— fps
Pulse Runner
Dodge the descending pulses for as long as you can hold the line.
Controls
- Keyboard
- Left and right arrows, or A and D, to steer.
- Touch
- Hold the left or right side of the lower band to steer.
- Restart
- Use the restart button on the game-over panel, or New game in the settings menu.
Pulse Runner exists to answer one question: does the Lab runtime hold sixty
frames a second on a phone? It is the first prototype wired to the fixed-timestep
loop in src/lab/loop/, the DPR-aware canvas stage, and the HUD frame counter.
The gameplay is deliberately simple so that any frame drop is the platform’s
fault and not the game’s.
How it plays
You steer a single craft along the bottom of the stage. Pulses fall from the top. Touch one and the run ends. Score is survival time, counted in tenths of a second, and it is stored only in this browser.
The playfield is letterboxed to a fixed aspect ratio, so the difficulty curve is identical on a 375 pixel phone and a 2560 pixel monitor. The bars above and below the playfield are painted with the stage background, which is why the seam is invisible.
What this prototype is testing
- Frame pacing. The HUD counter is smoothed, not instantaneous, because a number changing sixty times a second is unreadable and writing to the DOM that often costs the frames it is trying to measure.
- Pause correctness. Backgrounding the tab, opening the privacy dialog, or starting an ad all pause the loop through the shared shell. Resuming must not replay the paused interval as one enormous frame.
- Input under load. The input gate swallows keyboard, pointer, and touch in the capture phase while an ad is on screen, so a stray tap cannot kill the run behind the advert.
Limits
This is a prototype, not a finished game. It has no settings screen, no ambient audio, no difficulty options, and no saved progression beyond a browser-local score. It is not indexed by search engines and it is not part of the Quiet Arcade catalog. It may change or disappear without notice.