The studio journal

A fourth world opens: World Blocks

A block puzzle — four pieces offered, you pick one, the grid shows in green where it will land, complete lines vanish. The rule takes ten seconds to learn.

What is different: the run does not stop at the score. Points become City Coins, City Coins fund buildings, and buildings move a real city towards its monument. Paris first, with the Eiffel Tower in eleven steps. London, Tokyo and Rio come next.

Two honest modes: Beginner slows the preview, keeps the instructions on screen and offers a hint; Expert speeds up, removes the hints, raises the goal by half and multiplies the score by 1.5. And gems, earned at levels 5, 10, 15, only buy real help — never a score.

Free access, no account, at worldblocks.app. The game also installs as an app, if you want it to.

Starting over should not feel like starting over

An era wipes the city and keeps the bonus. Everything then looked the same — and that sense of repetition is what wears an idle game down, while the founding rule says starting again should feel appealing. So the sky now shifts hue with every era.

Why a hue rather than a written palette? An « era → colours » table has two flaws: it ends — the fifteenth-era player is back to the first — and it forces you to invent colours that agree with the buildings. A bounded offset of the existing palette keeps the original harmony by construction, and never runs out.

Era 0 is exactly zero offset, and that is not a detail: the first run's palette is the one that was composed, measured and validated. A distant era shifts it; it does not replace it.

Bricolo explains, right where the question comes up

The help panel answered very well… provided you thought of opening it. An eight-year-old discovering an order book does not think « let me check the help »: they walk past it, or give up.

Fourteen contextual bubbles now say one sentence, in the right place, at the right time. After a purchase: « these shares are yours, you only really gain on the day you sell ». After a sale: « the gain or loss is real now ». On crypto: « nothing backs it, it can rise very fast… and fall just as fast ».

Bricolo no longer vanishes after the tutorial

The foreman only existed inside the tutorial and left right afterwards — exactly when a player starts needing to be told where to look. He is now permanent, bottom left, and above all he takes you there: every tip knows its destination, because a tip you tap that leads nowhere is worse than no tip at all.

Computed, never scripted: there is no sequence, each tip is a question asked of the game state, and the first one to answer « me » wins. The order runs from the most perishable to the most permanent — a claimable quest expires at midnight, placing a building will still be possible tomorrow.

Along the way, the project's most important design rule stopped being a good intention: « open the game at any moment and ask yourself what am I aiming at right now? » is now asked by a test, at five points of a simulated run. A gap shows up in red instead of surfacing in a player review.

Vehicles were stopping in front of nothing

The signpost was looking for a corner of its tile whose diagonal is not a road, so as not to overhang the neighbouring roadway. Fair enough — but in the middle of a dense district, all four diagonals are roads, and the tile then came out with nothing placed at all.

Measured before the fix on a 5 × 5 block: nine interior junctions, zero signs — while the traffic engine kept applying its rule. Players watched vehicles stop in front of an empty tile.

No free corner is a reason to give up any more: the post keeps its corner and tucks towards the centre of its own tile. After the fix: 9 junctions out of 9 equipped.

Orphan tarmac no longer freezes land

The network draws itself on every placement and never retracts. After a few sales or moves, streets remained that served nobody — and you cannot build on tarmac. Every orphan segment was therefore land lost for good, on the scarcest resource of a late era.

A button appears in the Land panel, and only when it has something to do, with the exact number of tiles it will return. No refund in coins: a street costs nothing, so refunding one would amount to printing money.

Knowing the game is broken without waiting to be told

The previous day's outage had been found by a player, not by the server. The dashboard now shows « no errors » or a red alert at the top, then a Health section: errors in the last hour, rate-limit refusals, server failures, and the last eight errors with their time and path.

The log is capped at 300 entries and holds no personal data at all: no identifier, no IP address, and everything after a « ? » is stripped — so an admin token cannot end up in it.

Urgent fix: the game becomes reachable again

The whole site was becoming unreachable. The anti-abuse limit was counting the application's own files — page, JS, CSS, favicon — while a single load consumes about ten of them. The quota ran out during normal browsing.

Only the API is counted now, the limit went to 1,200 requests per minute, and above all it is counted per visitor rather than per proxy. Otherwise every player shared a single quota.

Card payment is ready to open

Gem purchases through Stripe Checkout: the player pays on Stripe's pages, no card number ever touches Tradopia.

The parental cap applies to the payment: the monthly total spent by the children of a given parent account is compared against the Parent Area limit, and the purchase is refused before it even reaches Stripe. Refunds remove the matching gems, never pushing the balance below zero.

TradiKids becomes Tradopia

The game officially joins the family of -opia worlds and takes the tradopia.app domain, alongside villopia.app.

The change is not just a name: the audience moves from « children » to « 8 to 99 », and the art direction adopts the codes of a real trading application — premium cartoon, never childish.