Interval
Work completed since the previous progress record.
The work began with a reported grid movement and expanded into complete location-specific vocabulary, development-only inspection tools, resource hygiene, and a more expressive home-screen character. Later prompts sharpened factual word relevance, limited cross-location reuse, separated the clownfish into animated mesh layers, and demanded cleaner fin-only transparency. The interval ended with a safe cleanup and guidance for reducing the task’s own retained context.
Direction of travel
How the work evolved.
Each step connects the user’s prompt to the practical change it produced.
Stabilised
Stopped the gameplay grid from dropping
Prompt: A screen recording highlighted a brief vertical grid shift while the score changed, alongside a request to extend word pools and reuse diagnostics to every location.
Outcome: The shifting header was given stable reserved space, preventing score and dimension text from changing board position. Every authored location was routed through validated Standard and Hard word pools with selection, fallback and reuse diagnostics.
Delivered
Created an extensible Development hub
Prompt: The home screen needed a development area containing a word browser and a way to inspect generated grids without playing through the campaign.
Outcome: A development-only hub now provides a searchable 100-word browser and a ten-level grid runner using the production generator. It reports targets, attempts, fallback use, reuse and reproducible generation details without affecting progression.
Reduced
Removed safe-to-retire shipping resources
Prompt: An audit was requested for unused resources, followed by permission to remove anything that could be retired safely.
Outcome: Inactive geography data moved out of the shipping bundle while its reference value was preserved. Orphaned artwork, dormant tuning UI and dead helper code were removed, reducing the packaged application without changing product behaviour.
Refined
Made word relevance factual and reuse measurable
Prompt: Each word needed a factual one-line inclusion reason, a visible count of other pools using it, reuse-first sorting and a strict cross-location reuse limit.
Outcome: The browser now sorts by distinct other-location count and explains inclusion with factual marine or site relevance. Catalog construction enforces a maximum of four other locations while reserving enough shorter words for reliable early and fallback grids.
Animated
Rebuilt the home clownfish as a layered rig
Prompt: The home-screen fish was to adopt separated body, tail and fin artwork with deformation meshes developed in earlier design work.
Outcome: The fish now uses five registered SpriteKit layers with matching meshes, independent tail and fin movement, a consistent left-facing swim and an undeformed Reduced Motion presentation. The SwiftUI screen remains separate from the renderer.
Corrected
Turned articulated layers into fin-only assets
Prompt: The initial separated layers still contained visible pieces of the body and needed to show only the articulated fins.
Outcome: Tail, dorsal, lower and pectoral artwork retained their registration canvases while torso, stripe and collar fragments were removed. Generated edits helped identify boundaries, and deterministic alpha masking produced the retained transparent assets when exploratory outputs introduced unsuitable backgrounds.
Tidied
Cleaned implementation residue and clarified context maintenance
Prompt: The project and the long-running task both needed cleanup without risking current work.
Outcome: Recoverable build scratch data and metadata residue were cleared, mesh grids were cached to avoid per-frame reconstruction, and validation still passed. Task-level compaction was correctly left as a user-triggered app action rather than altering project files.
What improved
Improvements made.
Evidence-led changes grouped around the product, implementation, design and working process.
Stable board geometry
Reserved header and score space prevents live text changes from pushing the puzzle grid vertically.
Complete location vocabulary
All 36 locations now resolve 100 Standard and 100 Hard words through the same validated campaign path.
Inspectable production generation
Developers can review every word and step through all ten production grids without changing player progress, rewards or replay history.
Evidence-led word curation
Inclusion reasons are factual, reuse counts are visible, and catalog-wide validation limits each word to the selected location plus at most four others.
Smaller and clearer shipping surface
Unused bundled data, orphaned artwork and obsolete UI helpers were removed while useful reference material and active assets were preserved.
Expressive layered character animation
Registered SpriteKit meshes animate the body, tail and fins independently while preserving a static accessible presentation for Reduced Motion.
Cleaner transparent animation layers
Four articulated fin assets now contain only their intended visible shapes on genuine transparency, with unchanged registration for the existing rig.
Lower per-frame rendering overhead
Warp geometry grids are cached instead of being rebuilt on every animation frame.
Pain points
Friction, constraints and open edges.
Resolved problems are separated from constraints and work that remains open.
Some visual and test checks depended on simulator availability
Several intermediate builds could compile without a booted simulator, but live visual replay and test execution had to wait. Later simulator verification covered the layered fish and completed the regression suite.
Exploratory image edits did not consistently preserve transparency
Some generated outputs introduced checkerboard or solid backgrounds and could not be used directly. Fin boundaries were therefore retained through precise alpha masks applied to the registered artwork.
The base body still contains stationary copies of articulated fins
The separated fin layers are clean, but stronger movement can reveal duplicated fin shapes on the body layer. A high-quality finless repaint and seam review remain necessary.
One long regression run was interrupted by the simulator
A stress test was terminated by simulator infrastructure rather than a code assertion; it passed independently, and a later clean run completed all 121 tests.
The remote review step could not be completed automatically
The available integration and browser session lacked the required access, so the user completed that external review step before local work continued.
Task context compaction cannot be initiated by the assistant
Reducing the task’s retained context requires the app’s user-triggered compaction control; it does not change project files or current work.
Outputs & proof
What was delivered and verified.
Verification covered catalog completeness, generation limits, compilation, packaged-resource exclusions, animation integration and project hygiene. Checks were repeated after the most risk-sensitive changes rather than relying only on static inspection.
Verification record
- All 36 locations passed 100-word Standard and 100-word Hard pool validation, including primary and replay fallback requirements.
- The reuse cap, factual browser content and reuse-first sorting were exercised by focused catalog checks.
- The development hub, word browser and grid runner compiled under the project’s current Swift language mode.
- Full tests, debug tests and release builds passed after the safe resource cleanup; removed data was absent from the packaged application.
- The layered home-screen fish built successfully and all 121 regression tests passed on a clean simulator run.
- Each retained articulated asset remained 512 by 512 with genuine transparency and unchanged registration.
- Asset metadata, whitespace checks and a simulator build passed after the final cleanup and warp-grid caching change.
Key decisions
Reserve a stable header region instead of allowing score and dimension text to reflow the gameplay board.
Use the production campaign generator inside development tools so diagnostics describe real gameplay behaviour rather than a parallel approximation.
Count Standard and Hard use at the same location once when enforcing cross-location vocabulary reuse.
Preserve useful geographic reference material outside the shipping bundle instead of deleting provenance that still supports tests and documentation.
Keep the SwiftUI home composition separate from the SpriteKit fish renderer and provide a static undeformed Reduced Motion state.
Prefer deterministic alpha masks for final registered fin assets when generative edits fail transparency or alignment requirements.
Move large scratch data to recoverable storage and preserve valid ignored deliverables and user settings during cleanup.
Visual checkpoints
Generated and edited images.
Six image-edit attempts explored dorsal, lower, pectoral, body and tail separation. The four retained fin layers are shown in their registered transparent canvases. Two exploratory outputs that could not safely be retained are represented by neutral placeholders so the visual record remains complete without embedding unusable or private material.
Image omitted because it was unavailable or not safe to store.
Image omitted because it was unavailable or not safe to store.
Next moves & open questions
Current position.
The gameplay board is stable, every location has validated and inspectable vocabulary, and the development hub exposes production grid behaviour without a play-through. The home clownfish now has a working layered mesh rig and four clean fin-only assets. The main remaining product risk is visual: the base body still includes stationary fin copies, so a finless repaint and an in-motion seam review are needed before the character work is considered finished. The latest cleanup has passed structural and build checks and remains ready for review.