6466973f4e
Cloudflare fronts monsterrobot.games and serves the modules with max-age=14400, so a redeploy left you running four-hour-old code — the same staleness the dev server's /v<timestamp>/ prefix exists to prevent, just moved upstream. deploy.sh now purges the deployed paths, reading CF_API_TOKEN from deploy/.env (gitignored) at run time, and warns loudly rather than failing when it isn't set. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
149 lines
6.5 KiB
Markdown
149 lines
6.5 KiB
Markdown
# MOLLY COOL
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You are fourteen angstroms tall with a proton in one hand and a vacuum in the
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other. Shoot charge across the room, wrestle atoms together until they snap,
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and try to put out a chain reaction before it eats the field — and you.
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**Play:** `python3 serve.py` → http://localhost:5178
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No dependencies. No build step. Vanilla JS + Canvas 2D.
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---
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## Controls
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|---|---|
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| **WASD** | move |
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| **mouse** | aim |
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| **left click** | proton bolt — pushes charge in (**+**) |
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| **right click** | vacuum bolt — rips charge out (**−**) |
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| **space** (hold) | grab two things and squeeze them together |
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| **Q** | heat — area shove, breaks every bond in radius (40% go homolytic) |
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| **R** | retry |
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| **F** | frame-time readout (off by default) |
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| **shift+A** | jump straight to CASCADE |
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Aim at your own feet to charge **yourself** — that's how you go neutral and
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slip through a membrane.
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## The rules, none of which the game will tell you
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- **Opposites attract, likes repel.** Bolts are charged too, so they *curve*
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through the field. Bank shots are real.
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- **Give spends, take earns.** Eight protons orbit your hand. Fire them all
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and you're dry — the left hand always works, for free.
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- **Bonds can't form on their own.** Every pair has an activation barrier that
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parks them at arm's length. Your hands are the only way over it.
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- **Saturation is the firebreak.** A radical takes an atom by grabbing an
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*open valence slot*. Close every slot on something and the fire can't cross
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it. A bonded pair of hydrogens is the cheapest wall in the game; a lone
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carbon has four open sockets and is the best kindling. Wall a radical in
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with nothing left to take and it goes out on its own in a few seconds —
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which is the only way to kill the last one, since terminating needs a pair.
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- **Nothing you build is permanent.** A detonation snaps a bond and *both*
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halves come away radical. **Q breaks every bond it touches** and 40% of
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those splits go homolytic — two new radicals. The button that unsticks a
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jam is the button that opens a hole in your own wall.
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- **The membrane blocks anything charged and ignores anything neutral.** It has
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no guard and no keyhole. You get through by becoming the right kind of thing.
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- **Sour air keeps shoving protons onto everything.** Including you.
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- **Keep feeding one atom and it goes critical.** A fuse, then a blast that
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charges everything nearby — which can tip *those* over. In a dense field one
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seed can take the whole screen.
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- **Radicals are the only pure white thing in the game.** They have no mind:
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every 0.32s a radical grabs its nearest neighbour, completes itself, and
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hands the wound on. You can't shoot one dead. You **terminate** it by
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wrestling two together — radical pairs recombine barrierlessly, so it's fast.
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- **Two radicals that drift into each other quench on their own.** Herding is
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a legitimate tactic.
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## Structure
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Seven wordless tutorial rooms (the cold open), then **CASCADE** — eight arenas
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of escalating density. Each arena spends a fixed number of ignition waves; put
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the fire out and it clears. Let it burn and the field melts down.
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Density is the difficulty dial. Everything else follows from it.
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The one number on screen is **terminations**, and back-to-back kills stack a
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streak that lapses after three quiet seconds. No label, no praise, no record.
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## Layout
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```
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src/config.js ALL feel constants. Tune the game here.
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src/physics.js storm, charge, the activation barrier, zones, membrane
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src/bonds.js the wrestle — grab, squeeze, SNAP
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src/bolts.js laserhands
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src/radicals.js the enemy
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src/overload.js fuses, detonations, the cascade
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src/arena.js CASCADE — waves, meltdown, clear
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src/elements.js twelve elements: colour, valence, radius, mass
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src/juice.js hitstop/trauma budget (a cascade must never freeze the screen)
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test/*.test.mjs headless sim tests — `node test/sim.test.mjs`
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```
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## Tests
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```
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node test/sim.test.mjs core physics, radicals, molly, regression
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node test/arena.test.mjs arena waves, win/lose, difficulty ramp
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node test/overload.test.mjs fuses, cascade, juice budget, perf
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node test/firebreak.test.mjs saturation, homolysis, the score, arena both-ends
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```
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The sim is seedable (`seedRandom`), so runs are reproducible. Tests drive the
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real physics headlessly in Node — no browser, no canvas.
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## Tuning
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The three knobs that matter, in order:
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1. **`JITTER_STRENGTH`** — the life of the world.
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2. **`SQUEEZE_RATE` / `BARRIER_FORCE`** — the wrestle. The whole game's feel in
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two numbers.
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3. **`SNAP_TRAUMA` / `HITSTOP`** — the payoff.
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Some constants have non-obvious constraints, documented where they live:
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`BARRIER_FORCE` must stay above `MAX_CHARGE_FORCE` (or atoms bond themselves
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and the wrestle is skipped); `RAD_SPLIT_R` must stay above the field's natural
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packing distance (or outbreaks never bloom); and `RAD_STARVE_TIME` /
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`RAD_DRIFT_TIME` must stay far apart — a radical walled in by matter you built
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should die fast, but one merely adrift in a sparse early arena must not, or
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the outbreak evaporates unattended and the meltdown lose state disappears.
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## Deploy
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```bash
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./deploy/deploy.sh
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```
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Live at **https://monsterrobot.games/mollycool/**. Rsyncs `index.html` + `src/`
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to the games VPS at `/home/humanjing/monsterrobot.games/games/mollycool` and
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symlinks `mollycool -> games/mollycool` at the lander root, which is the
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convention `not-tonight` already uses — no nginx change needed.
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Two traps it handles for you, both of which produce a *silent* dead title
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screen rather than an error:
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- **forum-nginx mounts the lander read-only**, so `docker cp` fails quietly.
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Always write the host path. (Same trap as beyondmorp V2.)
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- **The dev server's `/v<timestamp>/` prefix is absolute.** In production it
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falls through nginx's `try_files` to the *lander's* `index.html` and gets
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served as `text/html`, which the browser refuses to execute as a module.
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`index.html` only uses the prefix on localhost and ships a relative
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specifier everywhere else. The script verifies the module's content-type,
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not just the page's status code.
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Cloudflare serves the modules with `max-age=14400`, so the script purges the
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deployed paths. Put `CF_API_TOKEN` in `deploy/.env` (gitignored) or you'll be
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running four-hour-old code after a redeploy until you hard-reload.
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## Dev note
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`serve.py` strips a `/v<timestamp>/` prefix off request paths, and `index.html`
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imports the entry under a fresh one each load. Browsers cache the *parsed* ES
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module by URL, so without this you can edit a file, hard-reload, and still be
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running yesterday's code.
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