Games, quizzes and one stubborn iOS app.
I am Paj. This is my corner of the internet — the place where the things I make end up.
Right now that means three things. Games you can play right here in the browser, no download and no account. A devlog about TAG, an iOS app I am building so my friends and I can play a month-long game of tag without arguing about who tagged whom. And an anime shelf, because the Big 3 and Dragon Ball are the reason half the stuff on this site looks the way it does.
Nothing here is a product. It is a workshop with the door left open.
No installs, no accounts, no ads. Pick one and go.
It is called TAG. GPS decides who caught whom, the rules live in the database, and whoever is it when August ends carries it for a year.
The beta is open. You need the TestFlight app, the link, and a gang to join — and the invite mail lands in spam more often than not.
I bought the developer account, and within a day the app was signed onto a real phone, push was arriving for real, and version 1.0.0 was sitting in App Store Connect. Also: the most unhelpful error message I have ever been handed.
Read itIt is out, and people are playing it. TAG is on TestFlight, the external beta passed Apple's review in a matter of hours, and the link is public: join the beta. You need the TestFlight app, that link, an invite code from a gang, and Always on the location question. The invite mail from Apple has a habit of landing in spam.
Five testers on the first build, thirty-one sessions between them before I had finished writing this. It is a real game now rather than a thing that compiles.
Build 2 went out to everyone today and took five new things with it: the whole gang on the home screen, protests after the fact, a location requirement you cannot quietly opt out of, anonymous tips to whoever is it, and a gang chat. Apple let it through without another review, since it stays inside what was already approved.
The week's other work was less fun and more important. I went through the database asking not what the rules allow, but what a modified app could do around them. Four holes, all the same shape: a table where the permissions were wider than any rule justified. One of them let a gamemaster rewrite the history of who caught whom. All four are shut, and a test now fails if any table is ever given a write permission without a policy to justify it.
Migrations 1 to 36 in production. 74 unit tests, 538 database assertions, and four interface tests that play the real game against the real backend.
Next: screenshots, review notes, and the App Store itself.
