A light theme, 39 badges, and no more re-joining between games

Blip Party has always been a dark room. Neon on a night stage is the whole look, and we like it. But a party game gets played on a sunny balcony, on a projector in a bright office, on a phone in bed next to someone trying to sleep, and a dark screen is the wrong answer to all three. So the site now has a light theme. That's the first of three things in this post; the other two are a much bigger set of badges and a fix for the most annoying thirty seconds of any game night.

The lights come up

There's a small switch in the top bar, sun on one side and moon on the other, and a three-way control in the footer if you'd rather it follow your phone's setting. It follows your phone by default. In a room, the same switch lives in the reactions tray next to the sound toggle, because the moment you want it is usually mid-game, when somebody turns the big light on.

We thought this would be an afternoon. Flip the backgrounds, done. It wasn't, and the reason is worth a paragraph. Almost everything on the site is coloured by the same handful of neon accents, and about three hundred of those uses are text: a cyan room code, a gold streak, a lime score. Neon cyan on a white card is unreadable, so in light mode every accent quietly becomes a deeper version of itself, and the buttons keep the bright fill because dark lettering on bright cyan reads fine. The little pictures on every game card were drawn for the dark stage too, so all sixty of them, and the nine daily puzzles, were redrawn to sit on a pale tile instead of a black one. Then we went through every screen in a real browser and fixed what we'd missed. The Blip in the logo, for one, lost its eyes on white. It has them back.

Dark is still the brand and still the room most people will play in. But if you pinned light and something looks off, the Help button is in every room. The light theme is new enough that you will be the first to see some of it.

Badges for the things you were already doing

Since August the account page has had twelve badges, and if you look at them closely they're all the same badge. Play 10 games, play 50, win 5, win 25, bank 10,000 points, bank 100,000. Every one of them says 'keep going', and none of them notices what you were doing while you went. There are now 39, and most of the new ones look sideways rather than up.

Try five different games and you're an Explorer; thirty makes you a Catalog Crawler. Host a game for your friends and you're the Party Starter; host fifty and you're the Ringleader. Fill all eight seats once for a Full House. Win against five or more people for Crowd Pleaser. Finish a Party Mix, win a co-op game with your room, go one-on-one with three different friends, beat the same friend five times running and earn the name Nemesis. Keep a seven-day streak on any Blip Daily, then a thirty-day one. Draw your own Blip in the studio and wear it, and that's a badge too, because it should be.

Four badges belong to single games: win ten rounds of Quiz Hero, five of Doodle Dash, five of Fibber, five of Word Rush. And two are hidden. The account page shows them as a row of question marks until the night you earn one, and we're not going to say what they are here, except that both of them are about how a game ends rather than whether you won it.

A few rules, all of them on your side. Guests earn everything, no account needed, and if you make an account later your badges come with you. Blips don't count: a win only goes on your record when at least two real people were in the room, so beating three bots alone is a warm-up, not a trophy. New badges show up on the game-over screen the moment they unlock, and the account page now tells you what's next and how close you are, with a bar under each one.

If you've been playing since the summer, your first game over after this update may hand you a stack at once. That's your back catalogue being counted, not a bug.

Change the game, keep the room

Here's the thirty seconds. A game ends, everyone's laughing, and somebody says 'let's do a drawing one now'. Until this week that meant the host closed the room, made a new one, a new code went up on the TV, and six people typed four letters into their phones again. Every game night, every time. We watched it happen in playtests and kept telling ourselves it was fine.

The game-over screen now has two buttons for the host. Play again runs the same game back. Change game opens the full list of sixty, right there, and picks one for the whole room. Nobody leaves, nobody re-joins, the scores reset and the lobby opens on the new game with the same people in it. The lobby's own game chip does the same job before you start: tap it and switch. We built that one first for Discord, where everyone arrives in the room before anyone has decided what to play, and it turned out the web needed it just as much.

The small ones

Blips are quicker now. A Blip used to take its turn on a schedule, somewhere in the middle of the timer, which meant a host playing alone with three bots sat through the rest of every countdown waiting for Beep to make up its mind. Now, once every real player has answered, the Blips answer within a second or two. Games with a lot of typing, like the word scrambles, are left alone, because there a person's first move isn't their last.

The Pace dial now reaches every timer in every game, and the lobby quotes how long a game will take at the pace you picked. We wrote about that one in the last post. It's in this release.

• A light theme: switch in the top bar, three-way control in the footer, a row in the reactions tray. Follows your device by default.
• 39 badges instead of 12: breadth, hosting, full rooms, big wins, co-op, rivals, daily streaks, self-portraits, per-game wins, and two hidden ones.
• Play again or change game from the game-over screen without a new room code. The lobby chip switches games too.
• Blips move about a second after the last human does.

Then finish it and see what unlocks. Or check your ladder on the account page first.