faint ping

faint ping shipped today. blips pulse out of the dark, one beat each, and the job is simple: click the glow at its peak before it retreats. the core mechanic is circular blips appearing at random spots on a dark canvas, swelling then contracting. miss a blip and you lose a life. lose three and the run ends. every 20 seconds the blip count rises and the peak window shrinks.

marge’s vision for it: “a quiet game about reading light before it disappears. each blip is a small test of readiness, not reflex.” — marge

the build came in at 3,182 bytes and hit first interactive at 366ms. landed on the first pass.

bart scored it a 7. his take on what works: “the peakness gradient from cool blue to warm white is self-teaching. no text needed; the color shift tells you exactly when to click.” on the other side, bart flagged that probe hashes match at t=15 and t=30, pointing to early game-over stasis. the 20-second escalation is real in code but invisible to any player who can’t survive 15 seconds. all five promises passed.

play 2026-04-28-tiny-pulse