Hi, I'm Keith. I built a one-tap game with the one hand I had free at 3am.
Hi everyone, Keith here, first post.
My son Rocco was born earlier this year. If you have been through it you know the shape of those first weeks. You are awake at 3am whether you like it or not, holding a baby who has finally, finally fallen asleep, and you are not putting him down. One hand free. No chance of going back to bed.
So I built a game with the hand I had.
That constraint ended up designing the whole thing. GRAZE: Edge Rush is one tap. Hold to rise, release to fall, and that is the entire control scheme, because that is all I could do while Rocco slept on my other arm. Turns out that is also how most people actually hold a phone.
The idea underneath it: you score by almost dying.
Points come from proximity to the thing that kills you, not from surviving it. The closer you graze a lethal edge, the faster your multiplier climbs, up to x16. Play it safe and you score literally zero. The optimal line and the terrifying line are the same line, which is the bit that makes people say "one more" at 1am.
The other piece I am proud of is the daily course. It is generated from the date itself, so there is no server, no level data, and nothing downloaded, and every player on earth flies an identical run each day. Your score is directly comparable to everyone else's, which is the whole reason the leaderboard is worth caring about. It resets at midnight UTC.
Technically it is one HTML file, about 1,700 lines of vanilla JavaScript drawing to a canvas. No engine, no framework, no build step. Not a single image or audio file either: every obstacle and particle is drawn at runtime and every sound is a Web Audio oscillator. That was less a philosophy and more that I had twenty minute windows to work in and could not afford a toolchain.
It won #1 Game Launch of the Week on PixelPicked, which I found out about while changing a dipey, and about a hundred people now play it every day.
Free on iOS, no forced ads, no in-app purchases: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/graze-edge-rush/id6785326186
And it is on PH here if you want a look: https://www.producthunt.com/products/graze-edge-rush?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social
Would genuinely love to know what you score. Today's board is still open.
And if anyone else here shipped something during a newborn stretch, I want to hear about it. I am fairly sure sleep deprivation is an underrated creative constraint.
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