A leaderboard nobody could reach, and a homepage that finally leads with the game

The homepage leads with the game now.

Until today, the first thing a visitor saw was the fake consultancy: a serious headline, a paragraph about stakeholders, and a small text link to the game underneath. Funny if you already knew what this was, a puzzle if you didn't. The headline stays — 'Serious consultancy. With room for improvement.' is still the best summary of the whole thing — but the text under it now says what this actually is, there's a real 'Play free on itch.io' button, and next to it runs one real sprint from the game: four Sales cards, a Core competency, 65 hours at $400, and the stamp landing on the bill. It's stitched together from screenshots of the actual game rather than a video, and anyone who has reduced motion switched on gets the final frame, standing still. The game page's gallery got the same treatment: English screens, including the card screen, which somehow was never in there before.

A newsletter, for when there's news.

There's now a way to hear about new versions without checking back: a signup form at the bottom of the homepage and the game page. Double opt-in — one email to confirm first, and an unconfirmed address disappears on its own within a week. Unsubscribing deletes the address entirely instead of flagging it. The privacy page has a new section on exactly what's kept and why.

The leaderboard had two bugs, and they were hiding each other.

Securing the leaderboard started as a small job: until today, anyone could post a score of a billion with a single line of code. That's closed now — a limit per sender (counted without storing anyone's IP address), a ceiling for truly absurd numbers, the run's seed saved with every score so a suspicious one can be replayed, and a delete button for the admin. The first version also capped scores per round, based on the phase targets — and that same evening it turned away a real run of $616,305,183. Late in a run, revenue climbs far faster than the targets suggest. The per-round cap is gone.

Reading the game's side of the exchange turned up something worse. The game was still sending scores to coonsultancy.nl — the old domain that, since the switch two days ago, only forwards and has no certificate of its own. A browser won't even start that conversation, so shares from the game have most likely been failing since 21 September, with a polite 'try again later' as the only trace. And had a score made it through, it would have been off by a factor of a hundred: the game shows revenue multiplied by 100, but sent the raw number. A $4,340 run would have landed on the board as $43.

Both are fixed in the game: the right domain, the amount as the player sees it, and the seed. Scores that came in the old way are recognised and corrected on the board rather than rewritten.

And the game itself lost half its weight.

The single file that runs on itch.io was 3 MB, and half of it was duplicates: fonts that are really one file per family were baked in once per weight — Caveat three times, JetBrains Mono three times — and the logos were full-colour images, even though the game only ever uses their shape. Merged and trimmed, the file is 1.4 MB, and every theme looks pixel-for-pixel the same as before.

The most on-brand finding of the day: a leaderboard that needed protecting against too many scores had, for two days, been receiving none at all.