Get Plunger'd: Cottage Brawl

A fast top-down roguelite for the crew, in the style of Enter the Gungeon. Pick your guy, grab a plunger, and fight across the cottage: the dock, the cabin, the trail, and the beach, six areas a day, then the Porcelain King in the outhouse. The cottage is the director. It builds every area, picks your rewards and wildlife, and remembers how you play. On the live site, Jev makes those choices through Vercel AI Gateway.

Rename the crew in the FRIENDS list near the top of the game script in public/plungerd/app.js.

The arcade

The site opens on the Cottage Arcade, a room of old-school cabinets. Click anywhere on a machine to play it: a token drops in, and the game starts. If you are out of tokens, it plays on free play. You can also drag a token into a coin slot, or tap the slot, then press Start. The screen powers on and grows to fill the window, and the game loads. Every game has a machine. Get Plunger'd lives at /plungerd/, Down the Drain at /fall/, Cottage Brawl at /brawl/, Breath of the Lake at /wild/, Reel It In at /fish/, In Full Swing at /vr/, Olympus at /olympus/, Crimson Rogue at /crimson/, Shore of the Ancients at /tidebreak/, Moonwell at /moonwell/, BREAKTHROUGH at /breakthrough2/, and Follow Suit at /follow-suit/. The lab has machines too: The Lab (/lab/), Small Worlds (/lab/worlds/), Neon Ronin (/neon/), Loon Echo (/echo/), Tell Me (/tellme/), and the four lab toys, Take the Plunge, Up the Creek, Full Tilt and House Rules. The older BREAKTHROUGH page at /breakthrough/ has no machine: the machine opens /breakthrough2/.

• Down the Drain opens on a pixel-art title screen in the game's own look: a 16-bit cutaway of the cottage and the caves under it, a chunky gold logo, "Press any button", a menu in a pixel frame, and a hero select with pixel-art hero cards. Its own 8-bit theme plays from the first press.
• The arcade's browser icon is a pixel-art plunger and a gold token on a purple tile.
• The arcade plays its own 8-bit theme song. It starts with your first tap or key press, and the sound button turns it off.
• On a keyboard, the arrow keys pick a machine, 5 drops a token, and 1 or Enter starts, like an emulator.
• You start with 3 tokens. The change machine gives you more.
• The machines stand in five groups: Cottage, Action, ASCII Scenes, Strategy and Lab. The site opens on All games; its ◀ Old arcade button shows the machines, one cabinet per group. Play a group's cabinet to open a row of its games; it takes no token. ◀ ARCADE in the tray, Escape, Backspace, or the browser's back button returns to the groups. Each group has its own link, such as /#action, and coming back from a game reopens its group with that game selected. Both skip All games. The pills under the sign open Cottage, Action and Strategy; LAB ↗ goes straight to the lab page. The list under the machines names every machine under its group and jumps straight to it. New machines go at the end of the row, because the page counts them in order. Add the game to a group in the GROUPS list in public/index.html, or it shows under More. The small ASCII scene games (all but ASCII Front and Battle Tanks) stand in the Lab. The Lab page lists them under ASCII sketches. All games leaves them out, and Loon Echo, Take the Plunge and Up the Creek too; labOnly: true in public/arcade/switch.js marks a game that stands only in the Lab.
• A machine's screen is a picture from the real game, saved as a WebP file in public/arcade/ (480 pixels wide, under 60 KB), or a small canvas. The line on the screen reads that game's own save in your browser. A missing or broken save keeps the plain line.
• The ◀ ▶ arrows at the sides switch machines on every screen. You can also swipe, drag with the mouse, or use the scroll wheel or a trackpad. On a phone, and on any screen too narrow for the whole row, you see one machine at a time in the middle, and the row slides.
• Every game's menu has a Switch game button. It lists every game that has a machine, marks the one you are playing, and jumps straight to another game or back to the arcade. The two buttons at the bottom stay in view while you scroll the list. The list lives in public/arcade/switch.js. When one game's address starts with another's (/lab/worlds/ and ), the longer one is the game you are playing. Only some game menus have the button so far. To add the button to a game, load that script and give a menu button the attribute. Breath of the Lake () is already on the list: its tile shows as soon as that game is live.

Sound stops when a page is hidden. On a phone, a tab you leave, a browser you minimise, or a locked screen can keep playing music. public/arcade/quiet.js stops it for every game. It keeps track of every AudioContext, <audio>, and <video> that a page makes, and of the SoundCloud songs in Get Plunger'd and Crimson Rogue. When the page is hidden, it suspends them. When the page is visible again, it starts only what it stopped, and a game that suspends its own sound keeps control of it. Each game page that makes sound loads it first in <head>: <script src="/arcade/quiet.js"></script>. A new game must do the same. In Full Swing (/vr/) does not load it. Its own code stops the sound when a headset session is hidden, and when the page is hidden on a phone. To test it, serve public/ and run node qa/arcade/quiet.mjs. It fails when a page with sound does not load the script first. It also opens each game, hides the page, and checks that the sound stops and comes back.

Play

Silent Depth (/silent-depth/) is a Pacific submarine patrol for desktop and phones. Track a convoy through the periscope, chart or hydrophone, launch torpedoes, then dive and evade the escort. Start in its control room and visit the periscope, chart, individual torpedo tubes, hydrophone and helm. Its circular periscope has etched angular marks, lens shading and 1.5×/6× optical power. Its ocean has GPU-animated traveling ripples and reflections, with a static fallback. Find its cabinet at the end of Strategy or search All Games. Tests: node --test qa/silent-depth/*.test.mjs; browser: NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/silent-depth/smoke.e2e.mjs.

The arcade is live at https://arcade.uptick.systems/. To run your own copy, deploy to Vercel, or serve public/ from any static server and open it in a browser. Opened locally, a built-in stand-in answers for Jev.

• The How to play card, and the How to play chip on the title screen, show a short clip of each move.
• Move with WASD. Keep moving to break into a sprint.
• Aim with the mouse and hold the left button to shoot. The aim keeps following the mouse, even after it leaves the window, and you can keep running with the keys.
• Roll with Space or the right button. You can't be hit while you roll.
• E blows the air horn and clears every bullet.
• Q or 1 to 4 switches guns.
• R reloads. Tap R again in the gold part of the bar to reload at once and heat up the next clip.
• On a phone with "One hand" on, drag anywhere to move and you shoot the nearest critter on your own. Flick to roll, tap the air horn to clear bullets, and tap your gun to switch. With "One hand" off, the left thumb moves and the right thumb aims and shoots.

The look

The world of Get Plunger'd is painted. GPT Image 2.5 on Higgsfield painted the art, and scripts cut it, lined it up, and packed it. The files are in public/plungerd/art/.

• Each stop has its own painted ground, wall faces, and wall tops. The ground tiles with no seams, and big soft patches hide the repeat. Walls throw soft shadows on the ground. On the dock and the lake, the water is the wall: you see the side of the dock, or the sand bank, where the ground drops into the water.
• Every critter has a painted sheet with eight walk frames and an attack pose. The black bear, the Porcelain King, Baby Charlie, the Goose Lord, and the Snapping Titan have their own sheets.
• Props, rugs, decals, guns, shots, pickups, chests, and effects are painted too. The effects are muzzle flashes, blasts, hit stars, puffs, splashes, lightning, and stink clouds.
• A light map gives each stop a mood: a rainy night downtown, dusk on the 401, shade under the pines, lamplight at the cottage, sunset on the dock, and a bright day on the water. The player, lamps, doors, muzzle flashes, blasts, and bullets carry light. Outdoors, cloud shadows drift over the ground.
• Phones load the half-size files (.sd.webp). The ground and wall images stay out of GPU memory: each day paints a copy scaled to the map. A stop's art loads while the Cottage plans the day, and the next stop's art loads in the background.
• If a file does not load, the game draws that thing in code, as it did before.

Down the Drain

Down the Drain is a spin-off at /fall/, with the same crew, critters, and bosses as Get Plunger'd. The outhouse backed up, and the ground under the cottage is now a falling-sand world. Every pixel moves. Sand and gold fall. Water, oil, lava, drain cleaner (acid), sewage, and blood flow. Fire spreads through wood, moss, oil, and swamp gas. It plays like a fast action roguelite in the style of Dead Cells, dropped into a Noita-like world.

A link from House Rules (/fall/#L=...) opens a layer that a player painted. See The lab.

Levels

Each layer is 1024 pixels wide and 720 tall, so it is wider than it is tall. It is a web of rooms, not one line:

• An entry room sits under the hole. Below it, rows of four to six rooms spread across the whole width.
• Each open room leads down to one or two rooms near it. Some rows also have side passages, so you can cross over to another way down.
• About one room in five is a dead end: you can get in, but there is no way on. Dead ends hold a cooler or a heap of gold. Blind tunnels also run off into the dirt, and some end in gold.
• Every open way meets again in one last room above the two drains. That room is the sealed room that opens the drains.
• The compass follows the shortest way through the web.
• Each layer picks a style: an even web, rooms that wander, or mostly huge caverns.

The layer is bigger, so each critter the Cottage picks comes twice, and the fast-drain timer is 60% longer. The minimap shows the whole width.

About half the rooms are cave shapes drawn on Higgsfield as black-and-white cross sections: a stalactite cathedral, a sinkhole, worm burrows, a lake basin that fills with the layer's liquid, an old mine, a root chamber, terraces, a crystal geode, stone arches over a pit, and a zigzag fissure. They are stored as small grids and stamped at a random size with rough edges. Short tunnels join the middle of each cave to every tunnel mouth, so the way through stays open. Tunnels bend on the way between rooms.

Fair play

Research on what makes action games fun, and how this game was tuned against it, is in docs/drain-fun.md. In short:

• A hit knocks you back and gives you 0.8 s of safety.
• Every attack has a wind-up you can see and hear, and it glows through the dark.
• Hazards make a sound and show red damage numbers.
• Propane tanks hiss on a fuse before they blow.
• The boss shudders before it slams, then stays down for a moment. It drops a scroll and a rich cooler when it dies.
• Digging warns you before the ground answers.
• A death keeps half your caps for the next run.
• Once the drains open, arrows at the screen edge point to them.

Movement and physics

• Jumps: tap jump for a short hop, or hold it for the full jump. Falling pulls harder than rising, and the top of a jump hangs for a moment.
• Turns: turning around bites harder than speeding up.
• Corner correction: a jump that clips the edge of a ceiling slides around it.
• Slopes: walking down a slope keeps you on the ground.
• Walls: push into a wall in the air to slide down it slowly, then jump off it.
• Debris: blasts throw bits of the ground, which bounce off walls and settle as the same material where they land.
• Smooth motion: the hero and the critters are drawn between physics steps. They squash when they land, stretch when they leap, bob and lean as they run, and turn smoothly.

Graphics

There are two looks. Painted, the default, draws the ground with pixel-art textures made on Higgsfield: cobbles, mossy stone, packed earth, roots, bones, gold nuggets, iron plates, and porcelain tile. Each layer also gets its own back wall: cellar stone, septic tank tile, crawlspace boards, or sauna brick. The textures are pinned to the world, so when you dig, you cut through them. Top edges catch the light, and edges next to open air go dark, like an outline. In Painted mode the crew, the critters, and the bosses are pixel-art sprites made on Higgsfield, with walk and attack frames. They draw at two pixels per world cell with a dark one-pixel outline, so they sit on the same grid as the ground. Classic draws each material in four flat shades and keeps the old character art. Switch with the brush button in the top bar, the G key, the Graphics item on the title menu, or the button in the Stats sheet. The game remembers your choice.

The loop

• Learn the moves. The title screen plays short clips of each move: hit, roll, pound, shoot, and dig.
• Pick a friend and a weapon. Each of the five friends has a perk. You start with the Plunger, or with any weapon you have unlocked.
• Fight your way down. Each layer is a route of rooms down to the drains. Some rooms slam shut with screen doors until two waves of critters are dead. The drains stay clogged until the last of those rooms is clear. If you dig around it, the fight comes to you at the drains.
• Collect caps. Critters, nests, and sealed rooms drop bottle caps. At the snack bar between layers, spend caps at the tab on unlocks that stay between runs: new weapons, more hot dogs, a better starting shovel, pocket money, a starting scroll, and a second wind. Caps you still carry when you go down are lost.
• Choose your drain. Each layer ends at two drains. Each one is labeled with the look of the next layer, and one is richer and harder: more relics and gold, but more critters and one more sealed room.
• Go fast. Reach the drain before the timer runs out for bonus caps and gold.
• Take risks. From the second layer on, a cooler can be cursed. It holds a weapon, a scroll, and a pile of gold, but any hit takes you down until you beat 10 critters.
• Grow the build. Scrolls of power raise Muscle (melee), Aim (gun), or Grit (health). Relics dug out of the walls change the run: Hot Sauce, Energy Drink, Bug Spray, Lucky Loonie, Sunscreen, Flip Flops, Snorkel, Work Gloves, Car Keys, TV Remote, the Golden Plunger, and Lost Sunglasses.
• Chase a rank. Kills fill a streak meter from D (Damp) up to SS (Sasquatch), as in Devil May Cry. The meter drains fast when you stop killing, and faster at high ranks. A hit knocks you down a rank. Mix your moves: the same kind of kill again and again earns less each time, so crits, pounds, shots, and air hits climb fastest. A higher rank multiplies your caps and your score, up to ×2.5.
• Take a gift. Each sealed room you clear brings a gift from a cottage animal, as in Hades. Pick one of three: Bear Paw, Sunburn, Loon Wake, Skeeter Bite, Moose Hide, Thunder Bay, Firefly Pop, Beaver Teeth, Campfire Story, or Chipmunk Cheeks. A gift you already have goes up a level, to level 3. Jev picks which three show up, to fit how you play.
• Grab the Golden Plunger. Once a layer, after about ten kills, a Golden Plunger drops, like the power pellet in Pac-Man. For 8 seconds the critters glow blue, run from you, and cannot hurt you. Your hits deal triple damage, and each kill scores double the last: 200, 400, 800, 1600.
• Beat the high score. Kills, sealed rooms, depth, bosses, and gold add to your score. A top-10 score asks for your initials, and the best score shows on the Down the Drain cabinet in the arcade.

Combat

Your melee weapon swings in combos, and each weapon crits in its own way:

Weapon	Combo	Crits
Plunger	3 quick hits	On the last hit
Canoe Paddle	2 slow, wide hits that knock critters flat	On stunned critters
Hockey Stick	4 fast hits	On burning or poisoned critters
Fishing Rod	2 hits with the longest reach	With the tip
Frying Pan	1 heavy clang that stuns	On critters in the air

A swing knocks critter spit out of the air. The dodge roll dodges every hit and passes through critters. In the air, hold down and hit to pound the ground, which stuns everything near where you land. Hits pause the game for a moment, so they land hard. Seagulls flash before they spit, geese before they dash, and moose lower their heads before they charge. Hot dogs heal almost half your health, and the snack bar refills them.

Your gun is the second weapon. Each gun fires its shots from left to right, then reloads, and each gun has its own slots, pressure, fire rate, and spread. You carry up to three.

Digging and the world

Hold F and push a direction to dig with your shovel, or push nothing to dig toward the mouse. Each swing cuts a chunk of tunnel your size, and an outline shows where the next swing will cut. Soft ground breaks in one swing. Rock, metal, and porcelain crack over several swings. Digging tires you: the brown bar is your stamina, and it refills only when you stop. Digging is also loud. Critters nearby come for you, and if you keep at it, the ceiling caves in or critters dig their way to you. The garden shovel tires fast and takes six swings for rock. The steel spade and the power auger swing faster, cut farther, and tire you less. Better shovels come from the snack bar and from coolers.

The ground holds junk from the cottage: canoes, tires, old toilets, fridges, bike wheels, bottles, boots, lawn chairs, fish bones, and signs. Relics glint through the dirt. Water pipes run along the ceilings and leak where you shoot or dig them, and the water puts out fires. Propane tanks explode when shot or heated. Hornet nests hang from ceilings and send hornets until you break them.

The first layer starts inside the outhouse under the night sky, and you drop through the seat. Each look has its own back wall, drawn with depth: fieldstone in the cellar, concrete and pipes in the septic tank, floor joists and roots in the crawlspace, and cedar planks under the sauna. Lamps, lava, and candles glow in color. Dust, drips, fireflies, and embers drift in the air.

The Cottage and Jev

The Cottage runs the world through the same /api/warden function, with Jev:

• Each layer. One call asks 37 questions: the look, the fill, liquid, and cave shape of six strata, the gold, the critter count, two set pieces, the sealed rooms, how many relics to bury, which props to use (pipes, tanks, nests, or a mix), ten critter slots, and a voice line. The two drains lead to the two next looks that Jev likes best.

• While you fall. About every 20 seconds, Jev reads what is near you, whether you are burning or stalling, and your build. Then it picks an act: watch, rain, oil, lava, acid, gas, sand, gold, critters, or quench. It also picks where.

• The boss. Jev picks what the Cottage pours into the boss fight.

• The snack bar. Jev stocks three free shots and two items for gold, which can be a new melee weapon, a scroll, or a better shovel. It also decides how much you heal.

• Gifts. After a sealed room, Jev picks the three gifts on offer.

• After a death. Jev reviews the run and retunes the game. See the next section.

The code checks each pick and can overrule it. For example, it holds back lava when you are badly hurt, and it applies your drain choice. Every override shows in the Cottage tab.

The game tunes itself

When you die, the Cottage reads a log of the run: who hurt you and how much, whether you lost half your health in 3 seconds, how often you rolled, whether you died with hot dogs left, cave-ins, time alive, and depth. It sends this to Jev in one call (cottage.tune), which judges the run as rough, fair, or breezy and moves nine dials one step each:

Dial	Range	What it changes
Critter damage	-40% to +50%	How hard every critter hits
Critter toughness	-30% to +50%	Critter health
Attack warnings	-20% to +80%	How long critters flash before they attack
Critter count	-30% to +40%	How many critters each layer holds
Hot dogs	+0 to +2	Extra hot dogs each run
Hot dog heal	35% to 70%	How much one hot dog heals
Shovel effort	-30% to +30%	How fast digging tires you
Cap drops	-20% to +100%	How many caps critters drop
First-layer ease	0% to 100%	Fewer critters and sealed rooms on the first two layers

Jev can also soften one critter that hit too hard, and it picks one tip for the next run. The code keeps at most three dial moves, drops moves that go against the verdict, and always makes at least one fix after a rough run. A breezy run pushes the dials back up. The death screen lists every change and the tip. The Memory tab shows the current dials, and a button there resets them. The tuning stays in your browser.

Between layers, the snack bar also asks Jev for a flow check. If you lost most of your health on that layer, the next one runs calmer. If you barely got touched, it runs hotter.

Controls

Action	Keyboard and mouse	Gamepad
Move, jump, hover	A and D, W or Space (hold to hover)	Left stick, A
Hit	Left mouse or J	X
Ground pound	S and hit, in the air	Down and X, in the air
Roll	Shift or L	B
Shoot	Right mouse or K	RT or RB
Change guns	1, 2, 3, or the wheel	LB
Dig	Hold F	LT
Hot dog	R	Y
Take or open	E	D-pad up
Map, sound	Q, M	Back

On a phone, the left thumb moves, and pulling down on the stick while you hit in the air pounds the ground. Tap the right side or the Hit button to swing, and drag the right side to aim and shoot. Buttons roll, eat a hot dog, and switch the right thumb to the shovel.

The game fits the screen on desktop and phone. Menus never shrink their text: a menu too tall for the screen flows into two columns, and on a narrow phone it scrolls inside the screen.

Crimson Rogue

Crimson Rogue is a third-person 3D boss fight at /crimson/, in the spirit of Black Myth: Wukong and Sekiro. One of the crew, dressed as a ronin, meets Gabe the mountain man at night in the red-rock hills of Sedona. The whole world is black-and-white ink wash. Only Gabe's neon track suit has color, and neon means danger: a fist, foot, or claw glows neon just before it lands.

• Pick a friend. Tank Top hits 20% harder, Fifty-One has 20% more life, Shades has a wider parry window, New Balance dodges for less ki, and Red Jersey moves 12% faster. All five fight as the same ronin for now.
• Gabe, the mountain man. A boxer in a neon track suit. He throws jab-cross combos, a lunging roundhouse kick, and a cartwheel into a flying kick. He slips your swings and counters. A neon 危 means a grab (he hauls you over his head and throws you) or his bear call: he pulls out a PVC pipe and roars down it, and neon sound rings blow you off your feet. Dodge through both.
• Gabe, the grizzly. At about half life, a cut scene plays: black bars close in, a low camera circles Gabe as he glows and the ground shakes, the film of him turning into the bear plays (tap or press a key to skip), and the grizzly comes out roaring in slow motion with shockwave rings and a 熊 card. The grizzly stands twice your height. The bear rakes with a two-hit claw sweep, chops overhead, smashes with both paws, slams the ground, and charges. A neon 危 before a charge means dodge.
• Deflect. Press parry just as a blow lands. A clean deflect throws white-hot sparks, punches the camera in, and fills Gabe's posture bar. Hold parry to block: a block costs ki, and an empty ki bar breaks your guard.
• Break him. When the posture bar fills, Gabe staggers. Strike the neon mark for a deathblow that takes almost a fifth of his life.
• Drink. You carry five gourds. Each one heals 50 life, but you stand still to drink.
• The end. Beat the bear and the credits roll over the battlefield to their own music: the cast with their portraits, how the game was made, and at the end the other cabinets of the Cottage Arcade, with FIGHT AGAIN and ARCADE. A tap or key skips to the end.

Action	Keyboard and mouse	Touch
Move	WASD	Drag on the left half
Camera	Mouse	Drag on the right half
Light attack (3-hit combo)	Left click or J	CUT, or tap the right half
Heavy attack	K or Q	HEAVY
Dodge roll	Space	DODGE
Parry (hold to block)	Shift, F, or right click	GUARD
Drink a gourd	R or E	GOURD
Lock on	Tab or middle click	LOCK
Pause	Esc or P	II
Music on or off	M	♪ on the title screen

Ten Seats: the story

The title screen offers three ways in: NEW STORY, CONTINUE and FIGHT GABE. FIGHT GABE plays the boss fight above, exactly as before, and loads no story code.

NEW STORY opens with the Gabe fight. When you win, Gabe yields, and the game goes back three days to Fifty-One's bachelor party in Sedona. From there it is an open world: a 2 km Sedona with Uptown, West Sedona, the creek, the trailheads and Midgley Bridge. The crew rides in the Whale, a ten-seat white van. The crew learns that Gabe watches the bridge for a trafficking gang and meets the FBI once a month. Together they bring the gang to justice.

• Missions. Chapters mix driving, chases, stealth, photo steps, clue hunts and fights in the style of the boss fight. A failed mission offers RETRY from its last checkpoint.
• Side jobs. Four Legends (the javelina, the vulture, the gila and the tarantula), two time trials and three photo hunts, marked on the map.
• Cast. The crew, Agent Vance, Harlan Voss, "Rattler" and the gang. Mouths move with the lines, and each costume fits the chapter.
• Saves. The game saves at checkpoints and when you hide the page. CONTINUE on the title picks up from the last save, and repairs a damaged one.
• Phones. Touch controls, a HUD that fits short screens, and an optional tilt look: tap 傾 to steer the camera by tilting the phone, and double-tap to centre it.

Action	Keyboard	On foot / in a vehicle
Move or steer	WASD or arrows	both
Use, talk, get in or out	E or Enter	both
Handbrake	Space	vehicle
Horn	H	vehicle
Look back	C	vehicle
Crouch	C, X or Ctrl	foot
Phone camera	V	both
Map	M	both
Fight	the boss fight keys above	foot
Pause and menu	Esc or P	both

The story code is in public/crimson/js/story/, one folder for each package: look, world, cast, vehicles, combat, ui, missions and content. types.js holds the contracts between them.

How it is made

• Characters. The ronin, Gabe, and the bear are textured 3D models with skeletons, made with Higgsfield (Meshy image-to-3D) from concept art. Every move is a motion-capture clip from the same library. The rigging service gives each clip a slightly different skeleton, so a build step moves each clip onto the detailed model: it copies every bone's world rotation change from the rest pose. The game cuts attacks out of the longer clips, and hit timings come from measuring when each fist, foot, or paw moves fastest.
• Look. The models get cel shading and an ink outline. A post pass turns the frame to ink: it keeps only neon, crushes blacks, draws edges, adds grain and film scratches, and makes the neon bloom.
• Sedona. The sky all the way round is one ink painting of the buttes and the moon, made from two generated halves. The desert floor, sandstone spires, boulders, junipers, and grass that leans away from the fighters are made in code.
• Title screen. The fighter you pick fills the screen, and Gabe stands opposite on wide screens. The ink-wash portraits (the five crew members, Gabe, and the grizzly) were made on Higgsfield from the crew art.
• Clips. The cut scene film (Gabe turns into the bear, with sound) was made with Seedance on Higgsfield. It plays at the change, not at the start of the fight.
• Music. Two songs play through SoundCloud's own embed player. The title screen plays George Baker Selection's "Little Green Bag" in the Marco Zeta bootleg remix, from Ziglio's Musique. The fight plays Nero's "Promises" (Skrillex remix), from Skrillex's SoundCloud page. The player changes song when the fight starts and again when you go back to the title. The song tries to start when the page loads. Browsers that block sound until you tap or press a key start it then; on a phone, tap play on the small SoundCloud bar. Try other tracks with ?titlesong=<SoundCloud link> and ?song=<SoundCloud link>, or turn music off with ?nomusic.
• Phones. Phones get a lighter setup (lower resolution, fewer grass blades, smaller shadows). On every device the game lowers the render resolution when frames run long, and raises it again when there is room.
• Sound. Every sound effect is made in the browser with Web Audio.
• Credits music. An original score for taiko, shakuhachi, koto, strings and low choir in the Japanese in scale, written as Web Audio code (makeScore in public/crimson/js/credits.js). The game plays public/crimson/audio/credits.mp3, the same score rendered offline, and plays the code live if the file cannot load.

The game uses Three.js r170 (in public/crimson/lib/) with no build step. Add ?god to the URL to take no damage while you test.

Breath of the Lake

Breath of the Lake is a 3D open-world spin-off at /wild/, in the style of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, with a soft, hand-painted look like a Studio Ghibli film. The Porcelain King clogged Loon Lake. His sludge took Gabe, Christian, and Ryu, and gave them red eyes. You wake up at the cottage and go get them back.

• A painted lakeside world. Higgsfield-generated cottage, wood, linen, roof, foliage, sky and meadow artwork is mapped onto real 3D geometry. Raised window frames, a shingled roof, curved furniture and an open pergola catch the sunlight. Leaf clusters sway on instanced trees, while the painted sky yields to sunset, night and the King’s storm. Characters, cottage and foliage share soft cel shading, warm directional sunlight and cool skylight; simpler ground color shapes and drawn outlines give the game a cartoon aesthetic. The cottage remains a solid, climbable building. Asset provenance and rendering notes are in docs/botl-art.md.
• Go anywhere. The valley is about 1.6 km across: the cottage on the south shore, the pine forest to the west, the meadows to the east, and the mountains to the north. A short dock at the cottage has a kayak tied to it. Paddle it out to Clog Island.
• Climb anything. Walk into a cliff, a tower, or a building, and you grab on. You climb hand over hand in pulls, lean into rock faces, and pull yourself up over the top edge. Climbing uses stamina.
• Glide. Jump, then jump again in the air to open a beach umbrella. A campfire under you pushes you up.
• Paddle. Walk up to the kayak and press E to get in. Steer with the stick, and hold sprint to paddle hard. Press E near a dock or a beach to get out, or jump to slip into the water. When you go far away, the kayak drifts back to the cottage dock.
• Fish. Rings on the water mean fish are rising. Stand on the shore, a dock, or sit in the kayak, and press E to cast. When the bobber dips, press Swing to hook the fish. Then hold Swing to lift your green zone and let go to drop it. Keep the fish inside the zone until the bar fills. You can catch Yellow Perch, Lake Trout, Walleye, and the rare Golden Loon Bass. Fish heal you and go in the stew pot. Each spot rests for a while after a catch.
• Swim. Swimming uses stamina too. Run out and you wash back up on shore, one heart short.
• Light the beacons. Four lookout towers stand on high ground, each with a beacon on top. Climb one and light its beacon, and you map the land you can see from up there: the map opens and the clouds part over that region. You can travel to any lit beacon from the map.
• Clear the outhouse trials. Twelve outhouses glow blue. Win the fight inside the ring for a Golden Orb. Pray at the loon statue with four orbs for a new heart or more stamina.
• Find the Loonies. Thirty are hidden: most under odd little rocks with flowers on top, and some up high.
• Swing in a combo, or hold and let go for a spin. Tap again during a swing and the next one follows as soon as the first lands. Each swing steps you in toward the target, and the last swing of a combo is a heavy one. Roll or jump to cut off the end of a swing. Every hit lands with a spark, a short freeze, a flash on the target, and a number: white, gold for a critical hit, and red for damage to you. A roll costs a little stamina and keeps you safe for its first quarter second. Roll the moment before a hit lands and time slows down. Roll as you land from a long fall to take half the damage.

The look. The game draws each frame, then paints over it in one pass so it looks like a frame from a Studio Ghibli film. A brush filter (Kuwahara) turns flat areas into soft strokes. Thin ink lines trace hills, trees, and people. Warm colour grading, a soft glow, haze around the sun, and paper grain finish it. Far away, the brush gets broader and the hills fade into a clear painted blue, like the backgrounds of an animated film. The grass is dense and tall, and it covers the ground from your feet to the far hills. Big waves of wind roll across whole fields. The grass parts around you and springs back slowly behind you, and the tips glow when the sun is behind them. The east meadows turn to golden pampas. People and animals ease from one pose to the next, so walking, turning, landing, and swinging blend smoothly. The stride follows the ground: it gets longer as you speed up, the knees lift through each swing, the elbows pump, the hips bob as each foot lands, and the body leans into a sprint. The weapon stays at one steady angle while you run. In the world, cloud shadows drift over the hills, far hills fade into blue haze, tall summer clouds stand on the horizon, and seed fluff floats in the light. A giant old tree stands on the hill behind the cottage. Campfires are painted flames with drifting embers and smoke, and they light up the ground around them at night.

The map. The map looks like a page from a storybook: a watercolour valley with hill shading, contour lines, rings along the shore, little trees, dotted paths, place names, and a compass rose. Land you have not mapped yet hides under painted clouds. The HUD map is a round window onto the same painting, in a wooden ring with a north mark.

The camera. When a wall or a hill gets between the camera and you, the camera rises over your shoulder instead of moving into you. It moves in fast and eases back out slowly, so it does not jitter.

Graphics settings. The pause menu has High, Medium, and Low. The Graphics button steps through them in that order. Phones start on Low. On a phone, High counts only if you picked it on that phone. Computers with built-in graphics (Intel, AMD Radeon Graphics, phone chips) start on Medium. During play the game lowers its resolution in a few steps when frames get slow, and raises it again when there is room. It knows the screen's own frame rate, so an iPhone in Low Power Mode (30 fps) does not count as slow. If a computer is still slow at the lowest step, the game drops one setting for that visit and says so.

Speed. How the game was made faster, with the numbers, is in docs/botl-perf.md. In short:

• The forest is split into tiles. Far tiles use a simpler tree and cast no shadow.
• Grass that the camera cannot see is skipped.
• Props such as campfires and towers are merged into a few meshes.
• Nothing is drawn behind the title and full-screen menus.
• The title waits only for the models the world needs.

Painted assets. The crew, the three bosses, the King, the critters, the kayak, the fish, the cabin, the outhouses, and the loon statue are 3D models made with Higgsfield. Each one started as a painted concept picture, then became a textured model. The people have skeletons, and the game drives them with the same walk, climb, glide, swim, and swing poses as before. The ground uses painted grass, dirt, sand, and rock textures. A painted ring of far mountains stands behind the valley, and the loading screen and the arcade cabinet show a painted key art picture. If a model or texture does not load, the game uses its old shape-built version.

The title screen. It opens on a painted dawn over the valley, with a gold logo and "Press any button". The first press starts an 8-bit overture and opens the menu. New Journey leads to the hero select: five painted hero cards. Pick one with the arrow keys, a click, or a swipe, and press Begin the Journey.

It saves on its own every 10 seconds, and the arcade cabinet shows your progress. It runs on three.js, loaded from a CDN. The sounds and music are made in code. It works with a keyboard and mouse, a game pad, or a phone.

Reel It In

Reel It In is a first-person fishing game at /fish/. You stand at the end of the cottage dock on Loon Lake, and later at three more places. Your phone is the rod and the reel: you cast it and reel it with real moves. You can also play with touch, or with a mouse and keys on a computer.

Hold the phone upright. In motion play its top edge is the rod, for the cast and for the reel. You never turn it sideways. Grip the phone tight. Only your thumb lets go, never your hand. Use a wrist strap if you have one, and keep 2 m clear around you. The game shows this safety note when it asks to use the motion sensors.

Motion or touch. The first time you play on a phone, the game asks to use the motion sensors (an iPhone asks for permission). If you say no, or the phone sends no motion data, you play with touch. After a no on the web, the card tells you how to turn motion on again. On an iPhone, close Safari fully, open the page again, and tap Allow. On Android, allow Motion sensors in the site settings. In the app, a no switches to touch and says "Motion is off. You can play with touch." A computer plays with the mouse and the keys. Settings > Controls changes it later.

The cast

With motion:

1. Turn your body to aim. A dotted line on the water shows where the lure goes.
2. Press and hold your thumb on the screen. The bail clacks open and your thumb holds the line, in one move.
3. Tip the phone back over your shoulder. The rod creaks and taps when it loads, and again at full power.
4. Whip the phone forward. Lift your thumb as the phone tips forward, at 11 o'clock. The line zips off the spool and the lure flies.
   • The gyro measures how fast you swing. A faster flick casts farther. A sweet cast with a brisk flick lands 35 to 55 m out at Loon Lake. A short, sharp flick of the wrist is enough. A harder throw adds little distance.
   • The game times your lift against the moment the rod passes 11 o'clock. A lift up to about 90 ms before or after that moment launches the lure at a good angle, at any swing speed. Lift too early and the lure goes high and short. Lift too late and it slaps the water in front of you.
   • The gyro measures the swing across the rod, so the cast reads true whether the screen faces you or leans toward your thumb.
   • Where you face sets the direction.
   • Lift your thumb with no swing and the bail snaps shut, ready for the next try. Swing and keep your thumb down, and the lure still flies, low. The game then says to lift sooner.

With touch. Press anywhere: on the rod, the reel or the lake. The game waits for the drag. Up and down takes the line where you pressed, and sideways aims. Drag down to tip the rod back. Then flick up and let go. A rail beside your finger shows the rod as a bead. Drag the bead down past LOAD. The mark below LOAD is full power. Let go while the bead crosses the green band. The game grades the cast where your finger lifts, so a pause before the lift changes nothing. A flick that carries on past the press point still casts far. A swipe up that never tipped the rod back casts nothing and uses no derby cast. A press near the bottom edge needs a shorter drag, so it still reaches full power before your finger runs off the screen.

On a computer. Hold the mouse button still. The rod tips back by itself, then swings forward. Let go while it passes the green on the rail. Move the mouse sideways while you hold to aim. If you let go before the rod comes forward, nothing flies. You can also drag down and flick up, as with touch. Space works like the mouse button, and the arrow keys (or A and D) aim. A press on a button or a menu never casts. E opens and closes the bail, but you never need it.

Feather the line. Touch the rod while the lure flies to slow the line, so the lure drops short onto a target. On a computer, click anywhere.

Easy mode is on at first (in Settings). It softens a cast that goes too high or too low, and a gentle stroke goes farther. In the fight it gives you more time to set the hook, and some fish hook themselves when you keep reeling through the strike. A jump also rises 0.2 s slower, except a legend's.

What the cast tells you. A sweet release says "Sweet!" with a sound and a tap the moment the lure leaves. The aim line runs out to where a cast like your last one would land, and turns amber when that spot is not water. After each cast you see the distance and how the release went. One more line can follow. It names a run of sweet casts, a hit on a rising ring, or a near miss ("4 m short of the ring."). It can also say that big fish live far out, give a tip, mark your longest cast, or name the water where the lure landed. A good release with a short back swing says "Tip back farther for more distance." A cast with no back swing says "Tip the phone back first." (with touch, "Drag down first."). Rings on the water show rising fish. Cast into a ring for a near-sure bite. If the motion sensors send nothing for 3 s, the game asks "The motion sensors stopped. Play with touch?", and a tap switches to touch for this visit.

The next cast comes fast. "Nothing this time." stays 1 s and a cast onto the shore 0.9 s. A lost fish stays 3.4 s (a legend 4.5 s), so you can read the loss line. A cast input ends the wait early: a press, a click, Space, or your thumb in motion play. It works 0.35 s after the words show (0.8 s after a loss), and the same press goes on into the next cast. A press on the crank ends the wait. It does not cast. After a lost fish, a press on the rod does the same. After "Nothing this time." no fish was on, so a press on the rod casts, like a press on the lake. After 3 s with no fish on the way, the prompt says "Nothing is biting here." A crank faster than 1.5 turns a second shortens that wait, down to 1 s. Then the lure skips home: each turn of the crank winds in at least 4 times as much line, and any turn of the crank brings the lure home in about 3 s.

The fight

Reel. The reel starts the moment the lure lands. The lake fills the screen and the crank sits under your thumb: on the left in touch play, and on the side you pick in motion play.

• Turn the crank to reel. On a computer, turn the mouse wheel or hold R. The first turn snaps the bail shut, like a real reel. The lure swims back, and it sinks when you stop. A short pause often makes a fish bite. Reel slowly: a small fish cannot catch a fast lure, and the game tells you when you reel too fast.
• On a new save, the first cast that lands in the water always brings a bite from a small, easy fish: a pumpkinseed or a perch.
• A shadow follows the lure. Small taps are nibbles: wait. A hard thump is the strike. Set the hook then: snap the phone up in motion play, swipe up on the rod or anywhere on the open lake in touch play, or press Space. Pull too soon and you spook the fish. Pull too late and it spits the lure.

Work the rod. In motion play, tip the phone back as you crank. This adds reel power, and a meter shows how much. Ease the phone forward to rest. In touch play your right thumb drags the rod up, down and sideways. On a computer, drag the rod with the mouse, or use W, A, S and D or the arrow keys. Each move has one right answer. The big words at the top name it, and the guide and the rod cue use the same words:

The fish	Motion	Touch and mouse
Runs, and the drag slips	Stop reeling. Hold the rod up.	The same
Pulls the line too tight	Stop reeling. Hold the rod up.	The same
Turns away	Stop reeling.	The same
Runs for cover (weeds, stumps, logs or rocks)	Tilt the phone left or right.	Drag the rod sideways.
Shakes its head	Hold the rod up. Keep reeling slowly.	The same
Jumps, or jumps again and again (a tail walk)	Lower the phone.	Drag the rod down.
Swims at you	Reel fast.	The same
Sees you and makes one last run	Let it run. Hold the rod up. Reel only if the line goes slack.	The same
Holds on the bottom	Tip back as you reel.	Drag the rod up. Reel as it comes down.
Rests between stages (a legend)	Rest your arm. Keep the line tight.	The same
Is tired and close	Lift the phone and hold.	Drag the rod up and hold.

A fish that is heavy for its place, or big for its kind, gets a warning at its first run, or 4 s after the hook set. A toast says "It is a big one!" with a buzz, and the gauge shows "Big fish on!" until you see the fish.

• The drag. A run starts with a click of the drag and a buzz. When the spool starts to slip, the crank stops adding pull. The pull builds back over 0.6 s. Stop reeling in that time and the crank does not snap the line. Keep cranking through the run and the line snaps. The − and + buttons beside the crank set the drag ([ and ] on a computer). At Gull Rock a long run can empty the spool: tighten the drag.
• Slack. Slack line lets the fish throw the hook. When the line stays slack for 0.3 s, the gauge says SLACK. In a head shake the prompt says "Slack line! Reel it in."
• The gauge shows the tension, the drag, the line out, the depth, and how much fight the fish has left. A word under the arc names the state: GOOD, TIGHT, SLIPPING, SLACK or TOO TIGHT. The arc is plain up to the drag mark, hatched past it and striped near the break, so it reads without color. The fish's bar ends in FIGHT, or in TIRED when the fish is beaten. A TIRED fish starts no new jumps, tail walks, charges, head shakes or thrashes.
• The rub meter. When the line rubs on a stump, a log, a rock or the weeds, a striped RUB band takes the place of the fish's name and fills. When it is full, the line breaks. Steer the fish away, or hold the rod up over low rocks.
• Legends fight in three stages and rest between them, so your arm rests too. Marks on the fish's bar show where the next stages start. In a rest you cannot land the fish, and the line is safe whatever you do. A legend shows TIRED only in its last stage. A fight lasts from a few seconds for a perch to about a minute for a legend.
• The loss line names the one move that would have saved the fish, for example "It wrapped the line in the weeds. Drag the rod sideways to steer it." A lost legend gets its own line, with when to look for its gold ring again.
• Land it. When the fish is tired and close, tip the phone up and hold it to lift the fish out. At Gull Rock you bring it to the wall.

Places and goals

Places. Land a big fish to open the next place. Each place has its own look, gear, derby, best score, Journal tab, six goals and legend. The Places card shows the facts and the goals of each place, and Fish here takes you there.

Place	You open it with	What is different	Legend
Loon Lake	(open from the start)	A calm lake. It teaches the moves. Line: 10 lb.	Golden Loon Bass
Stump Bay	A 3.5 kg fish at Loon Lake	A flooded forest at dusk, then night. The line rubs on stumps, so you steer fish out. Catfish bite in the dark, where a nibble says "It is dark. Feel for the bite." Line: 20 lb braid.	Old Whiskers, a giant catfish
Cedar River	A 6 kg fish at Stump Bay	Fast water at an autumn dawn. The current runs left and swings your lure. The first time, the prompt says "The current takes your lure." Salmon run down the river toward a logjam, so cast to the right. Line: 20 lb.	Old Hookjaw, an old salmon
Gull Rock	An 8 kg fish at Cedar River	The open sea, from the end of a stone wall. A giant tuna can empty your spool, and some fish dive for the rocks at your feet. Line: 30 lb.	Big Blue, a tuna as big as a man

When a catch in free fishing opens a place, a card follows the catch card: "Stump Bay is open!" Go there takes you there, and Stay here keeps you fishing. A fish of 70% to 100% of the goal weight says "Close! Land a fish of 3.5 kg or more to open Stump Bay."

The first trip to a new place ends on its arrival card. It shows NEW PLACE with the level, the new gear and one tip. Start goes straight to free fishing.

An older save keeps every fish. If it already holds a 3.5 kg fish, Stump Bay is open.

The fish at Loon Lake. Ten species live in Loon Lake, each in its own water. Pumpkinseed, Yellow Perch and Largemouth Bass live in the lily pads and the weed flat on the left. Rock Bass and Smallmouth Bass live on the rocky point on the right. Walleye hold on the drop-off, and Lake Trout in the deep water far out. The Northern Pike hunts the weed edges, and the Muskellunge is rare. The legend, the Golden Loon Bass, rises in a gold ring far out at dawn and dusk. Each fights its own way: a smallmouth jumps, a pike shakes its head, a walleye bores deep, a lake trout makes long runs, and a muskie makes one last run at the dock. You can also snag an old boot, the King's Plunger, and Pip's Frisbee. The day goes from dawn to dusk, and the fish bite best at their own hours.

The other places have 16 more fish. Stump Bay has Black Crappie, Bowfin, Longnose Gar, Channel Catfish, and Old Whiskers. Cedar River has Steelhead, Chinook Salmon, Brown Trout, Brook Trout, and Old Hookjaw. Gull Rock has Atlantic Mackerel, Pollock, Striped Bass, Bluefish, Atlantic Cod, and Big Blue. Each fights its own way. A usual catch is about 2 kg at Loon Lake, and long casts find the biggest ones. The catch card says how big your fish is for its kind, and a very big one gets a TROPHY badge and a photo.

Goals. Each place has six goals that ask for the skills the game teaches, such as "Cast 40 m." at Loon Lake or "Turn a fish from the stumps." at Stump Bay. The Places card shows "Goals: 2 of 6" and checks off the ones you did. Each goal you finish plays the record sting and says "Goal done: Cast 40 m."

Today's goal. The title shows one goal for each day, picked from the date and the open places: "Today: land 5 fish at Loon Lake. 1 of 5." In the journey sim, the median beginner finishes each one in 20 casts or fewer. Each day you finish adds to a run ("Today's goal is done. 2 days in a row."). A missed day ends the run and takes nothing else away. The first fish of a day says "Your first fish today." A new player's very first fish says "Your first fish!" in its place. When one catch brings several pieces of news, they show together in one toast.

What next. The title and the pause card name one thing to aim for. First comes the goal that opens the next place. Then comes a legend you have not landed, with when to look for its gold ring. After that come the next goal at this place, the next derby rank, and the fish still missing from your Journal.

The derby. Free fishing has no limit, and its clock moves an hour every 75 s. In the Derby you get ten casts, and your score is the weight of everything you land. A cast that misses the water does not use up a derby cast, and the game says "You get that cast back." Each place has six ranks, from SKUNKED up to its own CHAMPION. The results count the total up from zero, then show the rank, the next rank ("Next rank: WEEKEND ANGLER at 4 kg."), and your old best when you beat it. A derby catch that opens a place says so on its card, and the results offer Go there.

Help for short casters. While the goal that opens the next place is open, the first cast shorter than 22 m says "Big fish live far out." Every fifth short cast after it says so again. The game also counts your casts in the water at that place in free fishing. After 20 of them, the next ring that rises within 25 m carries a big fish, and the game says "A big fish is rising close in." That ring stays at least 90 s. When you land the big ring's fish, the count starts again from 0. The game keeps the count only while the page is open, and a cast at another place starts it again.

Sweet casts. Three sweet casts in a row in free fishing light up the report ("Three sweet casts! A big fish is near.") and make the next cast in the water bring a bigger fish. A cast that is not sweet ends the run.

The Journal has a tab for each place. It shows your best of each fish you caught, then the next three to find with where and when to look, then how many more are left. Above the list, under the place tabs, it counts the fish found, the fish landed and the casts, your best sweet run, and the days you finished today's goal.

The arcade cabinet shows one line from your save: all four legends, or the places open with your biggest fish, or your best derby at Loon Lake, or your biggest fish.

Sound and feel

• The hook set. The lake freezes for 70 ms, the view punches in, the rod tip whips, and "Fish on!" fills the prompt's place for about 0.9 s. A deep thump and a buzz longer than the strike's come with it. A set within 250 ms of the strike adds "Quick set!".
• Jumps. The view zooms in on a leaping fish, so a smallmouth 30 m out shows at least 20 px wide on a phone. Then it eases back.
• Catches. Each kind of catch has its own sound. A plain fish gets the landed sound. A new species gets a short rise and a new record a brass call. A trophy or a legend gets the whole fanfare, and a legend then plays the call of its place. A legend's next stage gets a drum roll and no fanfare. On the catch card the weight counts up with rising ticks, then the badges stamp on. A trophy, a legend, or a fish that opens a place gets a photo first, with a flash and a shutter.
• A new place. Its card rises in with a horn call and the new place's own sound, and the NEW PLACE badge stamps on.
• The derby end. The total counts up over about 1 s. Then the rank stamps on, with the fanfare for a new best or a soft close.
• Splashes grow with distance, so a lure 45 m out still makes a splash you can see.
• Sound. The game makes its sounds in code: the bail clack, the rod swish, the spool whirr, the splash, the crank gears, the drag ratchet, the line snap, and a loon on the lake.
• Buzz. On Android the phone buzzes for the gear ticks, nibbles, the strike, the line tension, the drag and the catch. A web page on an iPhone cannot start a buzz from code, so there only a finger on the reel or the crank gives a tap. In the iPhone app every buzz goes through the native haptics plugin, with the same priorities, rate limits and mute. Buzz and taps in Settings turns it all off.

Cutscenes

Short cutscenes play in the game's own scene, with letterbox bars, one caption and their own sound. They need no network and no video files.

• The opening: the first Go fishing on a new save. The camera glides low over Loon Lake at dawn, past the loon, and settles on the dock in the cast view. The cast starts when it ends.
• Arrivals: the first trip to a new place flies in over it, with its name, before the arrival card.
• Legend reveals: the first gold ring of a place's legend, outside a fight, once you have landed a fish. The camera pushes toward the ring, the legend breaches, and its name shows. Then play goes on from the same cast.
• Legend landed: a hero shot of the legend with its name and weight, before its catch card.
• The finale: when you leave the card of the fourth legend, "You fished them all."

Each cutscene plays once, and never in a fight. While one plays, the fish, the clock and the derby wait. Escape and the Android back button skip it at once. A tap, Space or Enter skips it after its first 0.5 s, so the second tap of a double tap does not. With Calm effects or reduced motion, a cutscene shows still shots joined by fades. Watch on a Places card plays that place's arrival and its legend's reveal again, once you have seen them.

Menus and settings

The title has Go fishing (free fishing, the red button), Derby: 10 casts, Places, Journal, How to play and Settings. On the web it also has Switch game and Back to the arcade. Under the menu are your best derby and biggest fish at this place, the next thing to aim for, and today's goal. Places has a NEW tag while an open place waits for your first visit. In the Painted style, the title at Loon Lake shows a painted picture of the lake. At another place it shows the live place, as the Original style does.

The guide. The ? button in play shows an animated guide to the moves. A new player sees it until they land their first fish, unless they turn it off. On the cast screen it goes round the three cast moves. Once the lure is in the water, it shows the move to make now.

How to play opens on the tab for your input: Motion, or Touch (Touch and mouse on a computer). Each tab is a short list that ends with the rising rings. The fish moves sit behind a Fish moves row. The Motion tab has a short clip of the tip back as you reel.

Settings:

Row	What it does
Sound	Turns the sound on and off.
Buzz and taps	Turns the buzz and the taps on and off.
Easy mode	On at first. See The cast.
Controls	Motion or Touch. Motion needs a phone.
Reel side	Right or Left. In motion play it moves the crank, the drag buttons and the gauge to the other side. In touch play the crank is always on the left.
Art style	Painted (the default: cartoon models, painted skies, painted trees and soft cel shading) or Original (the lake that the code builds). A save from before the name Painted keeps its look.
Graphics	Auto (Low on a phone, High on a computer), High or Low.
Larger text	Makes the words in play, on the cards and on the gauge 1.25 times as big.
Calm effects	Stops the flashes, pulses, pops, count-ups, freezes, camera punches and zooms. The words, the sounds and the buzz stay. It is on when the phone asks for reduced motion.
About	The version, a credit line, and the privacy policy.
Privacy	The privacy policy (privacy.html). It opens with no network.

The pause card has Resume, How to play, Journal, Settings and Quit to the title. On the web it also has Switch game, and Fullscreen where the browser allows it. It shows your catch so far and the next goal. Prompts and toasts reach screen readers through live regions, and each screen is a labeled dialog.

Keys. Escape or P pauses and resumes play. Escape also closes How to play, the Journal, Settings, Places, About and Privacy. On the catch card, Enter or Space presses the main button. Space waits until the photo is done.

Start-up, the store build and the app

Offline start. The game starts and plays with no network. three.js r170 is in lib/, and the fonts Alfa Slab One and Nunito are in fonts/ with their licenses. From the first frame a loading screen shows "REEL IT IN", a moving bar and "Loading the lake." A card with Try again takes its place when a module does not load or the device cannot draw 3D. The card also comes when the title is not ready after 15 s. If the GL context is lost, the game pauses, the pause card says "The lake is coming back.", and Resume waits until it is back. If it is still lost 4 s after the page shows, the card with Try again comes up.

Render scale. When frames stay slow for about a second, the lake draws with fewer pixels, in steps down to 60%. When frames are fast again, it climbs back in steps. One slow frame changes nothing. A screen held at 30 Hz, such as an iPhone in Low Power Mode, also looks slow at first. The game tests one step down and then 60%. When neither helps, it goes back to the scale it started at. Under a menu card the game draws the lake once, and the lake stands still.

Phones and rotation. In motion play the game stays upright on the phone. If the browser turns the page anyway (rotation lock off, or a big steering tilt), the game turns the picture back. On an iPhone, turn on Portrait Orientation Lock for the smoothest cast. On the web, Settings and the pause card have a Fullscreen button where the browser allows it. In full screen, motion play also locks the page upright. The screen stays awake while you fish.

The store build. <html data-build="store"> makes the page the app. A script at the top of index.html sets it inside a Capacitor app, and the app build writes it into its own copy. The store build hides Switch game, Back to the arcade and Fullscreen. It drops the "GET PLUNGER'D" kicker and skips the game switcher script. It uses app words, such as "Motion is off. You can play with touch." The app build also strips the arcade scripts from its copy. js/native.js is the only module that talks to Capacitor, and a missing plugin does nothing. In the app it handles the Android back button, app pause and resume, the splash screen, keep awake, and native haptics. The save and the settings also go to native storage, so they come back when the phone clears the web view's storage. The Android back button closes the top screen. In play it pauses, and on the pause card it resumes. On the catch card, the results and the arrival card it presses the main button. On the card of a new place it picks Stay here. On the title it sends the app to the background.

The apps. apps/fish/ wraps this page as an iPhone and Android app with Capacitor 8. apps/fish/README.md has the steps to build, sign and upload both apps. The store kit is in apps/fish/store/: the listing, the data safety and age answers, the accessibility labels, the screenshot list, the review notes, and the Play icon and feature graphic in graphics/.

QA switches. Add these to the address:

Switch	What it does
?open	Opens every place for this page load. The game does not save it.
?day=YYYY-MM-DD	Sets the day of today's goal for this page load. The game does not save its progress.
?shot	For the store pictures: Graphics High, the lake at up to 3 times the CSS pixels, and no automatic render scale.
?debug	Shows the sensor readings, the cast numbers, the timing of the last lift, and the frame rate.

Moonwell

Moonwell (/moonwell/) is pinball on its side. A pearl travels right across an endless row of moonlit islands that step down toward the sea, and the screen scrolls with it. A pair of gold flippers guards the water gap at the bottom of each bowl. The left flipper shoots the pearl up and over the next ridge. Flip near the tip for power: one good shot clears a ridge, and a late, sweet one can clear two. The right flipper is softer and passes the pearl across the bowl. A hit near its tip sends the pearl back over the ridge behind, so you can go back for a star, a lantern or a rail you missed. A ridge pays only the first time you cross it.

• The islands come from a seed and never end. Every eight islands make a region with its own look: Willow Meadow, Lantern Bridge, Lily Pond, Star Garden, Crystal Hollow and Cloud Isles. Play is brisk from the start, and ridges get taller, the gap gets wider and play gets faster as you go. The game keeps the 40 islands behind you.
• In the air are stars (an arc of stars shows the ideal shot), gold bumpers, lanterns to light with a pass, turning mills, gold rails that carry the pearl over two or three islands, moon portals, and a big pearl every ten islands for one more life.
• Scoring. Ridges in a row raise the multiplier, up to x8, and a drain ends the streak. Stars, bumpers, lanterns and ridges fill the moon in the sky. A full moon starts Moonrise: 12 s of double points, stronger flippers and no drains. Long shots, swift clears and clutch saves pay extra.
• Shrines. The last island of each region is a shrine with a sealed gate. Send the pearl into the moonwell and choose one of three charms, such as stronger flippers, one more pearl, a moon bridge for the next drain, or a star magnet. Then the seal opens, so you can come back this way.
• Pearls. A run has three pearls. A lost pearl comes back in a moonbeam over the bowl where it was lost. The first three islands have a moon post between the flippers, so a new player cannot drain there.
• Controls. Z, A or ← for the left flipper, X, D or → for the right one, C or ↑ to pulse the pearl up, Space to drop a pearl, Esc or P to pause and M to mute. On a phone, hold the left or right half of the screen. A gamepad uses its shoulder buttons. The first island shows you how.
• Your best score and furthest island stay in this browser. A flag stands on your furthest island, the head-up display shows it while you are behind it, and the Moonwell machine shows the best run.

The islands are drawn in code. The bumper, portal, star, pearl and flipper sprites, and the far islands, come from the original Moonwell paintings (qa/moonwell/sprites.sh cuts them). A bot plays behind the title.

Ahead of the Light

Ahead of the Light (/ahead-of-the-light/) is a flight home at the edge of light speed, drawn in characters with ascii.rest (MIT). At that speed the stars crowd ahead of you and turn blue, a ring of colour stands round the way ahead, and the sky at the edges reddens: the starbow. You fly a tube of stars toward Earth through eight sectors named for the route home: the cosmic web, Coma, Virgo, the Local Group, the Milky Way, the Orion Arm, the Sun's stars and Earth. A run is about 19 km and three minutes.

• The light of a gamma-ray burst starts 520 m behind you. For the first kilometre it only keeps pace with you, then it grows faster than you cruise. The meter at the top right runs from BURST to YOU, and the edges of the frame whiten as the light comes. When it reaches you, the run is over, and the card says why and what to try. A player's first three runs show one tip at a time.
• Stars in your path are hits: they take your shield, then your hull, and most of your speed. A star you would hit soon gets red brackets. Slip past one close (SKIM, or HAIRLINE) and it charges your boost.
• Gold rings hang in the tube about every 170 m: they are your target. Fly through one for charge and a kick of speed; rings in a row make a chain. The next one pulses and wears +SPEED, and an arrow at the edge points to it when it is off screen.
• Boost spends charge for speed. Charge also trickles in on its own.
• Controls. On a computer, A D W S or the arrows steer, Shift or Space boosts, and Esc or P pauses. A drag on the view also steers. On a phone, drag anywhere to steer and hold BOOST. A gamepad uses the left stick and RT or A.
• Your best run stays in this browser, and the machine shows the furthest sector (BEST: VIRGO).

The game is one ascii.rest piece sized to the window: render/ascii.js lights a grid of cells, and the library's mount draws each cell as a character in the starbow's colours. The library's galaxy piece is the galaxy ahead, and its banner draws the title and each sector's name in block letters (vendor/ascii-rest/). The run is pure code in core/ that node tests and bots fly headless. The music is the cinematic score in ui/sound.js, which grows over the run.

First Breath

First Breath (/first-breath/) is a baby's journey to birth, seen from the baby. It has eight short stages and an ending, and a run takes about 8 to 10 minutes. The look is paper cut: flat sheets of coloured paper stacked like a shadow box, with hand-cut edges and soft drop shadows. The heartbeat of the one who carries you plays through the whole run, and most moves keep time with it. Only the first stage has a goal you can miss: if you are not in the top 3, the Almost card lets you try again or go on.

1. The Race. Swim with 19 rivals to the meeting place, and arrive in the top 3.
2. The Egg. Guard your shell: turn an arc round it, and the other sperm bounce off. Let your own sperm in, then seal the shell.
3. The Embryo: first cells. Tap as each ring closes, and the cells split. Then hold, and let go at the glow.
4. The Placenta. Drift into a soft spot, and grow roots to 8 pools. Then tap with your first heartbeat.
5. First Trimester. Tap when the light reaches your heart, and drag to stretch.
6. Second Trimester. Tap with the heartbeat. Then listen to each hummed phrase and answer it.
7. Third Trimester. Practise four breaths, and turn head-down when there is room.
8. Birth. Ride 8 waves. Hold through each wave, and drag the way the prompt shows. Then the light grows from below and fills the screen. The ending is your first breath.

• Controls. On a phone, drag anywhere to steer. The stick starts where you touch. Tap, or hold and let go, as the prompt line says. On a computer, the arrow keys or WASD steer, and Space, Enter or Z is the tap and the hold. In the egg stage the left and right arrows (or A and D) turn the arc, or the mouse points it. In Birth, hold the arrow of the prompted direction. Esc or P pauses, M mutes and C turns the captions on or off.
• One-button mode (Settings) makes any key or tap the one button. Hold it, and the game steers for you.
• Settings also hold Assist, the word for the one who carries you (mother, mum, mom or parent), Motion (Auto, Full or Reduced), Captions, Large text, the Tap test and the timing offset.
• Facts. Each stage shows short facts, each with its week or day. Each fact has a source, and Sources on the title lists them all. The run result says what was real and what is the game's.
• Your best run stays in this browser, and the machine shows it (BEST 61,240). With no finished run, the machine shows RACE · GUARD · CRY.

The game is pure code in core/ that node tests and bots play headless. A Canvas 2D renderer in render/ draws it as paper, and its low tier keeps the paper look on a slow phone. The sound is made in code in ui/sound.js. The plan, the facts table and the sources are in openspec/changes/archive/2026-10-19-add-first-breath/.

The lab

The lab at /lab/ holds toys. A toy is a small build that tests the core move of a new game idea before anyone builds the game. The arcade shows the lab: The Lab machine opens /lab/, the LAB ↗ link under the sign does too, and each toy has a machine of its own. The game switcher lists the lab and its toys. Each lab page asks search engines not to index it. The ideas, and the bar a new game must pass, are in docs/game-ideas.md.

Each toy starts with a card that says what to try. The lab page shows how long you played each toy. Only your browser keeps these times. Tell the crew your times, and whether you wanted another go.

• Small Worlds (/lab/worlds/). Six small canvas games on one page, each on today's seed. Swing and let go in Threadwake, throw a spark from body to body in Borrowed Bodies, lead a river home in Foldwild, bend the seasons in Season Thief, guide a flock past the storms in Storm Choir, and keep a living ship on the beat in Heartship. When a world ends, the scene keeps moving for a moment, and then the card says how close you came to your best.
• Neon Ronin (/neon/). A sword duel in the Portal Badlands, with touch, gyro or a mouse. A ronin attacks only when you can see it, every windup warns with a tone, a red edge and a buzz, and a parry opens the guard at once. Every day brings a new duel.
• Loon Echo (/echo/). Lead a line of chicks home past an eel and boats. Each full nest hatches a harder clutch, and a big bank gets slow motion. Every day brings a new lake.
• Take the Plunge (/lab/plunge/). A loon dives into lakes for speed, ahead of winter. Hold to tuck and dive. Let go to glide. A green cue says when a hold will rip, and the first burst of each run is a slow-motion peak. The lakes change each day at midnight at the cottage, so the whole crew flies the same lakes. A ghost link lets a friend race your run.
• Up the Creek (/lab/creek/). The phone is a canoe paddle: rock the top edge to stroke, twist for a J-stroke, and tilt and hold to brace. Thumbs and keys turn the way you press. Catch the eddies behind the rocks, heed the warning before a capsize, and boof the ledge at the bottom of today's river.
• Full Tilt (/lab/tilt/). Pinball in open space across six worlds. Light the three beacons in each world, then shoot through the jump gate. A ring and a rising tone come up to 0.9 s before each flip, and each flip is Perfect, Good or Late. Clean flips in a row raise the multiplier, with no top. Hold to aim the launch, and light the gold beacon first for a skill shot that pays double. Start voyage flies the voyage of the day, so the crew flies the same worlds, and the end card says how close you came to your best.
• House Rules (/lab/rules/). You are the Cottage. Dig tunnels and pour sand, water, lava, oil, acid, swamp gas and gold. Then place critters, propane tanks and the two drains. Settle runs Down the Drain's own rules, tanks included, and a drag while it runs pokes the preview. Test it opens your layer in Down the Drain. When you reach a drain in your own layer, Share gives you a link for the crew. A friend races your time on a live clock and can send a time back or remix the layer.

The latest review of every lab game against the bar, and what changed, is in docs/lab-fun.md.

A House Rules link opens Down the Drain at /fall/#L=<code>. The code holds the brush strokes, so a busy layer fits in 2,000 characters. With a layer in the link, the game gives you one life, no unlocks, no banked caps and neutral tuning, so everyone plays the same layer. It saves nothing to your memory, your tuning or the high scores. Every change this needs in public/fall/index.html sits behind Custom.on, which is off for any other link.

The studio board

The Cottage Arcade Studio is a page that shows who builds what. Every Claude Code session on this repo is an agent. Every branch, and every local git worktree, is a work tree. A branch with no session (from Codex, for example) is an agent too. Every game in public/arcade/switch.js is a cabinet, and so is a new game folder on an open branch. When a new agent starts or a new branch is pushed, the next refresh adds it. Nobody has to add it by hand.

studio/refresh.mjs builds the page from studio/page.html. It reads the branches, the local worktrees and the pull request refs with git, and the sessions from the Claude Code Remote list_sessions tool. It reads the hand-kept parts from the live page and keeps them: the production crew, the stages, the feed, the bug board, and the name, blurb, colour and art of each cabinet. It rebuilds the rest, and it adds a feed line for each new agent, new work tree, merge and new cabinet. It reads switch.js and the page titles on a branch as text. It never runs code from a branch.

A keeper session refreshes the board every hour. To refresh it by hand, do the same steps:

1. Save the list_sessions result (your own sessions, limit 25) to a file. Its records no longer say which repo or branch a session is on.
2. Read the live page with the Artifact tool, which saves it to a file. The page remembers the repo of every session it has seen.
3. Run node studio/refresh.mjs --need --page <saved page> --sessions <sessions file>. It prints the sessions the page has not seen yet, one id per line. Call get_session for each, and save [{ "id", "repos": [...], "branches": [...] }] to a file. The repos come from session_context.sources and outcomes, and the branches from outcomes and external_metadata.current_branches.
4. Save the pull request list (all states) to a file: gh api "repos/<owner>/<repo>/pulls?state=all&per_page=100", one call per page. A pull request that was squash-merged leaves its branch ahead of main, so only the list can tell that the work tree is merged.
5. Run node studio/refresh.mjs --page <saved page> --sessions <sessions file> --where <lookup file> --prs <pull request file> --out studio.html --if-changed in a clone that can fetch from GitHub.
6. If the first word it prints is changed, publish studio.html to the same artifact.

Agent state	When
Working	The session is in a turn now, or a branch with no session got a commit in the last 2 hours
Needs you	The session waits for your answer or approval
Ready for review	The session stopped with work that is not in main, or a branch has an open pull request
Idle	A branch has commits that are not in main, and nobody works on it now
Done	The work is in main, or the session is finished

Watch call

voice/ lets the owner talk to their Hermes agent on a Fitbit Sense 2. The watch cannot run apps, but it can answer calls. Hermes rings the owner's phone through Twilio, the owner answers on the watch, and a small call server connects the call to the Hermes API server. It runs on the computer that runs Hermes, not on Vercel, and the arcade does not use it. Setup and use are in voice/README.md.

Mods for Claude Code

mods/ holds ten Claude Code mods: plugins whose hooks run inside Claude Code while the crew builds the arcade. Nothing loads by itself. Turn on one mod for one session with claude --plugin-dir mods/<name>, or add the folder as a marketplace once with claude plugin marketplace add ./mods and install the mods you want from cottage-mods.

Mod	What it does
announcer	The Shore of the Ancients announcer calls green test runs: "First blood", multi kills within a turn, streaks up to "Godlike", "Shut down" when a red run ends a streak, and "Flawless victory" for a merged pull request. A toast shows each call. The clip plays where Claude Code can play one (macOS).
cabinet-spinner	The game whose folder Claude last edited is the cabinet in play. In the terminal the spinner says its verbs ("Reeling", "Paddling", "Parrying") and a turn ends with its phrase ("Landed it in 3s"). The status line shows the cabinet and the arcade tokens: a prompt spends one, a green test run pays one back, FREE PLAY at zero, and /change adds three.
creel	While a command runs 3 seconds or more, a bobber sits on the water above the prompt. When it ends, a Reel It In fish comes up: heavier fish for longer green runs, the Old Boot for red ones, the Golden Loon Bass for a merge. /creel shows the catch and the daily goal.
loon-chicks	Each subagent swims as a Loon Echo chick behind the loon above the prompt. It reaches the nest when it answers; the eel takes it when it fails or is stopped. /chicks lists them.
tilt-sensor	The house rules as a pinball tilt: an Olympus edit needs npm run build --prefix games/olympus, a Follow Suit edit needs npm run build:arcade --prefix follow-suit, a page with sound loads /arcade/quiet.js first, and an arcade screen is a WebP 480 pixels wide and under 60 KB. An edit that breaks one shows DANGER. A commit that would ship it is blocked with TILT and the fix. /tilt-sensor lists and resets.
wanted-level	Crimson Rogue stars for risky moves: force pushes, rm -rf, hard resets, .env files, the paid /api/warden and project deletes. One star fades every 10 minutes. At five stars the next risky move is blocked until the stars fade or you run /lay-low.
task-breakout	/breakout shows the active OpenSpec change as a brick wall: a brick for each open task, a gap for each done one. When a box is checked, the ball breaks its brick. The last one is STAGE CLEAR, and the prompt suggests the archive.
attract-mode	When the session is idle for 3 minutes, a pane grows a live Primordia Lenia dish, like a cabinet's attract screen. The next prompt closes it. opens it at any time.

The terminal draws the pinball table, the brick wall and the Lenia dish with half-block cells, and pictures only in kitty or Ghostty. The desktop and mobile apps draw the same panes as SVG. Some game code and the announcer clips are copies: node mods/sync.mjs makes them again from public/ after the game changes.

Files

Path	What it does
public/index.html	The Cottage Arcade: the launcher with a cabinet for each game
public/arcade/	The art on the arcade screens, switch.js (the game switcher every game's menu opens), and quiet.js (stops the sound of a hidden page)
qa/arcade/	The tests that every game has a machine, and that sound stops when a page is hidden (see below)
public/plungerd/index.html	The page for Get Plunger'd
public/plungerd/app.js	The game script. The crew, the boss sheets, and the cover art are inside the file
public/plungerd/art/	The painted ground, walls, critters, props, guns, shots, and effects. Each file also comes at half size (.sd.webp) for phones
public/og.jpg	The share image
public/fall/index.html	Down the Drain: the falling-sand simulation, the guns, the critters, and the Cottage's questions, in one file with no libraries
public/crimson/index.html, public/crimson/game.js	Crimson Rogue: the page, the HUD, and the fight: moves, boss AI, camera, and flow
public/crimson/js/	Crimson Rogue modules: the ink renderer, the Sedona world, effects, sound, and the character loader
public/crimson/models/	The ronin, Gabe, and the bear: textured, rigged, with their clips
public/crimson/art/, public/crimson/clips/	The title art, the character portraits, and the clips for Crimson Rogue
public/crimson/audio/	The credits music, rendered from the score in js/credits.js
public/crimson/lib/	Three.js r170 and its glTF loader, used only by Crimson Rogue
public/crimson/js/story/	Crimson Rogue story mode (Ten Seats): the world, cast, vehicles, missions, UI and chapter content
qa/crimson/	Playwright tests for Crimson Rogue (see below)

The QA scripts open file:///home/claude/plungerd.html. Change that path to public/plungerd/index.html before you run them.

Crimson Rogue tests

Serve public/ (for example python3 -m http.server 8765 --directory public), set CRIMSON_URL=http://127.0.0.1:8765/crimson/, then run each script with Node from the repo root. Each one exits with code 1 when something fails.

Script	What it checks
boss.mjs, render.mjs	FIGHT GABE plays and draws exactly as the recorded golden run and images.
handoff.mjs, contract.mjs, story.mjs	The fight hands over to the story, and the story packages keep their contracts.
world.mjs, look.mjs, palette.mjs	Sedona builds, the roads connect, and the day and night looks stay in range.
cast.mjs, talk.mjs, van.mjs	Bodies, poses, talking mouths, and riders seated inside every vehicle, on slopes too.
combat.mjs, missions.mjs, photo.mjs	Fights, mission steps and the phone camera.
ui.mjs, touch.mjs, pad.mjs, tilt.mjs, text.mjs	The HUD at desktop and phone sizes, touch, gamepad, tilt and text.
save.mjs, music.mjs	Saves, damaged saves and CONTINUE; the title and fight songs.
perf.mjs	Triangle and draw budgets at each quality setting, in town and in fights.
playthrough.mjs <fixes, a chapter id, a side job id or newstory>	A bot plays with the normal controls only. fixes runs one check for each blocker found in the full playthrough.

Breath of the Lake tests

Serve public/ (for example cd public && python3 -m http.server 8765), then run each script with Node from qa/wild/. Each one exits with code 1 when something fails.

Script	What it checks
level.mjs	Every tower can be climbed from 8 sides with normal stamina. Outhouse doors, coolers, food, Loonies, boss arenas, and the crew are all in reachable places. You can walk down the dock, paddle the kayak to the island, get out, and walk up. Every fishing spot is in deep water you can reach.
fuzz.mjs [runs] [steps]	A bot mashes random buttons all over the map. After every step: no NaN, never under the ground or inside a building, never out of the world, hearts and stamina in range.
stress.mjs	Runs, rolls, and jumps into every building from 12 sides. Climbs and lets go. Jumps and glides off every tower. Climbs 40 cliffs. Swims under the dock. Paddles the kayak all over the lake, hops out, and climbs back in. Fishes at every spot with random buttons. Watches for the hero or the camera getting stuck or going inside things.
flows.mjs	Damaged save files, double clicks on New game, dying during a conversation, menus on top of menus, travel during a boss fight, catching a fish, moving or getting hit while fishing, travel from the kayak, a whole day and night, window resizing, and a graphics reset.
art.mjs	Generated asset loading, UVs and texture color spaces, cottage batching and roof height, day/night transitions, mobile viewport, and a playable fallback when all generated artwork fails to download. Set SHOTS for screenshots.
render.mjs	Draws the game at every graphics setting, by day, at sunset, and at night. No shader errors, and the picture is never blank, washed out, or black.
adventure.mjs	Every weapon and its combo, the modifiers, the double-damage last hit, throwing and picking up, the Frisbee coming back, a full pouch, the chests (four in each land), the camp cooler lock, all five side quests, Chip's bigger pouch, the two mini-bosses, and that a save with all of this loads again.
king.mjs	A bot fights the whole Porcelain King fight with the normal controls. All three rounds happen, plunging works, the sludge wall keeps you on the court, and after the fight or a death everything is put back.
fun.mjs	The fair-play rules: the King's gate, the roll cost, bites from behind miss, two wind-ups at most, damage numbers, the landing roll, the updraft fall, and the boss lines.
perf.mjs [quality ...]	Speed: draw calls, triangles, and the time of the game step, the world update and the draw at five places, plus load times. copies an iPhone screen. Compare runs with each other; software rendering is slow.

Set WILD_URL to test another address. If the CDN is blocked, set THREE_LOCAL to a local three.module.min.js and THREE_ADDONS to a local copy of three's examples/jsm folder.

Reel It In tests

Serve public/ (for example python3 -m http.server 8765 --directory public), then run each script with Node from the repo root. The scripts that open a browser need Playwright. Run npm ci --prefix qa/browser. Then run npx playwright install --with-deps chromium in qa/browser. Then set NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules. Some scripts serve public/ themselves. Each one exits with code 1 when something fails. The game ships three.js and its fonts, so the scripts need no network.

Script	What it checks
qa/fish/boot.e2e.mjs	Boot and the app shell on a 390x844 phone: an offline start with every other host blocked, slow fonts, the boot card for a missing module, no WebGL and a slow title, and Try again. The store build with a stub Capacitor: no arcade parts, the six title controls and the five pause buttons, the back button on every screen, app pause and resume, the save mirror, and a save restored from native storage. A GL context lost in a fight, the render scale in the page, and the lake drawn less under menus. One part waits 15 s on purpose
qa/fish/render-scale.test.mjs	The render scale in node, fed frame times at known rates: one hitch changes nothing, a slow stretch steps down to the floor and climbs back, a screen held at 30 Hz, a phone on the edge that must not pump, and a 120 Hz screen
qa/fish/app-bundle.e2e.mjs	Builds apps/fish/www, serves it on its own origin with every other origin blocked, and opens it with a fake Capacitor: the title shows, the store flag is set, no arcade text shows, no request leaves the origin, and no file is missing. It needs no other server
apps/fish/scripts/check-www.test.mjs	The bundle check on about 60 small made-up bundles: what must fail (another host, a web address in the code, a root path of the site, a missing file, arcade text on the page, and in a release a placeholder such as the support email), what only warns ("ghibli", arcade text in a script, a file that nothing loads), and what is allowed
qa/fish/flow.mjs	The whole game with motion, on a virtual phone that sends real sensor events, all upright: one press opens the bail and holds the line, the rod loads, the whip and the lift cast the lure, the reel starts on the landing, the first crank turn closes the bail, a pull sets the hook, and the fight lands the fish. Then a lift with no swing starts again, and a swing with the thumb still down casts low
qa/fish/motion.test.mjs	The rod angle, its speed, the yaw, the steering tilt, and the orientation from made-up sensor data, in every hold, through the angles where the browser's numbers flip. A simulated overhead cast checks the release angle to within 3°
qa/fish/motion.e2e.mjs	Real, trusted sensor events from Chromium's sensor emulation reach the game
qa/fish/release.test.mjs	How a release is graded, in node: the touch mapping in cast.js, a motion lift up to 90 ms either side of 11 o'clock is sweet, a held thumb casts low, the same flick gets the same verdict however long the finger rests before the lift, a flick that lifts 10 to 130 px past the press point lands 25 m or more out, and a lift 30 px below the press point grades high

Set FISH_URL to test another address. Many scripts save screenshots to the folder in SHOTS.

Moonwell tests

Run these from the repo root. The browser checks need public/ served at http://127.0.0.1:8765/ (or set BASE_URL).

Script	What it checks
node qa/moonwell/world.test.mjs	The same seed gives the same islands, 1,000 islands join up and step down, 40 stay behind with a wall, every eighth island is a shrine, rails and portals never skip a shrine, nothing sits in the ground, and the islands get harder
node qa/moonwell/play.test.mjs	Drains, the moon post, a cradle, late and early flips, the right flipper's pass, going back and a ridge that pays once, the wall 40 islands behind, the pace, no tunnelling, bumpers, the multiplier, long shots, Moonrise, rails, portals, shrines and charms, big pearls, the moonbeam and the end of a run, and a 15-minute run
node qa/moonwell/bot.mjs [runs] [skill] [minutes]	Bots of a given skill play whole runs and report how far they get, where they drain, and what they meet
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/moonwell/smoke.e2e.mjs	The title, keys, pause and blur, sound, the camera both ways, a trip back, a shrine with the 2 key, the end of a run and the save, junk saves, two thumbs on a phone, landscape, and reduced motion
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/moonwell/cabinet-art.mjs	Makes the machine art, public/arcade/moonwell.webp, from a frame of the real game

Ahead of the Light tests

Run these from the repo root. Each node test runs alone and exits with code 1 when something fails. The browser checks need public/ served at http://127.0.0.1:8765/ (or set BASE_URL) and Playwright on NODE_PATH.

Script	What it checks
for f in qa/ahead-of-the-light/*.test.mjs; do node $f || echo FAIL $f; done	The tube (the same for a seed, stars thicker toward Earth, a way through every slice, rings inside the tube and clear) and the run (doing nothing loses, a good bot gets home on most seeds and a weak one is caught on some, hits, skims, rings, boost, the tube's wall, determinism and the end)
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/ahead-of-the-light/smoke.e2e.mjs	At 1280 × 800, 800 × 600, 390 × 844, 320 × 568 and 844 × 390: the title fits with the logo whole, 44 px buttons, FLY, the grid fits the window, the ship on screen, steering by keys or drag, boost by Shift, Space or the button, pause, a sector's name in block letters, the caught card and FLY AGAIN, home and the best line, and no page errors; it reports the time to build a frame; shots in /tmp/ahead-of-the-light-smoke

First Breath tests

Run these from the repo root. Each node test runs alone and exits with code 1 when something fails. The browser checks start python3 -m http.server 8765 --directory public when nothing answers there, and need Playwright on NODE_PATH. They run headless Chromium with --disable-gpu and no SwiftShader flags, so the canvas draws in software. They do not test a real phone, real touch latency or phone speakers.

Script	What it checks
for f in qa/first-breath/*.test.mjs; do node $f || echo FAIL $f; done	Every node test: the clock and its labels, the beats, the judge and the targets, the draw-list limits, the save and the cabinet line, the run (stage order, retries, carry, one-button mode), the purity of core/, each stage (stage-<id>.test.mjs) and the ending, the facts and their sources (facts.test.mjs), the words (text.test.mjs: every string id resolves, no unfilled {var}, no em dash, the banned words and pronouns), the prompt words for keys, touch and one-button mode (prompts.test.mjs), the input's fresh-press rule (input.test.mjs), the captions queue (captions.test.mjs), each stage's step cost (perf.test.mjs: p99 1 ms or less), the paper kit with the colour script's contrast rules (paper.test.mjs), the score's cues and stingers (music.test.mjs), the score engine's scheduler on a fake AudioContext (music-engine.test.mjs: bar lines, swing, tempo, cue changes, stage 6's sync, stops and resumes, nodes freed, the voice cap, its cost), and the bots' whole-run gates over 20 seeds and 4 skills (sim.test.mjs)
node qa/first-breath/bot.mjs 20 0.7 1	Bots play whole runs headless (the number of runs, the skill from 0 to 1, the first seed) and report each stage's time, score, grade and accuracy, and the run time
node qa/first-breath/race-sim.mjs	A numeric model of the stage 1 race, apart from the game: the places and arrival times of the ref, mid and idle players and every rival over 20 seeds
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/first-breath/boot.e2e.mjs	At 390 × 844, 844 × 390 and 1440 × 900: the scripts in the right order, every member of window.__fb, Play, a whole run to the result, every stage by goto, and no errors
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/first-breath/smoke.e2e.mjs	The first 10 seconds, every stage by goto, the bot from Play to the run result, the low tier in every stage (?q=low and ?gl=0), and no raw string ids, console errors or failed requests
NODE_PATH=qa/browser/node_modules node qa/first-breath/input.e2e.mjs	Real touch at 390 × 844 and 844 × 390, and keys and the mouse at 1440 × 900: Play by a tap, a click or Enter; each stage's first gesture moves the game; one-button mode clears stage 1; a held key never clicks a new screen's button; the pause button over the overlay; the game switcher's keys; releases while paused or hidden; many keys as one hold; and the prompt words for each device

Table Tennis tests

Run these from the repo root. The desktop checks open Chromium through the Playwright package in qa/browser. Install that package, then install Chromium with npx playwright install chromium in qa/browser:

npm ci --prefix qa/browser
(cd qa/browser && npx playwright install chromium)
node --test qa/pingpong/*.test.mjs

The 48 checks cover the rules, the rally, the bat, the gate, phone motion, the desktop court, and the win rate.

Arcade tests

Serve public/ (for example cd public && python3 -m http.server 8765), then run the script from the repo root with Playwright on NODE_PATH (for example NODE_PATH=$(npm root -g)). Set ARCADE_URL to test another address of the same tree, SHOTS to a folder to save screenshots, and PARTS (gta, walk, layout, marquee, switcher, saves, credits, focus, backlinks) to run only some of the browser parts. quiet.mjs reads QUIET_URL instead (default http://localhost:8912, so serve on 8912 or set QUIET_URL=http://localhost:8765), and takes --old, --only=, --skip= and --modes=. The whole run takes a few minutes, because the page is slow in a headless browser. It exits with code 1 when something fails.

Script	What it checks
qa/arcade/machines.mjs	Every game folder in public/ (and every toy folder in public/lab/) has a machine and a place in switch.js, and the pictures are there. Then, at 390×844 and 1280×720, the arrows walk to every machine, a token goes in (dragged, tapped, or with key 5), START or key 1 or Enter picks the right address, and the page has no errors. It also checks the last machine by key and by swipe at seven window sizes, that no machine is clipped or overlapped, that the marquees of Light Years Home and Ahead of the Light show their whole title and sub line at 1280, 390, 375, 360 and 320 wide and their whole title, with the sub line hidden, in a short window (360×640 and 800×600), that the game switcher shows every game, marks the right one for each address, and keeps its exit buttons in reach, and that a junk save never breaks a screen line. A game with no machine must be in the ALLOW list in the script, with the reason. Each machine and its switcher entry must have the same id and the same name. The end card of Crimson Rogue, which lists the games of the switcher, keeps its buttons in the window at 360×740, 390×844 and 1280×720.
qa/arcade/quiet.mjs	Every page that makes sound loads quiet.js first (the scan). The script itself, on small test pages: contexts, media, SoundCloud songs, speech, interrupted contexts, a page with no AudioContext, and a script that loads twice. Then every game page, started the way a player starts it: the sound runs, goes silent when the page is hidden (even when the page pokes at its sound, and after 3 s), and runs again when the page is visible. It hides pages four ways: a page-level visibilitychange, pagehide then pageshow, a second tab on top, and a page freeze. The scan also fails when a game's page with sound has no entry in PAGES (UNPLAYED lists the older ones, each with the reason), and --only= fails on a name it does not know. A full run takes about 25 minutes. --old shows which pages are loud without the script.

Lab tests

Serve public/ (for example cd public && python3 -m http.server 8765), then run each script with Node from the repo root. The scripts that open a browser need Playwright: set NODE_PATH to the folder that holds it (for example NODE_PATH=$(npm root -g)). Each one exits with code 1 when something fails.

Script	What it checks
qa/lab/hidden.mjs	The arcade has a Lab machine and a link to the lab, the game switcher lists the lab, and every lab page asks search engines not to index it
qa/lab/links.mjs	Every game card on the Lab page and every game in the switcher opens a page that exists, and every picture in the switcher exists
qa/lab/worlds.e2e.mjs	The Small Worlds shell with all six games on a phone: today's seed, a run with no page errors, the outro, and a result card that compares the score with your best
qa/lab/worlds.<game>.sim.mjs	One sim for each Small Worlds game, run in Node with a stand-in shell: the seed sets the layout, a run can be lost, runs last 1 to 6 minutes, and a careful player beats a careless one
qa/lab/plunge.sim.mjs	The same inputs give the same flight in every run, a ghost survives its link and replays exactly, each kind of entry keeps its speed, a skim on the lake bed costs speed once, the dive cue tells the truth, and a lake-diving bot lasts at least 60 s
qa/lab/plunge.e2e.mjs	Take the Plunge on a phone and on a computer: hold and let go, a dive, winter at the end, Again, and a ghost link
qa/lab/plunge.feel.e2e.mjs	The dive cue and the amber line, the slow-motion burst, sunset and the northern lights, the winter pill, labels that stay on screen, and an old ghost link
qa/lab/creek.sim.mjs	Strokes turn the canoe the right way, J-strokes hold a line, a warning comes at least 0.3 s before every capsize, a swim resets near the swim, no eddy traps the canoe, and the log jam and the ledge work
qa/lab/creek.paddle.test.mjs	Made-up sensor data gives the right strokes, J-strokes, back strokes and braces, and a walk gives none
qa/lab/creek.thumbs.mjs	Bots that steer with thumbs: turning toward the side you press gets a simple player down every river
qa/lab/creek.e2e.mjs	Up the Creek with a virtual phone that sends real sensor events, with thumbs and with keys: an eddy catch, the log jam with Restart and Share, and the ledge
qa/lab/tilt.*.mjs, npm run test:pinball --prefix qa/browser	Full Tilt's sims and browser checks. CI runs them on every pull request that changes the lab (see )

Set LAB_URL to test another address, and SHOTS to a folder to save screenshots.

Studio tests

Run node qa/studio/refresh.test.mjs from the repo root. It builds a small git repo with branches, pull request refs and a local worktree, runs studio/refresh.mjs on it with made-up sessions, and checks the agents, the work trees, the cabinets and the feed. Then it opens the page in Chromium at desktop and phone width. The browser part needs Playwright (NODE_PATH=$(npm root -g)). It exits with code 1 when something fails.

Watch call tests

Run npm ci --prefix voice, then node qa/voice/call.test.mjs from the repo root. The tests place a call against a stand-in Twilio API and open call sessions the way Twilio does, against a stand-in Hermes API server. Forged signatures, forged or reused call tokens and messages before setup must never reach Hermes. The script exits with code 1 when something fails.

Mod tests

Run node mods/check.mjs from the repo root. It needs the claude CLI. It checks that the copies in the mods match public/, that every game in public/arcade/switch.js has a cabinet, that the marketplace and each mod validate, and it runs each mod's tests with claude plugin test. The type check also needs tsc and the engine's declarations: set CLAUDE_CODE_TYPES to the path of claude-code.d.ts, or load a mod once so Claude Code lays them in its folder. node mods/qa/frames.mjs times the three animated panes (each under 4 ms a frame) and draws a frame of each to a PNG. Each script exits with code 1 when something fails.

Jev and cost

api/warden.js signs in to AI Gateway with the project's Vercel OIDC token, so the repo holds no API key. To use a gateway key instead, set AI_GATEWAY_API_KEY. To pin a model, set JEV_MODEL (the default is typesafe-ai/jev).

/api/warden is public and spends AI Gateway credits. It accepts calls only from https://arcade.uptick.systems and *.vercel.app origins, and it caps the request size. node qa/api/warden.test.mjs checks the origin rule. For stronger protection, add a rate-limit rule in the Vercel Firewall.

Cottage Brawl platform fighter

The separate Smash-inspired fighter lives at /brawl/ and has its own Cottage Arcade cabinet and shared game-switcher entry. It includes eight fighters, landscape and portrait controls, collectible power-ups, default-on chiptune audio after the first gesture, and the corrected Christian portrait and title poster. Jev tactics use the existing /api/warden gateway, with local AI fallback; no extra client API key is needed.

River Rush

River Rush is an endless three-lane raft runner at /river-rush/, with an Action cabinet and a shared game-switcher entry. Use A/D or ←/→ to change lanes, W/↑/Space to jump logs, and S/↓ to duck branches. Dodge rocks, follow coin trails, build a ×5 streak, and complete rotating trick/coin/distance challenges. Coins and tricks charge Rush: Shift or its touch button grants four seconds of fast invulnerability. Magnet attracts coins across lanes for eight seconds; shields absorb one hit. Speed and obstacle combinations rise gradually, including jump-then-duck barriers. A collision ends an unprotected run; Enter or Ride again retries immediately. Phones support directional swipes and all five actions through touch buttons. Escape pauses; hiding the page pauses simulation and silences audio.

Editable source is in games/river-rush/. Run npm ci --prefix games/river-rush, npm test --prefix games/river-rush, and npm run build:arcade --prefix games/river-rush after changes; static output is committed in public/river-rush/. Browser regression: node qa/river-rush/runner.mjs with the static server running; ARCADE_URL selects a deployed origin. arcade.mjs, animation.mjs and the game’s tests/browser-check.mjs invoke the same consolidated regression.

The approved character keeps his face, long hair and modest loincloth in separate riding, jumping and ducking sprites. Generated portrait/landscape jungle environments, projected hazards, wakes, foam, shield and action bursts support readable play. The Higgsfield living title scene has a still fallback for reduced motion, data-saving and video errors. Runner best scores use version 2 in the existing browser-local storage key, so legacy race scores are not treated as runner records. Media provenance and design/verification records are in games/river-rush/docs/.

Standalone Unreal project

NORD: Parc La Fontaine, Montréal is an Unreal Engine 5.8.3 walking/driving co-op project centered on 1334 Rue Sherbrooke Est. Its geographic source, art credits, Linux build instructions, and checks are included with the project.