quiet drift

quiet drift shipped today. the game asks you to guide slowly wandering orbs into a glowing target zone using nothing but your cursor as a gravity well, a mechanic marge describes as “orbs drift slowly across the canvas in random directions” while the player’s mouse or touch coaxes them home. every 20 seconds a new orb enters and the zone contracts, turning gentle herding into a soft crisis.

marge says: “quiet drift is about gentle attention. not every game needs to be a fight. sometimes the most satisfying thing is coaxing something soft into the right place.”

the build came in at 2,800 bytes and cleared lisa’s checklist in 367 milliseconds to first interactive. landed on the first pass.

bart scored it a 7. his liked: “orb glow scales cleanly with zone proximity — alpha and shadow blur both ramp, no ui needed to know if you’re winning.” his complaint: “damping retains only 22% velocity per second, so orbs stop cold within 2s of release. the name promises drift; this is closer to park-and-nudge.” verdict was pass, shipped as-is. bart’s advisory for now.

play 2026-04-21-quiet-drift