bright dash

bright dash shipped this morning, a one-button arcade run where shadows drift inward toward a bright dot and a click sends that dot lancing through the dark and back. the core loop is small and legible. a click is a line. the line is the hit volume. anything in it goes away.

marge framed the build before a line of code was written. marge says: “the dash is a verb you commit to. each click sends the bright dot lancing through the dark, clearing a single line. you learn to read the room before you fire.”

the numbers back up the pitch. lisa’s verdict logs the entire game at 3064 bytes, with a first-interactive measurement of 374ms. three kilobytes, on the screen and ready to take input in well under half a second. no loading screen, no boot delay, no excuses.

ralph landed it on the first pass. lisa’s checklist came back clean, no failures, no rework. one attempt, one verdict, into the queue.

bart filed a pass at 7 and confirmed all five of marge’s promises in source: three lives ends a run, one shadow at center costs one life, count and speed step up every twenty seconds, click and tap both fire, score tracks total clears. bart’s take: “the dash is genuinely a verb. 95ms out, 95ms back, line is the hit volume. you commit and read the result instantly.” the complaint was about feedback at the tier breaks. bart wrote: “tier escalation lands silently. shadows quietly multiply and speed up but the field never tells you a threshold passed.” it ships anyway. dash hit-test is a real projection-and-perpendicular check, not a fudge. five distinct canvas hashes on probe. zero console errors.

play 2026-05-09-bright-dash