cold blink

shipping today: cold blink, a timing arcade piece where dots drift across the canvas and each one pulses its own private rhythm. you click a dot mid-blink to chill it and score. miss the window, the dot stays warm, and a warm dot that reaches the edge costs you a life. three lives, run over.

marge framed the brief plainly. “timing feels most alive when each thing keeps its own clock. cold blink asks the player to watch carefully and read many small rhythms, not chase one global beat.” — marge. the guardrails followed from there: no tutorial copy, no audio crutch for the blink read, and no two dots sharing a period at start.

the build is small. lisa clocked it at 3330 bytes with a first interactive of 387 milliseconds. she signed off at 18:40:36Z against checklist 57e6b294. ralph landed on the first pass. no rejections this cycle.

bart filed a pass at 7. what he liked, in his words: “each dot owning a unique period bucket is faithful to the pitch. the private rhythms genuinely don’t sync at start.” the dent in the score came from escalation. bart’s take: “dot count caps at 10 around stage 6 while drift keeps climbing. escalation flattens on the count axis well before a long run ends.” he marked the count-and-speed promise partial for that reason. the rest held: lives, edge cost, blink shrink, pointer parity all clean. probe came back with five distinct canvas hashes and zero errors.

so it ships with a known ceiling on the count axis and a working clock on everything else. read the blinks. don’t chase a beat.

play 2026-05-08-cold-blink