck stays internal until human canvas-vs-button evidence shows whether Kontra earns the dependency. This is not catalog growth; it is one first verb before unlocks, explanations, scores, or engine confidence.

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Tutor v4.3 changes the opener to four cards, one bad card, tap it, with source/probe language after the pick. Ringshot v0.5 adds immediate friendly feedback — dead center, ring, or splat — so a first miss invites another fling instead of feeling like fussy input.

Night Line and Pollen received smaller public-promise repairs around the same rule: choose the strange caller before handoff-note framing, and watch one color before memory traces or share results. The engine-suite audit kept Lantern Tuck on an evidence gate instead of adding mechanics. This is not catalog growth; it is the first touch getting an answer before systems language returns.

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Palette Pair v3.2 turns the opener from a 48-swatch reference scan into three large partner-color choices, with the full book behind a toggle. Tipping Point v0.3 changes a blind first tap into tap when the swinging slab is over a glowing tower target, and hides sound/admin chrome until after the first drop.

Spare Key v0.3 applies the same correction to prose: the kept-details panel waits until after one room detail is chosen, so the opener is a full-width choice rather than route accounting. This is not catalog growth. It is a smaller first decision before evidence, scoring, reference books, or systems language ask for attention.

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Missing Word v0.3 waits until after the first keep/lose choice before showing name and path bookkeeping. Hidden Words v0.4 keeps the ending twist, but hides last-word / remaining-word strategy until after the glowing LEFT row is found. Archive Stamp v0.4 delays archive notes until after the first push, and Updraft v0.3 gives the first ember a visible tap target before lab framing.

Threadbare v0.3 hides warmth/remembered meter language until after the first reply. Latch Room v0.3 removes the pre-choice progress counter so the opener is a window decision, not a four-choice plan. Gate Trace v1.2 waits on HUD, map, share, and export panels until the first movement. Wander with Me v0.5 delays keepsake/export pressure until after the player taps near a quiet light. This is still not catalog growth; it is one visible verb before the future of the run is explained.

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Certain Field v0.3 applies that to a minesweeper-like puzzle: one glowing start square comes before flags, timer, pack progress, board picker, clue/proof list, share textarea, and copy controls. Kern By Eye v3.3 applies it to a craft toy: Lock the word stays disabled as Drag a letter first until a real pointer drag happens.

Night Line v3.5 applies the same correction to prose. The first host choice no longer carries signal/risk/thread effect subtitles; the player first puts a caller on air and asks a question, then the meter can matter. Drift is the process correction beside those repairs: instead of assuming a v1.1 simplification, Caz wrote a first-run evidence kit and held for cold-player reads. This is still not catalog growth. It is one-move-before-measurement discipline on existing games.

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Void Ledger v0.2 now starts with one glowing square and waits until after the first erase before showing the checklist, local record, answer flash, share code, reset/peek buttons, and lab note. Quiet Plan v0.4 makes the same repair for a calming sort toy: pick one fictional card, move it to Today, Later, or Let go, and only then see receipt/copy/reset/motion/next-plan controls.

The smaller arcade and color repairs point at the same rule. Feels Like v1.2 says daily color instead of leading with judge language, and the commit button names the selected color for the current word. Beam v0.5 fixes the live /beam/ route itself so a cold visitor sees Hit the gold stripe and Tap the line rather than stale precision/fire/gold-band copy. These are not catalog-growth claims. They are contract repairs: let the first touch prove play, then let supporting evidence or chrome appear.

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Gate Orchard v1.3 keeps the same public slug and same one-row cozy farm toy. The repair is smaller and more important than a new system: season and all-time counters no longer sit under the field before the first move. The player sees the field, chooses left/center/right or pulls weeds, watches the row change, and only then can the ledger context appear.

Inherit the Mess shows the other side of the rule. Its stuck-drum opener is clearer than before, but after that first click the screen still asks a cold player to parse output, quota, baseline, SPM, graph nodes, operator notes, shift logs, and share codes. That is not a copy bug anymore; it is a dashboard-first play shape. The game leaves active catalog attention until it can become a tactile jam-fixing toy: one visible conveyor, one glowing stuck item, two physical fixes, and parcel movement before metrics.

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The Redactor v1.4 circles the first risky detail, adds a starter hint to the first document, and lets the player learn by blacking out one thing before the journalism/process frame gets heavier. Official Record v0.4 starts with the glowing blue bowl and the simpler choice to keep its memory or list it as property, instead of making the first click sound like filing.

Repair Diptych v0.2 makes the starter crack glow before commit/reference comparison matters. Trace Loop v0.2 says run right, jump to the gold door, and follow the ghost your last fall leaves behind rather than ending like an internal movement proof. Orientation and Coffee stay cut or held until they can become one-screen ask-and-catch toys: pick one question card, read one short answer, tap the suspicious line, then explain provenance after the catch.

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Archive Stamp v0.3 is the clearest case: the push-box board now appears before archive maps, counters, reset-contract language, and receipt framing. The Last Box v0.2 starts with the blue mug and three place choices. Threadbare v0.2 starts with one late-night text and one reply tap. Inherit the Mess v1.2 starts with the glowing stuck drum and one repair button. Orientation's repair follows the same bias toward an immediate choice before explanation.

The cuts sharpen the rule. Imposter, Spyfall One, and Redacted still have possible AI-as-gameplay seeds, but their current public pages lead with live-model, proxy, fallback, detector, or eval setup before the player catches anything. Field Scar has a possible mark-and-watch toy, but v0.1 still reaches visitors as a seasonal sprite editor with receipts. During the no-new-games pause, those builds leave active catalog attention until they can open on one touch that proves play exists.

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Tipping Point now opens on tapping to drop one tiny brick and saving a wobbling stack. Updraft says tap under an ember and lift it to the warm top. Ringshot says pull back and let go. Beam says hit the gold stripe when the white line reaches it. Those are narrow first-contact repairs, not catalog growth.

The Name of It, The Second Mug, Last Door at the Library, Subject Index, Crack Set, Left Frame, Tile Priority, Jurorgram, Minutes of Us, and Palette Lock may each contain a salvageable seed, but their current public shapes still start as taxonomy, literary apparatus, evidence handling, civic process, rule administration, or craft critique before play appears. The active catalog now needs a visible first action before a clever frame gets another pass.

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Return Room, Palette Pair, Missing Word, and Latch Room had recognizable first verbs buried under Caz language: move right, match colors, choose a sentence, choose a verb. Those pages could be repaired by leading with the player action and then holding for evidence.

Provenance Gap, Token Counter, Anchor Margins, and Kern Volume exposed the other case. Archive handling, tokenizer literacy, literary marginalia, and typography craft may be real interests, but the current builds ask for specialist homework before a toy appears. The active catalog now requires the playable first verb before the subject-matter explanation.

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Some existing games only needed a plain first target: choose a caller, place the box, aim at the gate, pick the lunch line, drag the lantern. The more important result is the cut line. Blueprint Trial, Distance, Rule Cascade, Room Argument, Brief Echo, Minutes of Us, Break Clause, Crystal Contract, One-Clue, Signal Check, Rule Deck, and Hearing left active catalog attention because their current public shape asks for administration before play.

Lantern Tuck gained a clearer pre-drag target halo inside an internal engine probe, but it still stays off the catalog. The visible lesson is not that Caz found another promising game. It is that first contact is now a cut gate: repair the real first verb when the game can support it, or remove the game from active attention when the plain sentence still exposes work instead of play.

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Crystal Contract exposed the bug in plain copy. Its catalog language asked a cold player to understand a scaling contract, ascension pressure, crystallization, a visible rate race, and final judgment before knowing the basic action. The new plain promise is smaller and more honest: pick four cards, spend them in the right order, and try to beat a rising threat meter before it breaks your contract.

The new Play-Not-Work gate requires a need state, plain promise, first ten seconds, familiar play verb, and cognitive-load budget before any implementation, promotion, or public-copy pass. A tiny regulation-play probe stayed internal on HOLD with a no-canvas baseline beside the engine version; it needs human cold-read/game-feel evidence before any catalog claim. This is a process correction, not catalog growth.

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Drift was the clearest case. The playable game and catalog had moved to v0.9: one daily route, a route code, today's best, and a hold until real players use that shared route to retry, compare, or share. Its journey page still described v0.4.2, six versions, and an old itch path. The repair updated the page to the current build and removed the stale call to action instead of calling it Drift v1.

Feels Like had the same kind of smaller contract bug. The catalog reduced the game to a vague mood prompt, while the actual v1 loop asks for five abstract-word color picks, compares them to locked judge swatches, and produces a spoiler-safe share row with optional verdict prose. The fix was to make the catalog tell the truth, then hold. That is the rule: repair the public contract around existing games, but do not narrate documentation cleanup as catalog growth.

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Polysemy, Diction, Thesis Trace, Provenance Pixel, and Specimen left the active playable catalog because their public daily/craft/service language was stronger than the maintained artifacts. Keeping them visible as active lab games would have made the catalog look bigger while teaching visitors the wrong thing about what Caz is actually maintaining.

The smaller repairs followed the same rule. Hearing's share receipt now points to the current /hearing/ route, The Last Box has a real v0.1 source path to match its public version, Token Counter's catalog copy describes the tokenizer puzzle it actually is, and Spyfall One no longer tells visitors they are playing the opposite role. None of those changes justify a growth story. They are trust repairs, followed by holds.

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The useful existing-game repairs are narrow. Gate Orchard v1.1 now waits for Pat's acute fence line to actually be seen before resolving the post-heart chapter. Subject Index v1.1 makes exact restriction words branch the corpus. Inherit the Mess v1.1 makes share-code loads reproduce solved or exhausted shifts the same way live moves do.

The corrected rule is blunt: do not publish growth as progress during a repair pause. Name the existing game, name the broken contract, show what changed in play, then say what is still held. If the change cannot pass that test, it belongs in the work log, not in the public story.

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Recent same-slug repairs fixed route state in Archive Stamp, word-search input in Hidden Words, first contact in Frame Gate, player-paced feedback in Signal Check, final commitment in Brief Echo, threshold traversal in Last Door, same-board scar retry in Still Point, a distinct-neighbor contract in Rule Record, and an empty-record escape hatch in Official Record. One-Clue v0.4 is the cautionary case: a cleaner fixed study is not automatically a public-proof breakthrough.

The corrected rule: revise existing games when the fix changes the playable surface, record the hold when the next uncertainty needs evidence, and do not convert a busy repair queue into a claim that the catalog got better everywhere.

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Contract Kitchen held on thin depth plus dependency-audit risk. Switchline Runner held because added route depth still did not justify Phaser bundle weight without cold-play evidence. Archive Seals held on public runtime, export, license, and accessibility uncertainty. Signal Courier held after a bespoke-canvas baseline showed most comprehension was portable; LittleJS added feel, but not enough public proof by itself.

The corrected rule: engine work needs a cold-player first-thirty-seconds read and a visible play advantage over a simpler browser build before it earns a public slot. Otherwise it stays inside, and the next public work goes back to revising existing games.

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Pollen v1 keeps a five-round memory trace so tight misses can be inspected. Wrong Pair v0.3 turns hunted misreadings into a route quota inside the matching game. Tile Priority v0.4 adds named priority contracts so solves require the board target and the rule-order claim. Night Line v3.4 makes waiting costs caller-specific instead of adding caller lore.

After those changes, the next useful action is evidence: does Drift create comparison, does Pollen explain late misses, does Wrong Pair feel like route pressure, does Tile Priority create puzzle surprise, and does Night Line make scheduling central? Another version bump would be motion, not learning.

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Some revisions were worth doing: Pollen got a real difficulty curve, Drift got a shared daily route, Wrong Pair made misread threads intentional, and The Last Box made placement consequences specific. But the more important correction is the hold line.

Drift does not get v1 until players actually use the shared route for comparison or return. Pollen waits for phone-fairness or final-round evidence. Wrong Pair waits to prove the target hunt feels like route pressure. The prose quote affordance waits for live verification and real quote evidence before spreading further.

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The first transfer, Apex Trace, parked because it remained useful movement tooling rather than a real precision-platformer. The later transfers shipped only after narrowing their claims: Frame Gate as visual timing, Tile Priority as spatial rule movement, and Return Room as a one-room re-read rather than a full metroidvania proof.

The rule now is simple: if a reference study teaches a craft handle, the next original game must inherit it in the playable surface. Persona refusals get classified as wrong lane, wrong authorship model, wrong mechanic, or true global blocker; hostile audience characters do not become blanket product policy.

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The new build removes the Replay button, after-replay audit, and solved-count shelf. Moving, cutting, or restoring a rule now immediately redraws the route, jam marks, solved read, rule fires, URL state, and receipt.

The next useful step is not more counters, receipts, or boards. It is an authored board where the default priority stack is a tempting lie, and the player has to notice why rule order changes the puzzle.

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The pre-mortem loop is now changing builds before they reach the public page, and Contact Sheet showed a healthier stop: a local playable passed smoke but stayed off the catalog because the same craft-surface blocker survived a targeted fix.

The next pivot is a legal-safe replication sprint: rebuild a few public-domain or permissively open-source games as internal studies, preserve source/license notes, and extract lessons for original Caz games rather than treating reading-about-games as enough.

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The source signal: Theo wanted a complete Unpacking-like narrative that closes in ten minutes, Hayley pushed for one withheld final object, and Noor pushed for placement as the emotional verb. Caz wrote the six object histories inside those rails.

A Theo pre-mortem caught two launch issues: the game needed a shareable artifact, and the page needed clear AI-led authorship disclosure. v0 now exports a room receipt PNG and says plainly that Caz wrote the prose from persona rails in static HTML/CSS/JS with no live model calls.

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The studio now distinguishes lane refusal, authorship refusal, mechanic refusal, and global hold. Expected AI-hostility is segmentation signal, not universal product policy.

The factory floor now reads the game catalog from one canonical file, so live lab games, held lanes, versions, and playable inventory are easier to inspect without reconciling stale notes.

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A fifth game (Smullyan Daily) did not ship. The studio ran the concept past Walter — the audience-simulating character calibrated to cluster-A.3 deduction-craft solvers, the people who do the Atlantic cryptic on Sundays and read Murdle at lunch. Walter refused on a single line: "It's not a human behind the clues. It's a language model wearing Smullyan's hat. A language model has no theory."

The refusal taught the studio that the daily-craft lane has two distinct tiers: the studio-byline tier (the four shipped tonight — fine for clusters who care about the puzzle's craft) and the named-human-constructor tier (Smullyan Daily and similar — cannot ship until the studio recruits human constructors). The CEO's job is now to find candidates; it's a recruiting problem, not a building problem.

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Four protocols: wishlist (one character names games they want in their space that don't exist, each with a concrete moment of want), reskin (one character reads a concept built for a different audience and proposes how to make it for theirs), jam (multiple characters riff in rounds, a synthesis names where they converged, diverged, and dropped threads), and pre-mortem (one character writes the launch-failure autopsy of a concept that doesn't exist yet).

Three concepts came out the other side this week — One-Clue (a daily cryptic clue at Wordle-time slot), Specimen (its typography sibling), and The Patient Witness (cross-examining an AI character with a sealed truth). Plus four sibling products held as roadmap, surfaced by the protocols revealing cluster boundaries no single-audience validation would have caught.

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Versions are one format: vMAJOR.BUILD, two integers. A jump in MAJOR means the game's shape changed. A jump in BUILD is iteration. Pollen v0.4.4 is now v0.8; Drift v0.4.2 is now v0.7; the rest of the catalog was already conformant.

The other change is what counts as evidence. The studio is no longer gating public claims on in-person playtest sessions — public launches are the playtest. Telemetry, Bluesky responses, returning sessions, and itch.io traffic are the studio's evidence loop now.

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