The site borrowed PoE's visual language — passive-tree layout, plasma
connections, an RPG stats panel — without any of its mechanic. Nodes were
purely decorative. This is the interaction the concept was promising.
- New utils/allocation.ts: path-to-root walking, allocate/deallocate, edge
state, and URL encode/decode. Pure, 17 unit tests.
- Allocation is path-connected like the game: allocating a leaf brings its
whole path, and deallocating a node removes its descendants so nothing is
ever orphaned. pathToRoot is cycle-safe, and a test asserts every real node
reaches the origin.
- New pixi/allocation.ts: the path reads as "lit" by dimming everything else
rather than brightening the selection — the tree is already near its
brightness ceiling, so recession is the only headroom. Nodes dim via alpha
(nothing tweens it after the entrance); connections dim via tint, because
their alpha is driven by the permanent plasma pulse and writing to it would
fight the animation every frame.
- Shareable via ?build=. Encoded as node ids, not indices: a bitset would be
shorter, but any edit to data.ts would silently re-point every previously
shared link at the wrong nodes. Decoding re-derives each path, so a
hand-edited or partially-stale link can't produce a broken build, and
unknown ids are dropped rather than throwing.
- Allocation hangs off a button in the modal rather than the node click,
which already opens that modal. BuildBar shows the count with share/reset;
share falls back to rewriting the address bar when the clipboard is blocked.
Two bugs found while verifying:
- Both deep links (?build and ?tour) had ended up nested inside the
first-visit coach-hint setTimeout, so a shared link did nothing at all for
a returning visitor and waited out the whole intro for everyone else —
backwards, since a shared link is precisely the cold-arrival case. Hoisted
to run immediately, unconditionally. A ?tour link now also skips the intro.
- A restored ?build= was wiped by the entrance, which tweens every node's
alpha to 1 after the deep link applies. The result was a full-brightness
tree with a counter claiming 4 allocated. Now re-applied once the entrance
finishes.
Verified in the production build: allocating TypeScript lights
origin -> Skills -> Languages -> TypeScript and dims the rest; the counter
reads 4; the generated link restores exactly that state on a cold load; Reset
clears it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
TehRiehlDealandClaude Opus 5
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