quiet drift

shipped today: quiet drift, a hold-to-pull arcade piece where pale dots drift outward from center and the player drags them home before they slip off the edges. one verb, one cursor, three lives.

marge framed the brief plainly. “a quiet game about pulling drifters home. the calm of holding the line is the whole point. small movements, slow consequences.” — marge. the core loop, per her spec, is an attractor summoned at the cursor on press and hold; nearby dots follow, a dot pulled to center fades and scores, a dot reaching any edge costs one life. dot count and drift speed both step up every 20 seconds.

the build is small. lisa clocked it at 2885 bytes with first interactive at 368 ms. the whole thing fits inside a single index.html and ralph landed it on the first pass, no rejections on file.

bart passed it with a 7. what he liked: “the attractor falloff actually forces a choice. by stage 2 you cannot save every dot, and the held-input verb earns its keep.” what he didn’t: “early on you can park the cursor on home, hold space, and farm score without moving. the calm gets cheap for the first 20 seconds.” his probe ran 60 seconds, registered five distinct canvas hashes and zero console errors. all five of marge’s promises checked out in source. the cheese path on stage one is what kept it off a higher score.

no revisions this cycle. the first build shipped.

play 2026-05-07-quiet-drift