QUAD CHASE

Changelog

What has actually shipped, newest first. The site gets each build before the app and portal versions do, so if something here is missing where you play, that is why.

August 2026

20 August — housekeeping the search engines care about

• The homepage answered on three addresses at once — with and without www, and with and without /index.html — and never said which was the real one. It does now, so the copies stop competing with each other.
• The links from the menu to these written pages are in the page's own markup rather than being added by script once the game has loaded. Anything that reads a page without running it can now find the rest of the site.

14 August — party lobbies, and the third phone

• Fixed: a third phone often could not join a party game. It failed with "couldn't reach the host", which reads as a Wi-Fi problem and was not one. Every pad opens two connections, and every phone in a room shares one address, so the free relay service we were relying on ran out of room at the third player. The game now works much harder to connect the phones to each other directly, which is both faster and not rationed.
• Same cause, second symptom: whoever got pushed onto that relay was also the laggy one, because their controls were travelling to another continent and back before reaching a phone across the table.
• The lobby now shows each player's connection — their ping, and whether they are connected directly or being relayed. A relayed player is called out in amber, because it usually means the router is blocking phones from talking to each other and that is something you can go and change.

4 August — the site around the game

• Nine written pages, including the ones you are reading: how to play, the arena, the bosses, multiplayer, about, FAQ, this changelog and the terms.
• The menu now says what Quad Chase actually is, and links to all of it.
• Ads came off the game screen entirely. They belong beside writing, not over a canvas, and an ad slot with nothing in it now collapses instead of leaving a white gap mid-article.
• A long fight with the new footer on phones held sideways, where the menu splits into two columns and there is very little room between the counter and the corner controls. It took four attempts.

1 August — the arena board

• Deepest floor is now a leaderboard. A new personal best offers itself to the board when a descent ends. Everyone runs one life under the same escalation, so depth is the one arena number that compares fairly between players.
• Your own row and the depth column are picked out in amber, and the top three keep their medals when you scroll.
• A disc can no longer be given a name the board would reject — the refusal now happens where you type it, not after a run you cared about.
• The drop lock opens at a checkpoint. Beating a boss already made the stretch after it a fresh attempt; now it gives you a fresh choice of what to carry into it.
• Duels: a vault resyncs once on landing rather than drifting, and the referee now notices an opponent who quits to the menu instead of waiting on them.

July 2026

26–28 July — making duels feel like one game

Roughly two weeks of the project went into the gap between "the netcode works" and "it feels like you are both in the same room". Highlights:

• One shared stage. Both devices now play on the same 2:1 arena regardless of their own screen shape, so neither player is looking at more of the floor than the other.
• A running score under the timer, loadout icons that scale with the arena, and the carried drop shown during the countdown.
• DECOY became a solid block in duels — a person watching you cannot be fooled by a ghost, so against a human it is a wall instead of a lie. SMOKE genuinely removes you from the opponent's screen. MATADOR learned to sell a feint to a human.
• PULSE and SWAP got cooldowns and were re-tuned to break contact rather than manufacture distance.
• A long run of correctness fixes: tags judged on the freshest report, small corrections gliding while only real teleports snap, the opponent no longer sliding backwards on a tag, and a duel that could restart itself as a local two-player match.
• Two changes were shipped and then reverted the same day after they made the tag feel worse. They are in the history rather than quietly deleted.

25 July — the Arena and Arena PVP went public

• The Arena opened to everyone, on every build — web, native and portals. It had been reachable only behind a URL flag.
• ARENA took a permanent menu slot, and the old DAILY mode was removed rather than hidden.
• The URL flags that used to gate it were deleted, along with a debug parameter that set your coin balance — with nothing left to gate, it would have been a cheat in a link.
• The ACE skin, which used to unlock by playing a daily, now unlocks by clearing an arena floor. Anyone who already had it kept it.

17–24 July — party modes, polish and store prep

• QUAD ROYALE — 2 to 6 phones, last one standing, AI chasers hunting the whole pack while the walls close in.
• TEAM TAG — 2 to 6 phones pick sides in the lobby; human chasers hunt human evaders, sides swap every round, best of three.
• PLAY ON TV, where both players are on phones and the big screen is only a display. It is the fairest 1v1 because both inputs cross the network the same way.
• Party plumbing that mattered more than it sounds: ghost connections no longer eat seats, pads never hang silently, and the lobby keeps its own heartbeat.
• Every pad, ring, aura and tag now wears the player's own identity colour, because six discs on one screen need a single colour language.

20 July — consent and disclosure

• A consent banner for visitors in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, using the three-choice form — consent, do not consent, or manage options. Burying refusal behind a submenu is a dark pattern and we did not want it.
• The privacy policy was rewritten to describe what actually happens, including the parts that are unflattering.
• An ad network offering only pop-unders and vignettes was turned down. Neither can be tied to a reward, and a pop-under is exactly the thing we are trying not to be.

14–16 July — depth for the solo game

• Highlight replays — the slow-motion moment from your run, captured, replayable and shareable as a video.
• Offline play with score sync when you come back, plus the interactive in-game guide.
• Skins with achievement unlocks, and challenge sharing: a score card image and a link that drops a friend straight into beating it.
• Separate leaderboards for evader and chaser, a progress map for unlocks, and QR joining for the two-phone mode.
• Three ways to dash on touch, after watching people fail to find the one there was.

13 July — the game found its shape

• CHASER MODE: the whole game inverted — you hunt, the AI runs.
• Orbs, introduced with briefing cards before they first appear rather than dropped on you unexplained.
• Elite chasers from round 14, which feint their lunges and shake off a decoy early instead of falling for it completely.
• Endless scaling past round 10, a second chaser on most rounds, light and dark themes, and an attract demo behind the menu.
• The service worker was torn out and rewritten after it served the previous build on first launch.

12 July — first playable

• Twenty seconds, one chaser, do not get tagged.
• Chaser personalities, near-miss slow-motion, the continue flow, and an arena that adapts to any screen shape.
• Same-device two-player, installable as a PWA, and chasers that path to where you are going rather than where you are.

PLAY QUAD CHASE