What shipped
Helm ships every week. This page is the record: what actually landed in the product, month by month, translated out of engineering shorthand into what it means on a venue floor. Newest first.
July 2026
- Program days run themselves. Author a day's itinerary once and the venue executes it: lobby boards light up on their own at open, scheduled activities launch on the right cluster of stations, and the end-of-day wind-down cleans every seat while refusing to touch anyone still playing.
- The cloud left the building. Helm's cloud now runs on managed infrastructure. Stations, game licensing, and telemetry all talk to the hosted service directly, so the floor keeps working with zero on-site servers and nothing tied to any one computer at the venue.
- The game-account vault went cloud-side. Credentials for rented titles resolve from an encrypted cloud vault with per-station leases. Fifty-eight accounts migrated and verified in the cutover, and every rental tile is cross-checked against its license pool so a game can never appear on the floor with no copies behind it.
- Quests built on what is real. Daily quests now only ever reference games and actions the telemetry actually tracks, they live on one surface instead of two, and they sit up front where players see them before launching anything.
- The idle screen wakes on intent. The attract screen dismisses on a deliberate press, not a bumped mouse or a passing vibration, so the invitation stays on screen until a player actually answers it.
- Cleaner game rentals, end to end. When a rented game session ends, the station now knows exactly which processes to close and which house account to restore for that specific title, driven by the game catalog instead of hand-kept lists. Sign-out before sign-in was tightened too, closing the stuck-account cases that used to need a staff visit.
- Pin a game to a seat. A rented game license can be pinned to a preferred station, so a title always lands where you want it: the party table, the streaming rig, the coaching row.
- Operator console design pass. Time, Members, Payment, and the wall board were rebuilt to read like finished product, and the modern console is now the default front desk app.
- Stations sell the session while signed out. An idle station now previews tonight's quests, blurred until sign-in. The room itself makes the case for sitting down.
- A curated launch library out of the box. The cloud catalog now seeds a full LAN lineup on day one, curated for youth-appropriate, free-to-start, actively updated titles.
- Venue events are product data. Author an event once in the console and every station's player screen leads with it. The venue's look and opening hours live in the same place, so the whole floor changes together.
- Opening hours drive shutdown. Venue auto-close: the weekly station shutdown schedule now follows the hours you set in the console, instead of living in a separate script someone has to remember.
- New venue onboarding in one step. Bringing a new location online is now a single provisioning action plus a console screen, not a week of hand setup.
- A live program board for the lobby TVs. Classes, events, and the day's itinerary render on the venue's screens straight from the schedule.
- Match tracking hardened. Two per-game reporting gaps were closed, so real match results from every supported title now reliably land on player ranks and the venue leaderboard.
- The game supply chain, closed. Stations pull their game lineup from the cloud catalog when they start, and keep an offline copy for internet-down days. Adding a game to a venue no longer means touching each machine. New titles even arrive with branded tile art, generated automatically.
June 2026
- Membership checkout at the seat. A regular who is ready for more than tonight can pick a program and pay by card right at the station, no front desk detour.
- Are we ready to open? One rollup answers the morning question: every station's health, anything that drifted overnight, and what still needs a hand, in a single glance.
- Win them back. Lapsed regulars surface automatically with context (last visit, favorite games), so retention outreach becomes a list you work, not a hunch.
- The telemetry watches itself. A station that quietly stops reporting gets flagged instead of silently falling off the charts. Pipeline health has its own panel in the console.
- A dedicated reliability pass. A systematic bug hunt across the cloud, console, and player screen closed more than thirty confirmed findings in one sustained push.
- Idle stations became signage. Attract mode: a station nobody is using plays branded motion graphics for featured games instead of sitting on a dead desktop.
- Manager-first console navigation. Six tabs that had grown up developer-shaped were folded around how a manager actually works, with the operations tools gathered in one place.
- Progression that celebrates in the moment. The rank ladder was rebuilt to be reachable, with weighted points and a 48-challenge set, and clearing a challenge or ranking up now celebrates on the player's screen as it happens.
- A skill map for every player. The ranks page shows each player where they stand per skill and exactly what to practice next.
- The coaching board. A hands-off nudge list tells the crew who on the floor could use a visit and why, built from real play data.
May 2026
- The console can direct any station. A command channel connects the front desk to every seat, and game-license grants now flow to the right station automatically.
- One keystroke to anywhere. A command palette in the operator console: extend a timer, seat a member, jump to any screen, all from the keyboard.
- Insights from the event stream. Daily rollups for station utilization and game popularity render in the console, computed from the same events the floor already emits.
- Five more games report real results. Per-game match adapters landed for five additional titles, feeding ranks and leaderboards with zero manual score entry.
- Players see their own balance. A wallet view on the player screen shows time remaining and history, the foundation for self-serve top-up at the seat.
- Reprice without a rollout. The pricing ladder became editable in the console, and every station picks up changes live. No engineer, no deploy window.
- Scheduled station power. The console plans the week's power-up and shutdown per station, so the floor is warm at open and dark after close.
- Small things that save a match. Controllers report low battery to the crew before they die mid-game, and stations sample network health continuously.