It's been a few months since the last update — time to catch you up. Since April, pretty much every system in The Grid got touched, and the game now has a proper home at thegrid.madoke.org. Here's the rundown.

A full visual overhaul

The whole game got redesigned, not just re-skinned. Transistors and microchips now share one consistent visual language (unified 3×2 footprints, bar-segment health readouts), the HUD went through several generations to land on a cleaner circular sidebar, and the buttons, logo, and fonts were all reworked for a sharper Tron-inspired look. Signals now share a single unified shape instead of a different marker per color.

Wire drawing that feels better in the hand

Drags are now symmetric and snap visually to ports, right-click cancels an in-progress draw, and backtracking your cursor rewinds the wire instead of fighting you. There's also a new "stitch" mode for patching gaps in existing wire without redrawing it from scratch.

Clearer feedback, less friction

• A new Wave Circle — a progress ring around your score — replaced the old wave stats section.
• Pause, Game Over, and Settings screens now share one consistent card layout.
• The main menu's top-scores panel became a full leaderboard screen.
• The tutorial moved from a wall of text before the game starts to teaching mechanics in the game itself, as you play.
• Even the main menu background changed — it's now built from the game's own board instead of a static backdrop.

Rebalanced difficulty

Transistors were reworked to be emit-only with constant signal speed, receiver difficulty now scales per receiver instead of per wave, drain rate and wave duration escalate on a tuned curve, and signals get slight speed variance so traffic feels less mechanical. The board also grew — 300×100 — with camera and mobile/portrait handling to match.

What's next: iOS and beyond

The Grid has been a web-first game so far, but the mobile-friendly HUD, portrait handling, and touch support laid the groundwork for something bigger: I'm now working toward native builds for iOS, with other platforms on the radar after that. No firm dates yet, but it's the next big push.

I want to hear from you

If you've played The Grid, I'd genuinely love your feedback — what's confusing, what's fun, what's missing. Drop a comment on the game's itch.io page. It directly shapes what gets prioritized next.

Thanks for playing.