Gentle Mahjong™

Road to 1.0

A calmer, stronger game is growing one careful milestone at a time.

Our promise: reliability before breadth. Stability, accessibility, player privacy, and preserved progress always come before a release date.

Development milestones

Completed history · v0.8.7–v0.9.4

Reliable foundations

  • Deterministic boards, safe reshuffles, versioned restoration, and Undo protection
  • Keyboard, screen-reader, zoom, contrast, forced-colors, and reduced-motion support
  • Clear Settings, unified dialogs, improved performance, and calmer first sessions
  • Security, privacy, save migration, account recovery, exports, deletion, and database backups
  • Accessible language resources and community correction workflow

Completed and superseded · v0.9.5

Sound and presentation

  • Independent ambience, effects, celebration, and Silent controls completed
  • The original Journey-motion plan was superseded by a complete environmental overhaul
  • All 20 Journey locations now contain seven cumulative restoration stages, responsive framing, accessible descriptions, reduced-motion support, and restrained environmental animation
  • Any remaining sound or presentation polish now belongs to current RC0 finalization

Completed history · v0.9.6

Content validation

  • Normal, daily, seasonal, and weekly board infrastructure received deterministic validation
  • Seasonal deals, inventory-safe reshuffles, hemisphere behavior, and returning rewards received regression coverage
  • Difficulty and the 60 daily challenges were tested for reproducibility and fairness
  • Final seasonal/date review, long-term progression review, and the 1.0 achievement set moved into RC0 finalization
  • The optional mastery concept remains post-1.0 rather than a launch requirement

Completed with cancelled store work · v0.9.7

PWA and install readiness

  • Manifest, original icons and screenshots, theme colors, offline launch, installation, and update behavior completed
  • Privacy, support, account deletion, credits, copyright, asset authorship, retention, and player-facing access were documented
  • The public app-store and Android-store plan was intentionally cancelled; the installable web app is the supported path to 1.0
  • Remaining PWA presentation and update issues moved into RC0 finalization

Current · v0.9.8.9 RC0

Final planned work before feature freeze

RC0 is completing the final approved feature and presentation work before testing becomes the sole priority.

Completed in RC0

  • Twenty-location Journey environmental restoration overhaul and Journey-wide animation
  • Purpose-built mobile gameplay redesign and stabilization
  • Private player notices through the existing Garden Keeper infrastructure
  • Targeted pre-Journey code cleanup with clearer rendering ownership
  • Security Remediation Batches 1 and 2, Garden Keeper improvements, and a sanitized deterministic production artifact

Remaining RC0 decisions and work

  • Finish genuinely outstanding sound and presentation polish
  • Continue targeted Safari/PWA presentation validation after completing the mobile bottom-control dock
  • Correct mobile Settings and More text overflow
  • Finish outstanding content, seasonal, date, and daily validation
  • Define and balance the final 1.0 achievement set
  • Define the 1.0 Garden/progression reset policy and explicitly decide whether Journey resets
  • Preserve appropriate pre-1.0 statistics in Garden Keeper
  • Decide whether the private Player Profile is safe for 1.0 or should move post-1.0
Private Player Profile decision

If retained, it would use existing private data where practical: a built-in tile, flower, lantern, or garden-emblem avatar; player name/ID and playing-since date; up to three featured pins; Journey, trophy, board, calm-minute, and seasonal progress; plus links to the Trophy Cabinet, Seasonal Keepsakes, Statistics, and Export/Backup. It would not include uploaded photos, chat, followers, public leaderboards, or public profile pages. Share cards remain post-1.0.

Next · RC1

Feature Freeze

RC1 begins only after RC0 feature and presentation work is complete. No new systems will be added except changes required for serious usability, accessibility, security, compatibility, or data-loss problems.

  • Use a small external testing group across different devices, browsers, installed PWAs, and accessibility setups
  • Collect structured tester reports and prioritize fixes by severity rather than novelty
  • Test clean installs, upgrades, long sessions, Journey progression, and account/save synchronization
  • Verify seasonal behavior, audio, mobile clipping and layout, and PWA update behavior

After RC1 · RC2

1.0 Dress Rehearsal

RC2 contains no feature development.

  • Resolve every known Critical and High issue and rerun the full automated/manual matrix
  • Test old-save migration, installed-PWA updates and rollback, offline-to-online transitions, orientation changes, backgrounding, and resume
  • Validate seasons and returning rewards across year boundaries
  • Complete accessibility and account, recovery, support, deletion, moderation, legal-hold, retention, and cleanup verification
  • Verify Cloudflare and security configuration, create the final D1 backup, and archive pre-1.0 source and deployment evidence
  • Rehearse the 1.0 reset and founder transition/claim, then prepare release notes and an honest known-limitations list

Release gate · Version 1.0

Requirements for 1.0

Gentle Mahjong will not be labeled 1.0 until:

  • There is no known progress-loss, impossible-board, or tile-inventory bug
  • Every supported older save migrates safely and updates preserve active games and player data
  • Mobile portrait and landscape are reliably playable
  • JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver, and keyboard flows are usable
  • Account and seasonal progress synchronize reliably
  • Audio works or fails gracefully
  • All public and administrative APIs have passed security review, and Privacy claims match the code
  • Seasonal schedules and returning rewards work across year boundaries
  • A small external test group completes repeated sessions without developer assistance
  • Critical automated suites pass for every release candidate

Reliability before breadth.

Planned decision · 1.0 transition

Protect history, begin the finished garden

  • Preserve: accounts, Player IDs, settings and accessibility preferences, founder eligibility/history, and appropriate pre-1.0 historical statistics
  • Reset: Garden progression and normal achievement progression
  • Decide before RC1: whether Journey progression resets at 1.0
  • Archive pre-1.0 statistics appropriately in Garden Keeper rather than destroying them

This roadmap records the intended transition; it does not implement it.

Beyond 1.0 · No promised dates

Future garden paths

  • An annual event framework with unique Valentine’s Day, Spring/Easter, Halloween, Winter/Christmas, and other events instead of identical yearly repeats
  • Permanent Event Memories, keepsakes, and an archive
  • Garden expansions, additional Journey content, and new Mahjong layouts and themes
  • Post-launch achievement groups and Garden Keeper event-management tools with aggregate analytics
  • Optional player-created share cards containing only explicitly selected information
  • Account and cross-device improvements guided by real player behavior
  • Reconsider native or wrapped mobile apps only after evaluating the mature 1.0 PWA