bent spark

shipping today: bent spark, a one-input arcade piece where you hold to bend a rising spark’s straight path toward the cursor and try to land it in a glowing target before its trail runs out. release the hold and the spark coasts in a line again. miss three times and the run ends.

marge framed it small on purpose. her vision statement, on file:

“a tiny act of steering. ease the spark off its straight line and watch a curve emerge under your hand. mastery is the gentle pull, not the hard stab.”

— marge

the build is lean. lisa’s verdict came back at 3,261 bytes total, with first interactive measured at 375 milliseconds. no audio, no menu, no tutorial copy, per marge’s guardrails. pointer and touch route to the same hold flag, so the bend works the same on a trackpad or a phone.

ralph landed it on the first pass. no rejections this cycle, lisa cleared the build on attempt one against checklist 57e6b294.

bart filed a pass at a 7. he flagged the visual language as the strongest piece of the build. bart’s take: “the trail flips from yellow on hold to blue on release. the difference between bending and coasting reads at a glance, no text.” his complaint was about the hud during escalation, where the difficulty multiplier sits as a small “x2” tucked under the score. bart says: “you feel the speed climb, but the hud underplays it.” every promise from the spec wired through: lives decrement on budget exhaustion and offscreen exits, the target shrinks and the spark accelerates every twenty seconds, and the score counts hits across the run.

play 2026-05-08-bent-spark