Mega update

# The box gets taller

Two updates rolled into one post. The first is the big one — a second comb, a

scoring system that cares about what you play rather than just how much of it,

an audience upstairs with opinions, and the ability to finish a box and move on

to a worse one. The second is smaller and overdue: you can now turn the whole

thing down.

## Harmony

The board has always mapped pitch to horizontal position, low tines on the left

and high on the right, but nothing ever scored the *relationship* between two

notes. A third and a tritone paid exactly the same. Now they don't. Two tines a

third or a fifth apart, struck close together, answer each other and pay again.

Fourths, sixths and octaves come in later. Three different tines inside a beat

that spell a chord pay a triad bonus, and strikes that walk the scale a step at

a time build a phrase that's worth more with every step.

All of it is audible, which was the whole point. An interval re-sounds the note

it's answering, so you hear a proper two-note chord. A triad sounds all three at

once. You can tell you've hit something good before you've read the number.

## The upper comb

I wanted a second comb, and for a while I assumed that meant doubling the tines

across the board. It doesn't fit. 44 columns would need pegs 11 px apart and a

bead needs 30, so there's no room, and no way to make room without re-tuning the

whole board from scratch. So it goes up instead of across.

Eleven upper tines, on alternate columns, unlocked once the first comb is whole.

Fit one and every peg on that column in the top of the board rings an octave

above the tine below it and pays more. The part I didn't plan and like the most:

it counts as a *high* note for the purpose of casting bells, so the upper comb

drags bells down over the left-hand side of the board where they could never

appear before. A bead falling straight down a fitted column crosses the register

line and plays an octave, which is now worth money because of the harmony work.

The two systems found each other without me arranging it.

Related, and deliberate: bells now only cast on the right-hand half of the comb,

and drone rods only on the left. Which half you repair first is a real decision

instead of a spending order. Repair the treble and you get a board full of

bells; repair the bass and you get drones and hum. Neither earns more than the

other. They just sound like different instruments.

## The house asks for something

Every night the audience upstairs names one tine and a number. Play that note

enough times and they're on their feet, and you get a spin of the reel. Three

reels, music all the way down. Three quarter notes or three eighths pays double,

three beamed pairs pays five times, and a whole bar three times over pays ten.

The accidentals — ♭ ♮ ♯ — are blanks and never pay, which is the house's little

joke. It multiplies the whole night, so a lucky spin can turn an ordinary

evening into a record.

Only beads actually striking the tine count. The sympathetic wave brushing it

doesn't, or a wide-wave build would satisfy the house every night without ever

aiming at anything.

## Selling the box

Finish a box and the audience turns up:

> *Well, look what we have here! It seems they've fixed the music box!*

> *Would you like to repair another?*

You can hand it over, or send them away and keep playing — there's a **Call the

audience** button in the workshop for whenever you're ready. They pay for the

best night they heard out of that box, so staying on to land one enormous night

is worth real money at the door. Then you start on a bare one: fewer tines still

fitted, more felt through the board, and every box you've ever mended still

playing somewhere, paying you for all of them.

There's also a book in the pause menu now. If you don't know what a fifth is,

"a fifth pays 60% again" is noise. Thirds, fourths, phrases, triads, registers,

dampers, sympathetic resonance — every entry says what the term means in music

and then what it means on this board. It's the thing I'd have wanted while

learning what the box was doing to me.

## Things that were broken

Beads were getting stuck at the bottom, and a player found it and diagnosed it

exactly: the brass rails made it impossible for a bead to get past the middle.

Worse than tight, actually — the left rail physically overlapped the peg above

it, and all three left gaps of 24–32 px where a bead needs 34. Beads wedged, the

run couldn't end, and the game had to be force closed. The rails have moved into

the gaps between the last row of pegs, every obstacle on the board is now

checked against a bead's width when it's placed, and there's a watchdog that

shakes loose anything that stops falling. There's a pause button with an *End

the night* option too, so there is always a way out.

Runaway plus Shatter could go infinite. Runaway makes beads free for nine

seconds, and during those nine seconds the bells were still dropping loose

parts, including more Runaways. It fed itself. Nothing drops during a Runaway

now, and there's a cooldown so a ten-bead cascade can't pay for its own ticket.

Holding to charge was highlighting the page on some browsers, which is fixed

properly on everything I can test. And the arpeggio bead's chain window was

running on the wall clock rather than game time, so it was frame-rate dependent

and kept counting while paused. Everything that scores now runs on a clock that

only moves when the game does.

## Demo and full

itch doesn't let browser games sit behind a price — embedded content is always

free, no matter what the project costs. So rather than pretend, there's a split.

The demo is the whole first arc: get the comb back to twenty-two tines. Harmony

and the upper comb are on the map, greyed out, so you can see what's up there.

Finish the comb and the audience turns up with the pitch.

If you buy it you don't start over. The demo hands you a progress code — every

fitting, every note of applause, your best night — and the full version takes it

on the title screen. Paste it in and pick up exactly where you stopped.

## And you can turn it down

The smaller update, and one I should have done sooner. Tinefall has always been

loud, bright and shaky on purpose, since the whole idea is that you can hear

whether you're winning, but until now there was no way to ask it to be less of

all that. There's a **Settings** sheet on the title screen, in the pause menu,

and behind the ⚙ in the workshop. Esc gets you out.

Music and sound are two separate sliders. Sound is everything the board does:

tines, bells, drone rods, the plunger, the thud of a bead landing in a bin.

Music is the box idling between runs, that slow half-broken tune it plays over

the menus using only the tines you've actually repaired. They're separate

because plenty of people want the board ringing and their own music playing over

the workshop, and that's a perfectly reasonable way to play.

The fiddly part was the reverb. The box has a room on it, a short feedback delay

that gives the tines their tail, and it was one room shared by everything. Turn

the music down with that setup and the notes get quieter while their echoes keep

ringing at full volume, which sounds broken in a way that's hard to point at. So

each side got its own room. Turn something down and its tails come down with it.

The bead trail is Full, Short or Off. The blur behind a falling bead looks good

and makes fast shots readable, but it's also a bright smear moving quickly

across a dark screen, which not everyone wants. Short keeps enough to follow the

arc. Off is off. Flash and shake is Full, Dim or Off, and covers everything that

jolts: the screen lighting up when a bell goes off, the whole board shaking when

something big lands, the blink on a powerup timer that's about to run out. Dim

keeps the feedback but takes the punch out of it. Off is genuinely still.

None of it changes what anything pays. A bell is worth the same whether or not

the screen lights up. The defaults are exactly what the game did before, so if

you never open the sheet you won't notice any of this. And your settings aren't

part of your progress — they're stored separately, so starting the box over from

bare parts leaves them alone. You shouldn't have to turn the flashes off twice.

Thank you!

Thanks to everyone who's played it and told me what broke. The rails thing in

particular was a *good* bug report and it made the game better. If something's

uncomfortable, too loud, too bright, or just broken, tell me — the last round of

fixes came almost entirely from people saying so.