Cleaning up, and finding two pieces of work that never arrived

A cleanup round, not a build round.

A number of separate development branches had piled up, and most were exactly what you'd expect: already fully processed, or a test that got reverted again. Two stood out — multiple commits, well documented, clearly tested, and yet never merged into the main line.

A language switch that never arrived.

Anyone who never chose a language now gets English as the starting position instead of Dutch — a deliberate, earlier choice is always respected, Dutch included. Alongside that: eight missing translations (a few colleague names, two themes) that only surfaced during a full pass through the game, and one small visual thing — the stamp on the end-screen poster now shows the mark itself instead of a text frame that no longer referred to anything.

A music theme that got adjusted three times.

The in-game theme got a warmth layer — some reverb, some saturation — so it wouldn't sound so bare. On full chords that saturation turned out to sound harsh instead (running dozens of simultaneous tones through a non-linear curve produces new, non-harmonic tones), so that step came back out while the reverb stayed. The fast, nervous in-game ostinato has been removed entirely; the calmer menu theme now plays everywhere. And the music gradually fills out the further you get into the game, tied to the phase instead of to scope pressure.

Before merging: a trial run.

Before anything was actually merged, a trial merge on a temporary copy first — purely to see whether it would clash with everything that's changed since. The music theme merged in without a single conflict. The language switch clashed on exactly one line: the copyright comment that's since been added at the top of the file, against the language switch on that same line. One line merged by hand, and done.

The bundled game file itself never belongs in that process — after a merge it just gets rebuilt, not hand-merged. The test suite afterwards: all clean.