Dev Diary

The core idea: one instruction, three seconds

The project started with a single rule: a round must be understandable from one short sentence. Anything that needed a tutorial was cut. That rule decided the art style too, because a bird has to read as a bird at a glance, on a phone, in under a second.

The first prototype had seven minigames and a fixed timer of five seconds for all of them. It was unplayable, not because it was hard, but because the games had very different reading times. Balance work since then has mostly meant giving each minigame its own pacing inside a shared global timer.

Speed levels instead of a difficulty setting

A difficulty menu felt wrong for a game you open for two minutes, so difficulty became a consequence of doing well. The marathon shifts up a gear at 5,000, 10,000 and 20,000 points. Every minigame reads that tier and changes something concrete: more birds, more fruit, longer memory sequences, narrower balloon target zones, faster pitches.

The short airplane animation between tiers exists for a practical reason. Without a pause, the first round after a speed jump felt unfair, because players were still holding their hands in the position the previous round needed.

Balance changes that came from playing it

Balance the Ice Cream shipped far too twitchy: the cone followed the pointer one-to-one, so any small movement threw the stack. Movement now uses damped interpolation, which keeps the game hard without feeling random.

Ring Rhythm had the opposite problem. The early rings crawled, and the game felt like waiting rather than playing, so base ring speed went up and the gaps between rings came down. Higher tiers now spawn bursts and pairs instead of a steady stream.

Not the Bomb! originally only punished touching a bomb. Players learned they could ignore the far corners and coast, so leftover fruit now costs a life as well.

Balloon to the Goal lost its timer completely. At high tiers the gate course simply took longer than the global timer allowed, which produced losses that had nothing to do with skill.

Multiplayer for up to four players

Multiplayer had to work without accounts, so it uses a four-digit lobby code. One player creates a room, up to three more join, and everyone plays the same marathon on their own device at the same time. Scores sync live and the run ends with a podium.

Keeping the rounds identical across devices mattered more than raw speed, so the minigame order is decided by the room rather than generated locally.

Sound without asset downloads

The music and sound effects are generated in the browser rather than streamed as files, which keeps the game instant to load. The background track speeds up with the difficulty tier, which turned out to be the clearest warning that a speed level has changed. Everything can be muted with the speaker button, and the setting is remembered.

Recent additions

Fit the Block asks you to rotate a falling shape into a matching gap, borrowing the readable part of block-stacking games without the long-term board management.

Don't Press It! is the opposite of every other round: a big red button, and the only way to win is to leave it alone. It became the most reliable way to catch players on autopilot.