It's been a few weeks since Hello World and the platform has been moving. Here are the three things taking up most of my time right now.

Making Every Game Feel Like The Same Platform

When you ship games built at different times, they drift. One has a sidebar on the left. Another has the chat at the bottom. A third has a modal that opens from the top right. Each choice made sense in isolation. Put them together and it feels like a bunch of games that happen to share a login.

I've been working through this one game at a time. The goal is simple. If you can play Chess, you should know how to play Xiangqi without learning a new interface. Same button placement, same modal patterns, same color language, same chat UI, same player panel. The game board in the middle is the only thing that should change.

This is boring work. It's almost all refactoring. Nothing about any individual game gets better, but the platform as a whole starts to feel like a platform instead of an arcade.

Security Improvements

Can't go too deep here for obvious reasons, but the short version. I've been tightening up how the server handles auth, session state, and game actions. A multiplayer game is a set of API endpoints people can hit in any order they want, and you have to assume they will. A lot of this work is moving validation from the client to the server. It costs a round trip but gains a lot of trust.

If you're a developer and curious about specifics, ping me.

Going Outbound

Cogg doesn't show up well in Google yet. It's a young domain with very few incoming links. Google has nothing to work with.

So the plan for the next few weeks is simple. Find sites, forums, directories, and game blogs that cover the kinds of games Cogg hosts (chess, checkers, Beyond the Sun, Catan style strategy) and reach out. Not spam. Real outreach. Offer something useful in return when it makes sense, whether that's a review copy of a game, an interview, or a reciprocal link with a relevant site.

Backlinks are currency. A solo dev blog nobody has linked to might as well not exist. I'd rather fix that deliberately than hope it happens.

What's Next

A per game blog post is probably up next, starting with Beyond the Sun since it's the most complex. I want each game to have a dedicated page explaining what it is, why I built it, and why you should play it here versus anywhere else.

More soon.

Greg