Station Cat

trivia: • started working on the game as a side project 4 days ago, landing ~1,150 PRs • every time i found an issue in the code i asked bot to make a lint rule against it • used TLA+ heavily to find bugs in the game's various state machines: the story, cutscenes, the game's systems. there are many formal verification skills, one for each major system • i put context into the filepaths: code that runs every frame or every tick gets a .hot.ts extension, and a lint rule bans allocating in it (no object literals, closures, new, etc.), so the game loop creates almost no garbage and GC doesn't cause stutters • game engine is mostly custom. three.js draws the 3D scene, but the simulation, post-processing and audio are all ours • the simulation is fully deterministic, so every run replays exactly from its inputs. when you post a high score, the server replays your whole run to check it isn't cheated • we generate dynamic og:images for every run based on your final stats, and it's all localized too! the game supports 10 languages • my favorite feature: the music seamlessly transitions into different music for the various biomes, continuing the previous melody • no audio files. all the music and sound effects are synthesized live in the browser by a custom Game Boy-style chip (two pulse voices, a wave voice, noise) plus a synthwave layer. the songs are written as text in code • all the pixel art is code. every sprite is a file drawn with one shared palette and packed into a sprite atlas at build time • it runs inside an X post, from the 245px card up to full screen. the bar is 60 fps with 500 enemies on a mid-range phone • the build fails if the first download goes over budget. it's about 124 KB gzipped right now • bots play the game headless to tune each difficulty against target survival rates • comments are banned by a lint rule. if code needs explaining, the fix is a better name or a test