Studio notes

What is being made at Thumbprint School, in the order it happened. These notes are kept as the arcade grows: a page for anyone who wants to know how the games are built, what changed and why, written by the people making them. Newest first.

17 October 2026: a morning of small fixes, and the offices opened up

Play-testing turns up the small things. The Clay Radio's play button stopped turning into a pause button after you came back from a game: the radio had resumed a moment before the arcade page was on screen, and the jukebox had stopped listening. Fixed. In Neon Lanes the glass cubicles on the office floor used to trap the crews where no shot could reach them; the offices are an open plan now, low partitions anyone shoots over, glass only on the foreman's office and the meeting room, and shots pass through that glass both ways. A health pack you do not need stays on the floor for later, the riot shield is a third bigger so it covers you, and in Go Fish and Glaze a big hand fans out so every card's corner shows instead of hiding behind the next one.

16 October 2026: the card room, the casino, and a kinder pond

The Card and Casino shelves opened: Solitaire, Rummy, Memory, Go Fish and Glaze (a shedding game in four glazes), then Blackjack, Roulette and Craps, all playing for clay chips that are never money. Every card now flies: dealt from a shoe or a stock with a turn in the air, slid between hands and piles, swept away when a hand ends, and every win or loss comes up on a casino plate with chasing lights. Roulette's ball runs the rim against the wheel, bounces off the frets and settles in the pocket that was drawn. Craps got a real layout and dice thrown across the felt. Two games went the other way: Go Fish and Memory became children's games, played by a pond with thirteen clay animals for cards. Clayju Runes gained a campaign on its beach level (circling gunships, armour that scrambles, a satellite strike that leads the monster with a red laser), buildings that break when the giants touch them, and a valley that is one piece of clay instead of many.

15 October 2026: the site's own pages

The site gained plain pages a reader can open without the arcade running: what it is, how to play, a page per game, and the privacy policy. They are written by hand from the same notes the games are built from, so what a page says the game does is what the game does.

10 to 14 October 2026: Neon Lanes grows a city

The 3D shelf's bowling-alley shooter grew a downtown, a drive-in, a warehouse and a roof finale, a merchant van, a riot shield with five guns to carry behind it, and storyboards with recorded voices between its chapters. A run of play-tests tightened the elevator, the stairwells, the shadows and the frame budget on low machines.

8 October 2026: Clay Crossing, and the Stripe adapter that stays closed

A road-and-river crossing joined the classics. On the server, the adapter for paid chips was written and tested and then left switched off: the casino games run on free play chips, and that is how they stay until there is a reason to change it.

7 October 2026: the brand, and the move to Fly

The arcade took the name Thumbprint School and moved its server to Fly.io, with the games' assets served from the same place as the API so nothing on the page comes from anywhere else. Genre ribbons went onto the tiles, and Clayju Runes' monster was rebuilt to match its key art.

6 October 2026: images from a second tool, and a radio in the alley

The project began handing its image work to a second tool through a folder of job files, one batch at a time, with every picture's origin written down. Clay Radio started playing original music in Neon Lanes. Grandma's Typewriter got a real typewriter sound and clay ghosts in place of painted ones.

5 October 2026: the first play-test

A long evening of notes from the first play-through, and a backlog rewritten from them: the ceilings in the stairwells, the riot shield, the word variety in the typing games, and the decision that every game must run on a locked-down office computer with no 3D hardware, which still shapes everything built since.

4 October 2026: the first day

One portal, a handful of games, and the rules that have not changed: everything pressed from the same clay, twelve frames a second, nothing a player writes ever shown to anyone else, no third-party scripts, and the Kiln as the villain in every game.

How these notes are kept

Each entry comes from the project's working log, which records what was built, why, and what was checked before it went live. Dates are the days the work went live on this site.