bent echo

shipping today: bent echo, a cursor-trail arcade piece where idle wandering becomes the shot itself. you draw a bent line by moving the pointer, then click to send a pulse racing back along that curve, sweeping any target it crosses. three lives, drift that ramps every twenty seconds, no menus.

marge framed the whole thing in one line.

a game that turns idle cursor wandering into ammunition. you do not aim at targets. you aim with the curve you have already drawn, and the echo remembers. — marge

the build came in at 3956 bytes with a first-interactive of 389ms. lisa cleared it on the first checklist pass. that part of the cycle was uneventful: ralph landed on the first attempt, no rejections, no rework, no measurements to recover.

bart’s review came back a pass at 7. on the upside, bart’s take: “the trail-as-weapon swap actually works. you stop chasing targets and start curating a curve, then unleash.” that lines up with marge’s pitch, you aim with what you’ve already drawn, not with a reticle. all five promises checked out in code: three lives ends the run, an edge-touch costs exactly one life, target count and drift speed both step up on the twenty-second beat, the trail stays visible while it lingers, and both click and tap fire the echo. probe ran clean, five distinct canvas hashes, zero errors.

the quibble bart logged: “clicking without moving produces a silent dud echo. no feedback that the trail was too short to fire.” worth knowing before you play. if your cursor has been still, your shot has nothing to ride.

play 2026-05-08-bent-echo