Three patches since the Locker opened, and this is the one that ties them together. Beta 2.15 rebuilt how Hard Money Heroes plays across its map. Beta 2.16 cut wasted work all over the arcade. Beta 2.17 makes the site lighter on your phone, gives every game its own colour, slows STACKED’s backgrounds down, teaches Tower of Power to speak touch, and puts your profile picture everywhere it should be.
- 4Games, each with its own colour now
- 60 sMinimum time a STACKED background stays
- ~1 MBLess to download on /games on a phone
- 0Ranked rules changed in 2.16 and 2.17
A note on numbers: Lester’s Arcade is in beta while we build, test and evolve everything on the way to mainnet. Every version here is a beta version, and Ranked runs on the LitVM testnet, where zkLTC has no monetary value. The measurements below come from our own test machines and emulated phones, not from every device.
| Patch | The big thing | Also |
|---|---|---|
| Beta 2.15 | Hard Money Heroes: connected roads, escorts, defenses, rescues and a fresh Ranked board | Med and ammo pickups, civilians and birds in the districts, Locker and Scores fixes |
| Beta 2.16 | A speed and recovery pass across all four games | Faster home page, Tower’s own game page, stalled publishes retry the same saved run |
| Beta 2.17 | Lighter pages, one colour per game, your picture everywhere | Calmer STACKED, Tower touch controls, clearer copy and fixes |
Beta 2.17: the arcade
- Your picture, everywhere. Upload a photo or pick an arcade avatar and the menu in the top right shows it too, not just your profile. It follows renames, remembers your picture between pages, and works for hidden profiles.
- A colour for every game. Hard Money Heroes is cobalt, Chikun’s Escape is ember red, STACKED is violet and Tower of Power is jade. You’ll see it on the cabinet cards, the game screens and the Scores tabs. Brass stays the arcade’s own button colour.
- Lighter pages. Cabinet cards show a still picture first and only download their spinning 3D sheet when you can see them, which saves about 1 MB on /games on a phone. Phones get banners sized for their screens, Scores, Profile and Settings no longer download the home page’s art, and the logo is about 40% smaller.
- Scores on a phone. The four games and the four time periods sit in tidy 2×2 grids, the medals are drawn instead of emoji, and your own row catches up after you change your name or picture.
- Words that say what they mean. Plainer loading lines, one style of page title, Settings controls that match the games (Tower blocks on Space; Hard Money Heroes swaps weapons on Q), and a Help & trust page that says what it covers.
STACKED: calmer backgrounds
The music-driven worlds behind the board used to change on almost every line clear. Now a background stays for at least 60 seconds of play. After that, your next Tetris can bring in a new one, and if no Tetris comes it changes at about 90 seconds. It always waits for a calm moment, never changes while you’re close to topping out, and fades over three seconds. Clears, combos and Hammers still light it up. With reduced motion on, the background doesn’t change at all.
Those crossfades also got cheaper: each scene is now drawn only where it shows. On our desktop test GPU the worst crossfade went from 0.73 ms to 0.38 ms per frame, and from 0.83 ms to 0.48 ms at phone resolution.
Tower of Power: made for touch
- Instructions for the controls you’re using. On a phone the tutorial, pause screen and start card name the touch buttons; on a controller they name pad buttons; on a keyboard, keys. Switch mid-fight and they follow.
- No accidental hits after a pause. A button still held when you resume no longer lands as a punch, kick or throw.
- Special shows when you can’t afford it. The touch SPECIAL button dims when Lester doesn’t have the health to pay for it.
- A lighter start. The first floor waits only for its own props, and the rest load quietly once you’re fighting.
Hard Money Heroes: a quicker way in
Your hero’s extra motion sheet now waits until you enter the level instead of competing with the art you need to start. In our tests that is about 3.4 MB less to download before the Enter button is ready on a desktop and about 1 MB less on a phone, and on a throttled phone connection the game was ready about a second sooner. Enemy health bars in big fights now reuse their drawings instead of rebuilding them every frame. The browser tab also says Hard Money Heroes instead of an internal name.
Big fights on phones still need more work, and we’re not promising a frame-rate jump from this patch.
Chikun’s Escape
If you open Chikun’s Escape on its own, outside the arcade, it now tells you straight away to play it from Lester’s Arcade, with a button to get there, instead of waiting and blaming your connection.
Beta 2.15 and 2.16, in case you missed them
Beta 2.15 rebuilt Hard Money Heroes across map v4: roads now connect the districts, missions include multi-stop escorts, two-wave defenses and guarded rescues, and med and ammo pickups are easy to recognise. Civilians move like people and small birds live in the districts. Those changes are Ranked rules r3, so Hard Money Heroes started a fresh board, and earlier runs stay in the Archive on Scores.
Beta 2.16 was a speed and recovery pass. Hard Money Heroes stopped drawing terrain and roads you can’t see, the home page’s opening film loads its final picture straight away, Tower of Power got its own game page, a stalled publish now times out and retries the same saved run, and every game cleans up properly when you leave mid-load.
What didn’t change
Beta 2.16 and 2.17 change no Ranked rules: Hard Money Heroes stays on r3, Chikun’s Escape on r3, STACKED on r2 and Tower of Power on v10, and every board you’re on today carries on. Free play still needs no wallet and never touches the chain, every Ranked run is still checked by the arcade’s server before it’s published, and Ranked still runs on the LitVM testnet.
Still on our list: testing on real phones and wallets beyond our emulators, smoother Hard Money Heroes in the biggest fights on phones, and a faster Chikun’s Escape start on slow connections.