I put four more things on itch.io since the last post. They were all sitting finished in a folder while I was figuring out how to put them up.
ABORT
A launch console. A wall of gauges, a fifty-item scrolling checklist, a terminal count, and one button. No single reading aborts the launch — combinations do, and nobody tells you which.
Fuel pressure low on its own is nothing because the pumps carry it. Fuel pressure low while the pump spin test has stalled means the pumps are not carrying it, and that is a launch you stop.
The countdown does four jobs. It is the evidence window, the checklist clock, the score, and the failure condition twice over. Let it reach zero with a live fault and the vehicle is lost. A few faults run on their own fuse and destroy the rocket before zero, which is the moment the count stops being the thing you are racing.
HOLD freezes the clock for fourteen seconds. It buys reading time and not safety. The gauges keep drifting while it is held.
Three channels lie on every count. Sitting still while the board shouts is most of the skill.
BREAK
You are outside the solar system and you have a rock. Pick a bearing, a speed, and a year to let go. Then watch for the next few thousand years.
I fired 24,000 shots with random settings and counted. Eight hit Earth. One in three thousand.
The rest: 94.9% leave the solar system for good. 4.6% still drifting after 50,000 years. 0.40% hit some planet. 0.05% fall into the Sun. 0.033% hit Earth. Jupiter got hit sixty times in the same batch — eleven times wider, five times further away, and it still catches seven rocks for every one that finds us.
With the solver on, most people land one in fifteen to forty tries.
Lottohuolto
Every Saturday evening several million people watch the national lottery draw. You maintain the machine.
Monday to Friday you are in the workshop. Polish a ball, take a gram out of the inside of another, swap a core, adjust the air guide, solder a wire across two pins on the Plus board. Saturday morning you buy your rows. Saturday evening Aulis Gerlachius walks over to the machine — retired police officer, thirty years on these draws, never once looked pleased about it — and you find out whether the week was a good idea.
Winning is not the same as being paid. Below 32 every number is somebody’s birthday. A jackpot on popular numbers gets divided among thousands. The numbers nobody plays are the ones worth your evenings.
Plus pays nothing by itself. It multiplies everything a row has already won by five, everything except the jackpot. On a fair machine that is a bad bet. On one you have spent two months on, a Plus week turns eight hundred euros into something else.
MOPO CHASE
Undercover cop in a black Passat estate. Jonne on an illegal white mopo. One road, twelve chases.
Put your bonnet inside the bracket on the back of his mopo, be faster than him at that moment, and he goes. The siren has to be on when you hit him. No siren, no case: his lawyer files and the points come off. Three lawsuits and you are off the force.
But he hears it too. On the first chase he takes about eight tenths of a second to react. By the twelfth it is about a third. Wail too early and he is already gone down the road.
Points are in the landing. Fence posts, hay bales, lamp posts, road signs, trees. The multiplier climbs with every object he goes through.
One HTML file, 78 kB. No image files, no audio files, no libraries. Every sprite with canvas commands, every sound with WebAudio at the moment it plays. Best on a phone in portrait. Headphones help.
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