Metrlol

A spiked steel ball, the head of a morning star with no morning star attached, is loose in an open city of takes. There are no tracks and no levels: Metrlol is one map, all of it there from the start, and the ball can roll anywhere it can get to. In the way is the discourse: the Pause crowd and the doomers, the effective altruists and the rationalists, the commune and the theorists, the Eurocrats on strike, the accelerationists on a podcast, and the reply guys, who are everywhere. Roll into them fast enough and they are smashed; too slowly and they bounce off, and it costs you spikes. Each time, the ball says something unkind about it.

Somewhere in all of it are 42 golden GPUs. Every side of the argument wants them. The ball is keeping them.

The sequel to Metroll, and made of the games before it:

• the engine is Petroll's: its renderer, ball physics, tiled map builder, traffic, hazards, minimap and HUD. The map is Metrlol's own: a city of nine parts, 256 tiles each way (four times the area of Petroleum Springs), with a few of Petroll's set pieces in it (the car park up to the roof, the skate park, the consensus maze, the footbridge, the plank to the island), and like Petroll's it is tested to be rollable from end to end;
• the ball, the smash rules, the cast, the quips and the band are Metroll's: the morning star's head, whose spikes snap off as it is knocked about; speed is everything (smash.js); the sculpted people (src/cast/, mostly in new clothes, plus a Pause protester and a Eurocrat); the sarcasm; and the music, played live in Web Audio;
• the sculptor is from the Rock 'n' Roller games.

It is satire of ideas, not of anyone in particular, and it is an equal-opportunity ball: the doomers get it, and so do the accelerationists, the commune, the Eurocrats, and you.

Run

git clone https://github.com/h1ddenpr0cess20/metrlol
cd metrlol
npm install
npm run dev               # → http://localhost:5173

A static page: no server, no keys. npm run build puts it in dist/, which runs from any folder. WebGPU where the browser has it, WebGL 2 where it doesn't (?renderer=webgl pins it). Node 22.12 or later.

Play

←↑↓→ or WASD	Roll. Up always rolls up the screen, however the view is turned.
Hold the mouse or a finger	Roll toward the pointer. The further it is from the ball, the harder the push.
Space or Shift	Accelerate: hold for a harder push and a higher top speed, until the meter runs dry (it refills when you let go). The ACCELERATE button on a touch screen.
Q E, or drag with the right mouse button	Turn the view. Dragging up and down tilts it.
Mouse wheel, or + −	Zoom.
Two fingers	Pinch to zoom, twist to turn, drag up or down to tilt.
C	Put the view back.
Gamepad	Left stick or d-pad rolls; right stick turns and tilts; shoulder buttons zoom; A, X or the right trigger accelerates; Start pauses.
P / Esc	An intermission (pause).
M	Sound on or off.

Speed is everything

How hard the ball hits someone is how fast the two were coming together, in tiles a second, their walking included. Everybody has a toughness, the speed it takes to smash them in one go, and a power, how much it hurts to bounce off them.

Speed		What happens
1.7 times what it takes (13 at the least)	OBLITERATED!	Gone, with double the cred.
At least their toughness	SMASHED!	Gone, thrown clear, and it costs the ball nothing.
Over half their toughness	BONK	You both bounce, and it costs some spikes, less the closer you were to a smash.
Under that	WEAK	It hurts, all of their power, and they don't move.

Someone who isn't smashed is still worn down, so a doorman you can't hit hard enough can be hit twice. The Prophet of Doom takes a good deal more.

• Acceleration is how you hit what you couldn't: hold it and the ball reaches speeds that smash anyone but the toughest (the doorman, datacentre security, the old bird) and the bosses. It runs dry in about three seconds, and refills in five.
• Cred is the score. Smashes build a combo (×5 at most) that multiplies each one.
• Time horizon, up in the corner, doubles every six smashes. The line goes up.
• Props go too: bins, benches, mailboxes, signs, hydrants, street lamps, trees, charging posts, parked cars, and the bronze paperclip in the plaza. Each has a speed it takes (a cone 2.5, a bin 4, a lamp post 9, the paperclip 14), and is as solid as a wall below it. They are worth a little cred each, and come back with a new run.
• Likes are the little hearts lying about in lines. They are validation, and worth nothing.

Staying in one piece

The ball starts with 100 spikes, and you can watch them snap off. It is a lump of forged steel and takes a beating: every knock costs half what it would. Hard landings, cars, cable reels rolling after it, the hot takes coming up out of the floor and the people it fails to smash take them away. At nothing the ball is blunted, and it is back at the last whetstone it rolled over, sharpened. A rubber stamp coming down on it blunts it outright. The data lake and the sea swallow it, and it's put back on the last firm ground.

What you've found, the last whetstone and the time so far are kept in the browser (metrlol.v1), and the game plays the same with storage blocked.

Metrlol

Nine parts of town, three across and three down, the superhighway down the east side, and the far side of it.

	Portland Heights, north-west: the suburbs, and home. Co-op houses, a drained pool that is now the community garden, a tiny house village, the consensus maze (still voting on the exit), the food co-op with a loading ramp up to its roof and the commune's long house behind it. The commune, the anarchists, the theorists, the doomscrollers, the dropout founders.
	The skate park, in Portland Heights: four blocks of it, the streets between them closed. A pool-tile bowl (deep at one end, shallow enough at the other to roll out of), a wooden half pipe with a deck at each end, a plaza with a stair set, two handrails and a bank down off it, a pyramid, ledges, manual pads, kickers and a flat rail, a pump track round a lawn with its corners banked, the quarter pipe with the murals on it (and a golden GPU near the top, for a run-up), and the skate shop (no AI).
	The Alignment District, north: the Longterm Institute and the alley behind it, a group house with a car park up to the roof, the slippery slope (oil all the way up: take a run at it), the doom clock and the prediction market round it, the plaza where the Pause protest has been for a year (a bronze paperclip on a plinth in the middle of it), the SHUT IT DOWN rally stage, the Effective Altruism Center, a building site whose crane has been paused since March. Doomers, effective altruists, rationalists, forecasters, safety researchers.
	The Ivory Tower, north-east: the campus. The library (closed for training), the lecture hall sunk in the quad, the trolley problem, going round and round, and the tower itself: a ramp three times round it to the top, where you are above it all. Rationalists, researchers, theorists, purists, longtermists.
	The Pause Compound, west: behind a fence, the tank of doom with a lift up its side, a ramp and a catwalk, the barracks, the bunker sunk in the yard, and hot takes alley, where they come up out of the floor in a wave you have to ride the gap behind. And the Prophet of Doom, who has predicted the end of the world every year since 2003 and has been, technically, early.
	The Timeline, the middle: downtown. Towers with screens on them (TRENDING: YOU), Ratio Square, the echo chamber (a round room in a round room), the discourse pit, the infinite scroll (a walkway in the air, over the street, to the end of it, with a troll under it), and the engagement farm, where the likes are grown in rows. Reply guys, engagement farmers, Substack writers, thought leaders, gatekeepers.

The music is Metroll's hardcore track (New York, 1989: a d-beat, no encores), start to finish.

The cast

Seventy-three kinds of people, about 440 of them, sculpted in code (src/cast/) and baked in background workers while the page loads. Who they are, and what they shout, is in src/foes.js. They come from the games before it, in new names:

• from Metroll: the doomer (the mourner), the forecaster (the coroner), the longtermist (the wizard), the effective altruist (the straight-edge kid: donates ten percent, does not shut up about the ten percent), the rationalists, the reply guys and most of the rest; and now the protest singer (the folkie), the dropout founder (the skater), the pallbearer, the dead internet (the zombie), the lab rat, Schrödinger's cat, the humanoid robot, the datacentre technician (the welder), the SRE on call (the sound guy), the cable wrangler (the roadie), datacentre security, the crypto bro (Florida Man), the AI ethicist (the medic), the shoggoth enjoyer (the goth) and the keeper of the weights (the knight);
• from Rock 'n' Roller: the YIMBY (the hipster), the NIMBY (the angry neighbour), the AI influencer, the main character (phone guy), the old bird (the mascot), the founder (the A&R suit);
• from Rock 'n' Roller II: the recruiter (the agent), the prepper (the cowboy), the newsletter kid (the newsie), the screenshotter (the paparazzo), the tourist, a non-human intelligence (the rubber alien), and the Billionaire (the mogul), a boss, up on Sand Hill by the infinity pool;
• from Rock 'n' Roller III: the tenured professor (the city gent), the thought experimenter (the mime), the postdoc (the archaeologist), the biohacker (the bull runner), the VC's corgi, the cyclist, the waiter (on strike), the cab driver, the lifeguard, the surfer, nonna, the hot take vendor, and the Edge Case (the yeti), a boss, out on the far side past the edge of the training data;
• sculpted already but never cast till now: the data protection officer (the beat cop), the prompt engineer (the scene kid), the simulation theorist (the stoner) and the festival bro (the beer guy);
• new in Metrlol: the Pause protester and the Eurocrat.

How it's made

madness-engine	The engine the game runs on: Alan's renderer, the physics, input, the town view, the sculpting kit, and the library's people, streets, vehicles, surfaces, sky, ball and band.
src/cast/	Who is in town (the library's people), their library and bake worker.
src/foes.js, src/crowd.js, src/smash.js	Who is in the way, how they walk and come at the ball, and what a meeting costs.
src/quips.js	What the ball says, and the time horizon.
src/map.js, src/town.js	The map: a grid of tiles, with road paint, props, solids, traffic, hazards, pickups, signs and the crowd on top of them; and Metrlol, part of town by part of town.
src/structures.js, src/models/	What stands on the map: signs, screens and billboards with words on them, tanks, the mast, the crane, parasols; sculpted street furniture, vehicles, charging posts, rubber stamps, cable reels, whetstones, likes and GPUs.
src/run.js	The world as it runs, with nothing drawn: the rules for spikes, smashes, combos, pickups. The game draws it; the tests drive it.
src/audio.js	The band (the library's), and every sound effect, synthesised.

Script
npm run dev	Vite dev server (and /preview.html: ?foes=pauser,eurocrat, ?foes=all, ?hurt=0.5)
npm run build	Bundles to dist/
npm test	node:test: physics, the map builder, the city, the traffic, the hazards, the crowd and the smash rules, and an autopilot that has to find all 42 golden GPUs in one go without being blunted
npm run lint	ESLint

In the browser console, metrlol.debug.teleport(x, z) puts the ball anywhere on the map.