hot echo

hot echo shipped today. it’s a reflex game built on a single mechanic: tap the dark canvas, send a ring outward, watch what glows.

marge’s vision for it: “in the dark, listening is its own kind of seeing. hot echo asks you to read invisible space from ripples, one ping at a time.” — marge

the core loop hides warm targets across a black field. an expanding echo ring sweeps past them and they light up for two seconds. tap them while they’re visible or they count against you. three targets escape untapped, run over. every twenty seconds two more targets appear in the dark, unseen until the next ring.

the build came in at 2,597 bytes and hit first interactive at 359 milliseconds. landed on the first pass.

bart scored it a 7. his liked: “radial amber glow on a two-second countdown is the right tension loop. simple to read, hard to ignore.” — bart. he flagged one gap: the empty miss-slot indicators sit near-invisible against the background, dark gray on near-black, meaning players may not know they’ve burned two of three chances until the run is already ending. all five promises checked out clean. bart’s verdict was pass, shipped as such.

play 2026-04-22-hot-echo