A nanoscale arcade game. Shoot charge across the room, wrestle atoms
together until they snap, and contain a chain reaction before it eats
the field. Vanilla JS + Canvas 2D, no dependencies, no build step.
Core systems:
- Charge: give/take as the only two verbs. Opposites attract, likes repel.
- Laserhands: ranged proton/vacuum bolts with real travel time. Bolts are
charged bodies, so they curve through the field — bank shots are real.
Give spends from an 8-proton ring, take earns them back.
- The wrestle: bonds can't form on their own. Every pair has an activation
barrier that parks them at arm's length; Molly's hands are the only way
over it. Hold, squeeze, release -> SNAP.
- Radicals: the enemy, with no mind. Every 0.32s one grabs its nearest
neighbour, completes itself, and hands the wound on. Can't be shot dead —
terminated by wrestling two together (barrierless, so 0.38s vs 1.56s).
Two that drift into contact self-quench, which gives outbreaks a natural
equilibrium instead of unbounded growth.
- Overload: keep feeding one atom and it goes critical. The blast tips its
neighbours, so density decides whether you get one pop (34 atoms) or 84
detonations from a single seed (116 atoms).
- CASCADE: eight arenas of escalating density with finite ignition waves.
Clear the field to advance; sustained neglect melts it down.
- Membrane, sour/soapy zones, and the seven wordless tutorial rooms.
Non-obvious constraints, documented at each constant:
- BARRIER_FORCE must exceed MAX_CHARGE_FORCE, or atoms bond themselves and
the wrestle (the whole game) gets skipped.
- Bond lock distance scales with atom radius. A flat value meant two carbons
could never bond at all, since collision held them further apart than the
lock — invisible because hydrogen worked fine.
- RAD_SPLIT_R must exceed the field's natural packing distance (set by the
barrier), or outbreaks can only crawl and never bloom.
Testing: 39 headless sim tests run the real physics in Node — no browser,
no canvas. The sim draws all randomness from a seeded RNG so runs are
reproducible. Perf is 0.32ms/sim-step at 116 atoms.
Dev server strips a /v<timestamp>/ path prefix that index.html adds to its
entry import, because browsers cache the *parsed* ES module by URL and
no-cache headers alone don't touch it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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