What's new

Nothing about the app changed. The privacy page did, because what we count on the public pages changed and the two have to match.

• We now count which buttons get pressed on the public pages — "Start your free trial", "See pricing", and so on — so we can tell whether those pages actually explain the thing. Still no cookies, still no IP stored, still nobody outside our own server sees any of it, and still nothing at all runs once your kid is signed in and building.
• The milestone list gained "started their free trial." It's the same kind of tally as the rest: no name, no username, no account attached.

Irenaverse now keeps a changelog, and this is it.

• A running list of what's new, linked from the bottom of every page. If you've been away a while, this is the catch-up.
• Backfilled to the beginning. Everything below was reconstructed from the project's history, so the whole story is here rather than just what happens next.

The app used to have a seam down the middle of it. The dashboard, the lessons and the marketing pages were white; the editor, the Sprite Studio and the game stage were dark. You crossed that line a dozen times an hour, and every crossing was a flash of white.

• One dark ground everywhere. Marketing, pricing, the dashboard, lessons, the editor, the Sprite Studio, the play stage, the parent panel — all on the same near-black violet. No more flash.
• Purple means live. The accent colour now marks what's actually happening right now: the lesson in progress, Ren mid-reply, the program that's running, the thing you can press. Nowhere else.
• Your work is the brightest thing on screen. The chrome quietened down so your artwork and your running game don't have to compete with it.
• A starfield behind the marketing pages, faint enough to read as sky rather than decoration.
• A "Log in" link for people who are already members and landed on the front page. It was genuinely missing.

• The whole site sounds like a person. A copy pass over every page — fewer product-brochure sentences, more plain ones.
• Visitor counting that doesn't follow the kid around. Analytics are self-hosted and proxied through this site, so no third party gets a picture of where anyone goes next.

Iris finished 37 of the 38 lessons, and the data said something uncomfortable: the median lesson changed about four lines of the starter code, and not one lesson was ever started from a blank file. The starters already contained the answer. This release is the fix.

• Quests. A goal, a handful of checkpoints, and an empty file. No starter code to nudge, nothing to tweak — you build it. Three to begin with: a platformer, a branching story, and one that's just your own idea. Checkpoints are a map, not a contract: do them in any order, and finish whenever you decide you're done.
• Lesson checks look for your work, not just the right words. "I did it!" now wants the idea to show up on a line you wrote. Move code between files or reorder it and nothing counts against you — that's not cheating, it's what several lessons teach.
• An escape hatch, because a heuristic is only a heuristic. Three refusals in a row and you go through anyway. If you'd genuinely done it, the app is the one that was wrong.
• Ren can't hand over a whole program any more, no matter how hard you push. That rule used to live only in Ren's instructions; now it's enforced in the code, and Ren says so up front rather than promising something she can't deliver.
• Ren notices when you're going in circles. Ask the same thing three times and instead of restating the same answer, she asks one short question about one numbered line. Exactly once, then back to normal.
• A parent panel that says more than a completion bar. Four things a percentage can't tell you: which ideas turn up in games nobody asked for, which lessons went through suspiciously fast, which ones took a few goes and why, and whether this week got stuck in a loop. Written to survive being read over a shoulder.

Until now Irenaverse was invite-only, and free because it was one family.

• Grown-ups can sign up directly, and invite their kids from inside. Kids still only ever arrive by invitation — there is no public sign-up for a child, by design.
• Seven days free, no card. The trial starts when you verify your email and is the whole app, Ren included.
• One family plan. Every kid in the household shares it. No tiers.
• A shared pool of Ren's time for the household, with top-ups if a month runs hot, and a page that shows where it's gone.

• Games play on a phone. An on-screen gamepad appears for games that listen to the arrow keys, so a game built with a keyboard is playable on a phone without changing a line of it.
• Ask for a sprite and get one. Describe what you want in the Sprite Studio and it arrives on the canvas as editable pixels — not a flat image. Change any of them.
• Lesson tracks. After the opening run, the curriculum branches: keep going with the core track, or peel off into looks and sound, or power-ups. Nine new lessons across the two new tracks.
• The Sprite Studio demo on the front page is real — you can paint in it without an account.

• Draw your own sprites. A pixel editor with a palette, an animation timeline, onion-skinning and a live preview. Your sprites appear in the editor's palette next to the bundled ones and work exactly the same way in a game.
• Music. play_music and stop_music, with 30 built-in tunes covering the moods games usually need. They're note data, not audio files, so they cost almost nothing to load.
• animate_once for animations that should play through and stop — a death, an explosion — and then hand control back to whatever was playing before.
• One audio button with music and sound effects on separate switches, instead of two buttons that did nearly the same thing.
• Bounce physics and a pinball starter, including flippers that actually kick and a ball that can't tunnel through the table.
• Game cards on the dashboard show a picture of the game, captured from the canvas, plus a badge when you've edited something since you shared it.

Every kid gets a page at /@yourname to show off what they've made.

• A homepage you own. Pick an avatar or upload one, choose which games to feature, write about yourself. No Irenaverse navigation on it — it's yours, not a page of ours with your name at the top.
• Or write the HTML and CSS yourself. A two-pane editor with a live preview, an asset library, and Ren on hand in the same window. Everything you write is sanitised before it goes out, and the editor tells you what it changed and why.
• Uploads are checked before they appear anywhere.

• Games fill the window. A toggle on the canvas grows the game to fill the browser, letterboxed so it never stretches, with a tiled Irene-keyword backdrop around it.
• Version history. A popover listing earlier saves of a project, with a one-click restore. Nothing you make is one bad afternoon away from gone.
• Games can remember things. Save data that survives closing the tab — high scores, which level you reached, what you've collected.
• One Ren. The Plan / Pair / Coach mode picker is gone. Ren reads what you're asking for and adjusts, instead of making you classify your own question first.
• Ren can plan a build with you and hold the plan across a session, ticking steps off as you get to them.
• Cmd-Enter runs the game, and the Run button becomes Restart while it's playing.
• 154 backdrops in a stock pack, alongside the ones you generate.
• Animated character sprites with a sprite.animation property, so a character can walk, jump and idle.
• A language reference at /irene, generated from the runtime itself so it can't drift from what the language actually does.
• Daily limits roll over at your midnight, not a server's.

• Family accounts. A grown-up account holds the household; each kid gets their own login, their own games and their own progress. Parents can add a kid, manage the account, and see what's going on.
• Ren moved into a drawer with a button that follows you, instead of permanently occupying a third of the screen. She also became an owl.
• Backdrops you describe and Ren draws, saved to your own library, with a daily cap shown before you start rather than after you hit it.
• The curriculum grew a lot, including two opening lessons — a tour of the editor and an introduction to Ren — before any code at all.
• A searchable reference panel in the editor: every keyword and function, with what it does and an example.
• Copy a game to try something wild without risking the original.
• Scenes, on collide, and two new starters — a Donkey Kong-style climb and a Mario-style platformer.
• Sprite hitboxes fit the artwork, so a character with empty space around it stops colliding with things it isn't touching.

Two big things landed on the same day.

Stories. A whole side of the language for games made of words rather than sprites.

• scene, say, ask and go_to — write a branching story, give the reader choices, send them to a different scene depending on what they pick.
• Seven lessons teaching it, and an adventure starter to pull apart.
• Ren got a personality, and a walkthrough mode for when you want to be taken through something step by step.

Sharing. Games stopped being private by necessity.

• Publish a game and get a link. The link plays a snapshot, so you can keep editing without breaking what you shared.
• Remix. Open someone's shared game, take a copy, make it yours. The original is credited automatically.
• Comments, checked before they appear so nothing unkind lands on a kid's game.
• "From your friends" on the dashboard — the games people you're connected to have shared.

And some quieter, grown-up things the same week: a real privacy policy and terms, a contact form, a one-click export of everything the app holds about you, email-confirmed account deletion, branded error pages with Ren on them instead of Laravel's default, and a "Ren energy" bar so you can see how much of the day's AI you have left before you run out mid-thought.

The first version drew emoji. This one doesn't.

• Hundreds of real pixel-art sprites and sounds, grouped by theme and searchable from inside the editor, with a credits page naming everyone whose work it is.
• touching() and destroy(), so things can actually hit each other and disappear.
• Named arguments — sprite(x: 100, y: 200) instead of remembering the order.
• play() for named sound effects, and every 200ms for anything that shouldn't happen sixty times a second.
• Projects can have more than one file, joined with use, with a file rail in the editor.
• Mouse support — on click, mouse.x, mouse.y, and asking a sprite whether it contains a point.
• Animated sprites and a scrolling camera, so the world can be bigger than the screen.
• Starter games to open and change rather than starting from nothing.
• Editor polish that adds up: a colour picker inline in the code, hover a sprite name to see the picture, hover a sound name to play it, undo and redo buttons, a pause button, and a marker on the line that's currently running.
• Live, editable demos on the marketing site instead of screenshots.

Everything, on one day.

• Irene, a small programming language that reads like Python without the parts that trip people up. It runs in the browser, in a worker, at 60 frames a second. Your code never touches a server.
• A code editor with syntax highlighting and errors marked on the line that caused them, next to a canvas the game runs on.
• Autosave and version history, from the first commit — nothing is ever lost by forgetting to save.
• The first ten lessons, written in the app, checked in the app.
• Ren, an AI who explains code you've selected, suggests the next line as you type, and answers questions in a chat beside your program. She helps you think it through; she doesn't write it for you.
• Invitation-only accounts, so a kid could only ever arrive by being asked.