FICTIONAL EXAMPLE: not a real person, not real corpus. Part of the examples/ worked corpus (persona: Sam Rivers). See examples/README.md.

Playtest Fridays: put the latest build in front of a stranger every week

Every Friday, whatever is playable goes in front of someone who isn't me and hasn't seen it that week. Not "a build exists somewhere," but a stranger's hands on it, the same week it changed.

Why it serves principle:ship-before-its-ready

The principle is about shipping rough and letting players teach me; a weekly cadence is what keeps that from being a one-time act of courage at launch. If the only exposure to real players is the eventual store release, the principle is aspirational talk. This habit is the rehearsal.

What counts

A person outside my own head plays the current build (or the current tutorial segment, if that's all that's ready) for at least five minutes, and I write down one concrete moment they hit that I didn't expect. Watching a friend nod along on a call does not count (it has to be someone who can get stuck without me coaching them through it).

Lapse signal

Two consecutive Fridays with nothing playable in front of a stranger moves this to lapsed. One missed Friday because the build was genuinely broken is a rep lost, not a pattern yet.

Evidence

• 2026-02-13: kept. Two people from the local dev-meetup Discord played the vertical slice; both got stuck on the same jump I'd never noticed was ambiguous.
• 2026-02-20: missed. A touch-input regression broke the build Thursday night; there was nothing playable by Friday.
• 2026-02-27: kept. Ran the tutorial past three strangers at the meetup. All three took twice as long as intended to reach the first real choice, confirming what the project log already suspected: the tutorial is too long.