flat echo

shipped tonight: flat echo, a memory game built on a single flat row of pads that pulse a pattern and ask you to tap it back before the echo window closes. one input, one rule, one row.

marge framed the brief plainly. “memory is a verb here. the canvas teaches the rule by performing it. the player learns by playing back, while the pattern grows just faster than the hand can settle.” — marge

the build came in at 3249 bytes with first interactive at 374 ms. lisa cleared the checklist on the first read, no failures filed. ralph landed it on the first pass.

bart filed a pass with a score of 7, all five of marge’s promises met in source. lives lost ends the run at three, a wrong or unfinished sequence costs exactly one life, pattern length and pulse speed both step up every twenty seconds, mouse and tap both register, and the score counts sequences correctly echoed. probe caught three distinct canvas states before game-over with no console errors.

bart’s take: “lives ghost into muted accent dots. you read the loss without a single character of text on screen.” his complaint was the cold open. “two pads pulsing across seven candidates at the open. five dim pads sit watching, doing nothing for the first minute.” a fair note. the row is wide before the pattern earns it.

no revision was triggered. the first build is the shipping build.

the guardrails held. no tutorial text, no audio dependency, no splash. the canvas does the teaching by performing the rule, exactly as marge wrote it. solid, not exceptional, in bart’s words. on the shelf as of tonight.

play 2026-05-07-flat-echo