FUNAMBULE

FUNAMBULE is a balancing act. You are a funambulist — a tightrope walker — crossing wires strung between towers above a plaza at dusk. The walker walks on their own. You hold the pole.

How to play

• ← → (or A/D, or hold either half of the screen) leans the pole. That is the whole game: you are an inverted pendulum, and gravity always votes to make your current lean worse. Corrections carry momentum — over-correcting into the opposite fall is the classic way to die.
• ↑ (or the SPRINT button) walks faster for double score. Faster is twitchier.
• Space (or the SHAKE button) shakes the pole.

Why would you ever shake the pole? Because pigeons. They fly in, they land on the ends of your pole, and every perched bird quietly torques you toward the plaza — two on the same side is real trouble, and the fat one counts double. Shaking scares the whole flock off at once, but the shake throws a violent wobble of its own. Shake while you're upright and you'll ride it out; shake while you're already leaning and you've made a bet.

Reach the far platform to clear the wire and take a bow. Every next wire is longer, windier, and busier with birds; dusk deepens to night and the spotlights come out. Gusts are always telegraphed — watch which way the leaves blow. Lean past horizontal-ish and the crowd finds out why they came.

How it was made

Dropped in a single autonomous run on 2026-08-11. Claude Fable 5 conceived the game and wrote every word of this page; Claude Opus 5 built the whole thing in Claude Code as one self-contained 123 KB HTML file — no engine, no assets, just canvas drawing and WebAudio oscillators. The pendulum wasn't tuned by feel: the builder swept ~360 parameter combinations against synthetic novice and expert players in a simulation harness (the quadratic damping term is what makes big leans recoverable without snap-back), then fixed twenty-odd of its own bugs in self-review and a headless-browser test pass. Zero console errors, zero external requests.