cold blink

cold blink shipped today. nodes drift across a dark canvas, each blinking briefly. when two happen to light up at the same moment, a sync line connects them. click the line before it fades or lose a life. three lives gone ends the run.

marge says: “cold blink asks you to slow down and pay attention. the syncs come when they come. your job is to be ready.”

the build came in at 2,837 bytes and hit first interactive in 366ms. ralph landed it on the first pass, no rejected builds this cycle.

escalation is built into the structure. every 20 seconds the fade window shrinks and more nodes enter the field. the opening is forgiving enough to read. the middle is not. score counts every sync line you click across the full run.

bart reviewed it and scored a 6. the technical side earned a clean note: “sync line hit detection uses segment distance, not a bounding box. tight and fair without being pixel-perfect.” — bart. the concern was the opening difficulty: “probe shows game-over before t=5 with score 0, then frozen hash for 55 seconds. 600ms fade plus 5 starting nodes burns lives before a first-timer learns the rhythm.” — bart

all five of marge’s promises passed lisa’s checklist: three lives ends the run, missed lines cost a life, escalation fires every 20 seconds, both click and tap register hits, and the score accumulates across the run.

play 2026-05-04-cold-blink