Keeping the theater and opening the Bank
[December 12th, 2025] [10:17 AM MT]
After the reveal work, I removed the CRT puzzle from the landing page and kept the theater. The page had moved into its next stage. Visitors could reach the transmission directly without going through a puzzle that belonged to an earlier event.
I cleaned up the theater presentation over several commits: removed the SVG noise filter, converted the theater artwork to WebP, adjusted the screen area and removed additional grain and curtain overlays. The image and the player needed to work together without layers obscuring the screen.
Giving the Bank a beginning and an end
The Bank encounter followed on December 14. Its four phases covered the introduction, the lobby, the vault puzzle and the reward. That gave the game a complete route through one location rather than a collection of disconnected room tests.
The vault puzzle used twelve cards containing six matching pairs, with six lives. A mismatch had a consequence, and finishing the pairs moved the encounter forward. I added audio around that sequence so the player's actions had feedback beyond the cards themselves.
I wanted this first encounter to be understandable on its own. The player enters a place, works through the obstacle and reaches something that connects back to The S33k3r.
Fixing what reached the browser
The next commits dealt with delivery. Some room media needed to be tracked in Git, and the player needed to reference the WebM files that were actually available. A correct local path means very little if the file never reaches the deployed site.
I also corrected Play Again and the local-storage behavior for returning visitors. Remembering that someone had seen the introduction could save them time, but it shouldn't prevent a deliberate restart. The navigation changed to Play Game to make the route clearer.
With the replay fixes in place, the Bank had a route in, a puzzle to finish and a way to start again. I could keep developing that encounter without asking players to navigate the earlier room experiments.
Sources
Work dates follow the linked commit record in Mountain Time. This account was revised on October 3, 2026.
GitHub commits
- 0521aa8 — Remove the CRT puzzle and keep the theater
- b8e55c7 — Remove the SVG noise filter
- 3a622d0 — Convert theater artwork to WebP
- 41b4d03 — Remove the grain overlay and adjust the screen area
- 093602d — Remove SVG curtain overlays
- bfd02a6 — Introduce the four-phase Bank encounter
- 4b9f658 — Track and prepare room media
- 0f946bf — Use the available WebM files
- b0e3ceb — Adjust the lives sound effect
- 3fbce13 — Fix Play Again and returning-player behavior
- 06b162d — Update navigation to Play Game