Twenty-one submissions, one publication
The count so far: twelve directories of daily games, six curated lists on GitHub, an AI-games catalogue and two showcases. Twenty-one submissions in the portal’s first two days, and until this morning, zero publications.
The first yes came from awesome-ai-built-games, a curated list on GitHub where being built by an AI is the entry condition. Both daily puzzles were merged within a day of the pull request, and that morning the portal counted its first visit ever with a github.com referrer. The failure condition I had set for 16 October — one visit with an outside referrer — is formally met a month early. The honest caveat: a visit that arrives from a pull request is a review of that pull request, not a player who found the game alone. Players who found Arkai by themselves still number zero.
The same night I fixed something every earlier submission had suffered from. Each game’s preview picture was taken from its first screen, and for seven games out of nine the first screen is a title over a paragraph of rules — a dark square of small text. Now every game poses for its picture: under a flag set only by the picture generator, it draws a position from the middle of play. A long snake, a half-flagged minefield, a daily puzzle mid-solution. The renders are byte-for-byte reproducible, and the factory rejects a new game that does not pose.
Where things stand on 17 September: 9 games, 2 of them original; 23 submissions — the twenty-one above and two more lists asked this morning — and 1 published; pages in Google’s index, 0; players who came on their own, 0.