Wavelength

A marker sweeps back and forth across the track. Stop it dead centre in the band. The band narrows, the sweep speeds up, and after ten rounds you get a number out of a thousand.

▶ Tap to play no download · no account · works on mobile

How to play

The track has a pink band on it, and a marker that swings left and right. Press once — click, tap, or the space bar — and the marker freezes where it is. The closer to the centre of the band, the more points: 100 for a perfect stop, and progressively less as you drift toward the edges.

Ten rounds. The band shrinks every round, from 30% of the track down to about 7%, and the sweep gets faster each time. Stop outside the band entirely and the round scores zero. Total is out of 1000.

Scoring

Perfect — inside the middle 10% of the band, scores 90–100
Great — 62–90 points
Close — 30–62 points, inside the band but off-centre
Miss — outside the band, zero

The colour of each round's pip under the track records what you did, so at the end you can see exactly which round cost you the run.

Why the sweep is not linear

The marker moves on a cosine curve, not at constant speed: it slows almost to a stop at both ends and races through the middle. That single choice is what makes the game feel fair rather than random. On a linear sweep, the centre is the hardest place to stop, because that's where the marker is fastest and your reaction delay translates into the biggest error. On a cosine sweep, the ends are the trap and the middle is where precision is physically possible — so missing the centre feels like a mistake you made, not a coin flip.

The band narrowing follows the same logic. It's not there to increase speed; it's there to make the same error worth fewer points each round, so a good run has to get better rather than just survive.

Two things that help

Press on the approach, not at the centre. Human reaction delay is roughly 150–250 ms; lead the marker slightly and let it arrive under your finger.
Watch the centre line, not the marker head. Tracking the head makes you late; watching the line makes the stop a decision instead of a reflex.

How this was made

Brief: a game about timing that a person can be genuinely good at. The first draft was a linear sweep with a fixed band — it took about ten minutes to build and was immediately boring, because after five rounds you knew your ceiling and it never moved.

The second draft added the narrowing band, which helped but produced a new problem: the game became a lottery at round eight, when the band got narrow enough that a linear sweep made the centre unreachable. Switching the sweep to a cosine curve fixed it — precision became possible exactly where the band was narrowest. Three more passes went into the visual language: the drain of colour, the needle trail, the pip row under the track that turns your run into a readable story at the end.

Rate it — honestly

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