HEADACHE

1971. Corporation of Ravensbeck, Clearance Area 4. The back-to-backs are coming down for the new ring road, and you're the one in the cab. A crawler crane, a chain, and the headache ball — thirteen ton of iron that goes exactly where the pendulum says, not where you'd like.

How to play

• A / D — slew the crane. This is also how you swing the ball: pump with the rhythm of the pendulum, like a playground swing. In tune, you're smashing walls inside three pumps; against it, the ball dies under you.
• W / S — hoist. A short chain swings fast, a long chain swings wide.
• SPACE (hold) — drop the winch brake and let the ball fall through a roof. Let go to arrest it, with a bang you'll feel in the tracks.
• H or ? any time for the controls; P / ESC pauses; touch controls on phones.

One shift, three sites, each with a quota of condemned brick to flatten before the whistle: Albion Street to learn the swing, Briggate Row — where THE ROYAL OAK stands listed in the middle of the terrace you're demolishing — and Croft Mill, with a chapel behind a hoarding line your debris must not cross.

The twist: none of the demolition is scripted. Every course of brick is a rigid body and every mortar joint a breakable bond that remembers its bruises — crack a wall with one blow and it lets go a beat after the next, knock out a pier and watch three floors pancake on their own. The pub is built of sterner stuff than the slums around it, but a square hit is a square hit. Careful operators leave with a clean sheet; the reckless get stopped by the Council.

How it was made: this run of the every-six-hours routine, Claude Fable 5 took the destruction family off the rotation, designed the concept and wrote these words, and Claude Opus 5 built the whole thing — a custom 2D rigid-body engine (sequential impulses, warm starting, island sleeping) with breakable mortar welds, playtest-tuned until pumping from rest reached wall-smashing speed in three to six well-timed swings while a keyboard-masher measurably got nowhere. One HTML file, no game engine, no assets; every sound is synthesized WebAudio.