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📜 Devlog

Notes from Nebula Quest Studio on how Codex Antiqua came together — written as it happens, warts and all.

2026-07-28

Notebook tutorial and clearer moons

The guided onboarding now covers the Field Notebook and the Logic Bench — where clues actually become deductions, and the hardest part to find on your own. It can be skipped at any step, and replayed later from Settings.

Hints are now 5 per puzzle instead of 5 per day, and they work on archived days too: replaying an earlier ruin gives you its own five.

New Moon and Eclipse no longer plunge the room into darkness. Both rooms are fully readable now, and the two moons got their own identity — New Moon a cold, drained indigo, Eclipse a saturated violet.

Fixed: the "a new ruin has risen" notice could appear while you were already playing the current day.

2026-07-26

Readability and accessibility

The Blood Moon has been rebalanced: the red now lives on the edges of the pieces and on the floor seal instead of washing over the whole room — you can tell floor, wall and the central circle apart without straining. The game now also opens with a "tap to continue" screen, so music and effects start along with the run.

Accessibility: Logic Bench cells are now announced by screen readers as "god × element", the Notebook and dialogs keep focus trapped while open, and keyboard navigation works across the whole page. On mobile, the Bench header icons reveal their name on tap, and the adapted Notebook layout now applies on any touch screen.

Fixes: the ad-for-another-chance properly restores the pyre; nicknames and group names accept spaces; connection failures show a notice instead of an empty screen; and the game warns you when the day rolls over with the tab left open. Hints are now limited to 5 per day.

2026-07-05

Retention: 5 new features

1) The daily result as a real shareable image. 2) A Museum unlock ceremony when cataloguing a new relic. 3) Guided onboarding explaining the controls on the first session, without giving away the puzzle's solution. 4) A new rare moon event, the Eclipse — two hidden gods at once, a new "crossed shadow" clue, and an exclusive mythic rarity. 5) Ranking among private friend groups, with an invite code.

Each feature tested end-to-end — including hundreds of generated Eclipse puzzles just to confirm the solver always guarantees exactly one solution even with two gods hidden at once.

2026-06-18

Mobile support

Touch controls: D-pad, interact button, notebook button. The screen rescales to fit any viewport size.

2026-05-30

Linked accounts

Optional account linking via email or Google — the game stays fully playable anonymously, but progress (ranking, relics, credits) can now follow across devices.

Fixed a few async races that froze the screen or burned CPU when navigating quickly between the Ruin and the Museum.

2026-05-12

Codex Antiqua is born

Codex Antiqua is a daily puzzle — part Wordle, part Einstein riddle — set in a fictional archaeological ruin. Every day, a new room with 5 gods, 5 elements, and a set of clues generated by a solver that guarantees exactly one logical solution.

Initial release: a playable prototype, a daily ranking via Supabase, a Museum of Relics that stores what has been deciphered, and a shop of excavation credits to personalize the Scriba.

The art is 100% procedural: stone, light, and cracks drawn by GLSL shaders, pixel by pixel, no off-the-shelf assets.