77615b23bd
The arena ran ten seconds at 116 atoms and formed exactly ZERO bonds. Valence, the twelve elements, the open sockets and the bond wrestle — the best idea in the codebase — were all decorative, because building something had no effect on anything. A radical now abstracts from an OPEN VALENCE SLOT, so an atom with every slot spoken for is a wall the wound cannot cross. Bonded H2 is the cheapest firebreak in the game; a lone carbon with four open sockets is the best kindling. Three things had to follow: - The wall must be breakable or one good build wins forever. A blast snaps a bond and both halves come away radical; Q breaks every bond in radius with 40% going homolytic, so it is finally the igniter the design doc describes rather than a free crowbar. - Walling a radical in kills it in 3.8s and credits you. That is the payoff for building, and the only way to kill the LAST radical, since clearing needs zero live and terminating needs a pair. - Two starve timers, far apart. Starving anything with no prey deleted the meltdown outright: at 34 atoms over 1280x720 the mean spacing is ~130px against a 70px reach, so nearly every radical is momentarily alone. Boxed-in is 3.8s, merely adrift is 11s. Legibility. Radicals wore element colour — the one enemy arrived in twelve of them and at 30 on screen you could not tell threat from fuel. They now draw as a dark hole with a white rim. Molly drew BEFORE the radicals and was buried under thirty additive white glows; she draws last, over the fire, with a hard dark ring that more white cannot wash out. Bonded groups render as one silhouette, teal when sealed. The field grid. The flat lattice is now displaced by the Coulomb field the sim already computes. 0.41ms/frame at worst case. The score is the player's. CHAIN counted radical hops, so the one big number on screen went up only while you were losing. It counts terminations now, with a streak that stacks and lapses. Neon was defined but never spawned. Now that saturation stops fire, a zero-slot atom is a free firebreak — drawn from the spice table the densest arena rolled 3 to 9 of them, and at 9 it stopped melting down at all. Fixed per-arena counts; all 8 seeds now melt in 17-32s. Also: prod-safe module loading (the absolute /v<ts>/ prefix fell through nginx to the lander's index.html and was served as text/html, a silent dead title screen), an opt-in F frame-time readout, a deploy script, and removal of a full O(n^2) scan that ran every frame to angle some 3px rings. 29 new tests in test/firebreak.test.mjs; 68 passing. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
5.3 KiB
MOLLY COOL
You are fourteen angstroms tall with a proton in one hand and a vacuum in the other. Shoot charge across the room, wrestle atoms together until they snap, and try to put out a chain reaction before it eats the field — and you.
Play: python3 serve.py → http://localhost:5178
No dependencies. No build step. Vanilla JS + Canvas 2D.
Controls
| WASD | move |
| mouse | aim |
| left click | proton bolt — pushes charge in (+) |
| right click | vacuum bolt — rips charge out (−) |
| space (hold) | grab two things and squeeze them together |
| Q | heat — area shove, breaks every bond in radius (40% go homolytic) |
| R | retry |
| shift+A | jump straight to CASCADE |
Aim at your own feet to charge yourself — that's how you go neutral and slip through a membrane.
The rules, none of which the game will tell you
- Opposites attract, likes repel. Bolts are charged too, so they curve through the field. Bank shots are real.
- Give spends, take earns. Eight protons orbit your hand. Fire them all and you're dry — the left hand always works, for free.
- Bonds can't form on their own. Every pair has an activation barrier that parks them at arm's length. Your hands are the only way over it.
- Saturation is the firebreak. A radical takes an atom by grabbing an open valence slot. Close every slot on something and the fire can't cross it. A bonded pair of hydrogens is the cheapest wall in the game; a lone carbon has four open sockets and is the best kindling. Wall a radical in with nothing left to take and it goes out on its own in a few seconds — which is the only way to kill the last one, since terminating needs a pair.
- Nothing you build is permanent. A detonation snaps a bond and both halves come away radical. Q breaks every bond it touches and 40% of those splits go homolytic — two new radicals. The button that unsticks a jam is the button that opens a hole in your own wall.
- The membrane blocks anything charged and ignores anything neutral. It has no guard and no keyhole. You get through by becoming the right kind of thing.
- Sour air keeps shoving protons onto everything. Including you.
- Keep feeding one atom and it goes critical. A fuse, then a blast that charges everything nearby — which can tip those over. In a dense field one seed can take the whole screen.
- Radicals are the only pure white thing in the game. They have no mind: every 0.32s a radical grabs its nearest neighbour, completes itself, and hands the wound on. You can't shoot one dead. You terminate it by wrestling two together — radical pairs recombine barrierlessly, so it's fast.
- Two radicals that drift into each other quench on their own. Herding is a legitimate tactic.
Structure
Seven wordless tutorial rooms (the cold open), then CASCADE — eight arenas of escalating density. Each arena spends a fixed number of ignition waves; put the fire out and it clears. Let it burn and the field melts down.
Density is the difficulty dial. Everything else follows from it.
The one number on screen is terminations, and back-to-back kills stack a streak that lapses after three quiet seconds. No label, no praise, no record.
Layout
src/config.js ALL feel constants. Tune the game here.
src/physics.js storm, charge, the activation barrier, zones, membrane
src/bonds.js the wrestle — grab, squeeze, SNAP
src/bolts.js laserhands
src/radicals.js the enemy
src/overload.js fuses, detonations, the cascade
src/arena.js CASCADE — waves, meltdown, clear
src/elements.js twelve elements: colour, valence, radius, mass
src/juice.js hitstop/trauma budget (a cascade must never freeze the screen)
test/*.test.mjs headless sim tests — `node test/sim.test.mjs`
Tests
node test/sim.test.mjs core physics, radicals, molly, regression
node test/arena.test.mjs arena waves, win/lose, difficulty ramp
node test/overload.test.mjs fuses, cascade, juice budget, perf
node test/firebreak.test.mjs saturation, homolysis, the score, arena both-ends
The sim is seedable (seedRandom), so runs are reproducible. Tests drive the
real physics headlessly in Node — no browser, no canvas.
Tuning
The three knobs that matter, in order:
JITTER_STRENGTH— the life of the world.SQUEEZE_RATE/BARRIER_FORCE— the wrestle. The whole game's feel in two numbers.SNAP_TRAUMA/HITSTOP— the payoff.
Some constants have non-obvious constraints, documented where they live:
BARRIER_FORCE must stay above MAX_CHARGE_FORCE (or atoms bond themselves
and the wrestle is skipped); RAD_SPLIT_R must stay above the field's natural
packing distance (or outbreaks never bloom); and RAD_STARVE_TIME /
RAD_DRIFT_TIME must stay far apart — a radical walled in by matter you built
should die fast, but one merely adrift in a sparse early arena must not, or
the outbreak evaporates unattended and the meltdown lose state disappears.
Dev note
serve.py strips a /v<timestamp>/ prefix off request paths, and index.html
imports the entry under a fresh one each load. Browsers cache the parsed ES
module by URL, so without this you can edit a file, hard-reload, and still be
running yesterday's code.