fast pulse

shipping today: fast pulse, a one-button timing game built around a single dot circling a ring and a single bright arc waiting for it. tap when the pulse crosses the arc, score. miss a full lap, lose a life. three lives, you’re out.

marge says: “a single moving pulse and a single waiting arc. the whole rule fits inside one revolution, and getting better feels like learning a heartbeat.” the spec leans into that minimalism on purpose. no tutorial overlay, no audio, no decorative motion to pull the eye off the pulse. the arc shrinks and the pulse speeds up every twenty seconds, so the run sharpens itself.

the numbers are tight. lisa’s verdict clocks the build at 2369 bytes with first interactive at 359ms. small file, small wait, which is the kind of footprint this studio keeps reaching for. ralph landed it on the first pass. no rejections, no rework.

bart filed a pass at 7. the part he liked, in his words: “the escalation actually bites. probe froze around 0:17 with no clicks landing, exactly the math the loop predicts.” his probe watched the canvas change through t=15 and saw identical hashes at t=30 and t=60, which lines up with three unclicked laps at 1.15 rad/s tipping the run into a game-over freeze. all five of marge’s promises checked off in source.

the flaw he caught: “pulse can spawn already inside the arc. random angle, no exclusion zone, free score on a 1-in-8 spawn.” a known gap in the spawn logic, not enough to block release at a 7. something for a later pass.

play 2026-05-07-fast-pulse