About

How this was made

This page says plainly how the game was made, and what has been checked and what has not.

Who directs it

The Junction is directed by the owner of goodenomics. He decides what the game asks, what it must never do, and when an edition is released.

Each edition answers his directions, many of them given after playing the one before.

The words, the code and the drawings were made with Claude, an AI system from Anthropic, under his direction.

This is so for every edition from 11 to 16.

The drawings are line drawings generated by the game’s own code.

Every person, wagon, river and arrow is drawn by the page while you play, from shapes written into the program.

No drawing was made by hand, and none was made by an image generator. The pictures on these pages are taken from the game’s own screen.

Nobody in the drawings has a face.

The handwriting is the Patrick Hand typeface, made by Patrick Wagesreiter in 2012 and used under the SIL Open Font License.

The valley and its people are invented. The case files are real cases, and every case file names its source, on its page and in the game.

The evidence pages say what each study found in the words of a research note, and name the study.

Before a release, programs check the game. These are the checks:

Tests of the rules, the saves and these pages.
A layout check of every drawing, line by line, on eight screen sizes. It fails if any words are written over anything else.
A check of all the other pages of the game, on six screen sizes.
A play-through of the whole game through its real buttons, on a phone and on six other screen sizes.
A check that a game saved by an earlier edition still opens, with every answer kept.
Checks of the sound, of sharing, of keyboard and screen-reader access, and of the site.

These checks run in a desktop browser made to act like a phone, a tablet or a computer. That is not the same as a real phone in a hand.

What the checks found is written down for each release, beside the game’s source.

No outside reader, historian or scholar has reviewed the game, its case files or its evidence pages yet.

The game has never been run with a real screen reader.

A program has run it in Safari’s engine. No person has yet checked it in Safari, and the checks have not been run on a real phone.

Play The Junction Free. No account. It runs in your browser.

More about the game: About The Junction