PlayMusic Backlog Snapshot

We can finally see load times

Until this week, partner complaints about "45-second load times" were a guessing game — we had no data. The game now reports back exactly how long each step took (initial download, configuration, game assets, audio) for every play session, on every partner.

New "Portals" dashboard in CMS

Anyone in the business can now open the CMS, go to LiveOps → Portals, and see per-partner load times, trends over time, and how many players are coming back to replay. Sparklines on each partner card give an at-a-glance health check.

Drop-out tracking

We also capture when a user bails before the game finishes loading — historically these players were invisible. Now we know how many we're losing and where.

Smart asset loading

The game now adapts how aggressively it downloads assets based on the player's connection and device. Fast connections on good devices get more in parallel; slow phones get protected from getting overwhelmed. This was originally scheduled later in the roadmap but came along for free.

Hover-to-prefetch on portals

When a player hovers over a game card for 200ms, we start loading the game in the background. By the time they click, it's already partway loaded — feels instant.

Discord embeds report in

Discord-embedded games now route through the same analytics pipeline as everywhere else, so we'll see Discord performance alongside Playgama, Y8, etc.

The new load-time tracking works inside our own site (playmusic.gg). It doesn't yet report from games embedded directly on partner sites like Playgama or Y8, or from our portal shells. So tomorrow's prod dashboard will show consumer-site data first; partner-embed coverage is the next follow-up.

Y8 partner attribution fixed

Y8 traffic wasn't being properly credited in our funnel — every session looked like it came from "unknown". Fixed: Y8 sessions now show up correctly in partner reporting, so we can have a real conversation with them about volume and payouts.

Discord Activity foundation

The "game-inside-Discord" launch surface is now mostly in place — Discord Activity UI redesigned, share + mobile UX polished, analytics flowing through the same pipeline as our other partners. Featured Artist Experience landed with STYNGR admin controls for curating which artist gets the prime slot.

Playgama feedback addressed

Items Playgama flagged during partner review have been closed out and shipped to prod.

One-click "promote to prod" for partner content

Previously, getting a new song or partner-portal update from staging to production required manual coordination across systems. Now it's one click from cms-staging — for the team running partner relationships, this is daily friction gone.

New game mode: OSU (rhythm tap)

Full rhythm-tap mode landed in production, with a polished wizard flow for picking it during game creation. Expands the catalogue beyond runner/drift/flight into the rhythm-game category.

Wizard rebuilt around real data

The "create a game" wizard used to have a lot of hardcoded options. It's now driven by actual config — so when content/engineering add a mode, it shows up in the wizard automatically. Less drift, less "why isn't X showing up?".

CMS song delete + maintenance polish

CMS got a clean song-delete flow (previously a support ticket) and maintenance-page polish so partner-visible downtime looks professional.

LiveOps got drill-down views, music data quality, and trend visibility

Five separate LiveOps improvements shipped in two weeks. The internal ops tool keeps getting tighter — drill down from a top-line metric into the underlying sessions, see music data quality at a glance, catch errors that used to go silent. Less time spent asking engineers "can you look this up for me?".

Better partner reporting infrastructure

D1 + Worker Redis runbooks finalised; observability fixes shipped. When something looks weird in the LiveOps dashboard, we now have actual playbooks for triaging it instead of inventing one each time.

Two same-day production hotfixes

A bug made collectibles invisible in some game modes (May 4); fixed same day. A separate bug caused phantom "MISS" popups in Cyber Run / Cosmo Run (May 5); also fixed same day. Both were caught before they hit large player numbers — operational maturity getting better.

Flight-mode ship revive UX

Smoother revive flow when players crash in flight mode — small UX nicety, but the kind of polish that compounds.

Mobile UI polish on Discord/partner shells

Mobile drawers, auto-hiding bars, share-link flow refined — the embedded-game experience feels closer to a native app.

Production load tolerance improved

Database connection pooling (PgBouncer) extended to production, memory increased on the busiest services, CPU throttling tuned. Net result: we can take more concurrent players without falling over, and OOM crashes that used to happen during traffic spikes are gone.

Engine release process formalised

The game engine now has a proper "canary cutover" promotion system — new versions go to a small slice of traffic first, with one-click flip to full traffic once we're confident. Riskiest part of any release (game engine itself) is now the safest.

Live Babylon engine + per-game config.json everywhere

Finished migrating every game-load path to use the live Babylon engine + per-game config.json. Removed the last legacy "baked HTML export" code paths from the consumer frontend, CMS, and the play API.

Portal import populates engine config

Portal imports now correctly populate game titles and song metadata in the engine config.

AI chart review hardening

Added robustness to the AI-driven chart review pipeline: handles truncated Gemini responses, configurable model, 16K token limit, robust JSON parsing for double-encoded responses.

Portal attribution end-to-end

Every game session played from a partner portal (Playgama, Discord, Y8, etc.) now records which portal it came from. Spans the engine, consumer frontend, and backend; backed by a new game_sessions.portal_id column. Critical for partner reporting and revenue attribution.

Wizard song analytics

When a user picks a song, navigates the wizard, and creates a game, we now track impressions, clicks, and "song builds" — feeding the LiveOps Songs leaderboard for editorial decisions ("which songs should we refresh?").

Share metrics fix

Share funnel had been silently broken since March — frontend was firing one event name and backend was looking for another. Fixed; share metrics will populate from now on.

Tween-friendly share menu

Dropped X/Twitter, added Messages (iMessage/SMS), reordered for tween-relevance. Native Discord share works for connected users.

Rich link previews

Share links pasted into Discord/Slack/iMessage/Twitter now unfurl as rich cards with the game thumbnail, title, and description. Previously rendered as a generic placeholder.

Music integration semantics fix

A pipeline-vs-engine vocabulary mismatch ("drop" / "break" / "breaker" weren't valid engine values) was causing audio to drop out and never recover on some songs. Both the publish path and the engine's runtime are now defensive.

Admin security hardening

All /api/admin/* endpoints now require ADMIN-role authentication at the router level. Removed two shared-secret backdoor endpoints that were guarded only by a hardcoded string in the codebase.

Playgama partner experience

New CDN-cached path for engine assets (immutable headers); portal D1 sync respects curated CMS data instead of overwriting; tab-pause/resume on the game modal; vehicle-URL safety fix to prevent cross-mode contamination.

Quick Builder cross-link

CMS sidebar's Quick Builder now opens the consumer-app /create flow on the matching environment.

Boujee Baby (Kendrick) — Drift mode

New environment (NYC streetscape, taller buildings, highway signs, custom sky), rigged character riding a Taxi Drift vehicle, organic camera pull-back, custom collectibles (flowers + trash), uniform Office wall with 8-color variety, denser lamps, full song-spaced gameplay tuning. Demonstrates the pipeline producing a polished one-of-one experience for a specific artist.

It Takes A Village (Canyon) — Platformer mode

New canyon environment with 3-height collectibles, double-jump + extended hang-time, "no game-over" forgiving mode, rolling wheels, diamond collectibles, song progress bar, always-on tutorial, results-screen polish. Audio unmute fix shipped alongside. Shows platformer mode now ready to host artist content, not just abstract levels.

Why these matter

Both are end-to-end proof that the song → concept art → 3D → game pipeline can deliver branded artist experiences. They also surfaced and forced fixes on real edge cases (vehicle wheel preservation, character swapping, audio fallback, void-damage modes) that now harden the engine for everyone.

Real-time relay infrastructure

Cloudflare Workers relay with Durable Objects GameRoom per match. WebSocket hibernation recovery so a worker restart doesn't drop in-flight games. 30Hz tick rate with smooth client-side interpolation between state ticks. Production relay URL wired up in the harness.

H2H (head-to-head)

Full ghost renderer with synced jump, slide, and celebration animations; lane sync; vertical-curve following on hills; postMessage integration with parent frame; dedicated MultiplayerHUD; H2H results screen.

Duet co-op mode

Stem-builder co-op where two players cooperatively trigger stems. Synced stem state, host config sharing on room join, dedicated co-op results screen.

Lobby + spectator system

Lobby with countdown, ready button gated on config load, room-state config persistence in Durable Object storage. Spectator camera + spectator lobby — anyone can watch live multiplayer matches without joining.

Customization

Ghost color picker, opacity slider, emote system, room settings panel, host toggles for ghost/score display. Player avatars with speed multiplier. Auto-removal of stale ghosts.

Currently gated

Modes restricted to Music Runner + Duet during testing. Flight and Drift disabled in MP for now — they'll come online as physics-sync mode matures. Mid-May ships the gated set; Q2 expands across all 10 modes.

Frame-ancestors + trusted origins for partner embedding

CSP frame-ancestors updated to allow Y8, Playgama, GamePix, and localhost. Portal-shell can be embedded in y8.com iframes without breaking. Same plumbing extends to Discord Activity iframe at launch.

Portal attribution end-to-end

Game sessions now record portal_id at the engine level — Phase 1 (engine sessions) and Phase 2 (frontend + backend regex matching) both shipped. When Discord Activity goes live, it'll plug into the same attribution pipeline with no additional work.

Embed-mode UX

Login button hidden in /e/ embed routes. Recording.js skipped in portal/embed contexts. Tab-pause/resume on the game modal. Cumulatively this is the embed UX Discord Activity will use.

What's left for Mid-May launch

Discord Activity SDK integration, Discord OAuth scopes, lobby/voice channel awareness, and submission to Discord's developer portal. Underlying iframe + attribution + embed UX is already production-tested via Y8 / Playgama traffic.