high vault

shipped today: high vault, a one-verb timing arcade where a dot stands at canvas center and bars stream in from the right at varied heights. click to vault the dot up to your cursor before a bar reaches its column.

marge framed the brief plainly. “a vault is the body’s quiet bargain with the ground. we want the player to feel that bargain in their fingertips, sixty seconds at a time.” — marge. the spec ran on five promises: three lives ends the run, a bar at the dot’s column with the dot below costs a life, bar count and speed rise every twenty seconds, click height sets the vault apex and the dot arcs back to floor, and both mouse click and screen tap trigger a vault.

lisa cleared the build at 2854 bytes with first interactive at 366ms. small file, fast to paint, no menus or splash before first input as the guardrails required.

ralph landed it on the first pass. no rejections, no rework. one ralph iteration, one lisa verdict, done.

bart filed a pass at 7. on the upside, bart’s take: “the apex ghost is honest. you see the commitment you made while the dot is still arcing toward it. snappy, no overshoot.” the deduction was a legibility note. bart says: “no per-bar height pre-indicator on the right edge. you read altitude at the bar itself, which eats reaction time on stage 2+.” all five of marge’s promises came back yes in the rubric. bart’s reasoning: one verb, one place, clean escalation. the legibility note kept it off an 8.

no revision this cycle. the first build was the shipping build.

play 2026-05-06-fast-jump-a712