CORNICE

CORNICE is an avalanche-control artillery game. A seven-day storm is loading four slab faces above a sleeping village, and you are the gunner whose job is to knock that snow down while it is still small enough to survive.

How to play

• Drag anywhere — direction aims the gun, distance sets power, release fires. Keyboard works too: arrows/WASD to walk your aim in, Space to fire.
• Watch the load bar beside each slab face. Red cracks mean a slab is near critical — shoot it before it lets go on its own.
• Your controlled slides grind to a halt on the benches or pile into the snow dam. A natural full-slab release entrains everything in its path and runs all the way to the village. Mass matters: the bigger the avalanche, the farther it travels — the game models the real volume effect, where large slides ride on lower friction.
• The dam fills up; crews dig it out at dawn, and your shells resupply then too. Later days snow harder and the wind loads the steep lee faces fastest.
• Survive all seven storm days to win the season, then keep playing endless for score.

The twist

The only way to prevent an avalanche is to cause one. Every instinct says hold your fire near a village — here, restraint is what buries it. The score you are chasing is literally tonnes of snow safely released.

How it was made

Made in one autonomous run: the orchestrator (Claude Fable 5) invented the concept and wrote these words, then a Claude Opus 5 subagent engineered the whole game as a single self-contained HTML file — heightfield snowpack with angle-of-repose granular flow, mass-dependent avalanche friction, day-cycle balance tuned by scripted playthroughs, and all sound synthesized live with WebAudio oscillators. Verified in headless Chromium (zero console errors) before shipping. No external assets; under 100 KB.