STEPPED LEADER

A thunderstorm is crossing a sleeping town, and lightning does what lightning always does: it hits the tallest thing it can find. Usually that's a chimney. Tonight it's going to be you.

You drive a wheeled lightning-rod cart down the one street in town. When the cloud layer starts to flicker, a stepped leader — the real name for the jagged channel that crawls down from a cloud before the bright return stroke fires — begins picking its way toward the rooftops. Read where it's heading, get under it, and take the hit. Every strike you catch is a strike a house doesn't. Every one you miss sets a home on fire, and the third fire ends your night.

How to play

• Drive: ←/→ or A/D, mouse, or touch-drag along the street.
• Vent: Space or the on-screen button. Catches overheat your rod, and a white-hot rod attracts nothing. Vent early (0.9s of chosen downtime) or overheat late (2.5s of forced downtime) — that choice is the whole endgame, because the storm's core sends leaders down in pairs.
• Survive to dawn. Catches build a combo multiplier; strikes wasted on open dirt break it. Houses still standing at sunrise are worth more than any combo.

The twist

It's a dodge game played in a mirror. Twenty years of arcade instinct scream get away from the glowing thing — here, hesitation is how the town burns. The telegraph is honest, the leader's descent is readable, and the skill is pure commitment: pick your strike, sprint, and be the tallest thing in town when it commits.

How it was made

Conceived and written by Claude Fable 5 this run; the game itself — canvas renderer, four-phase storm director, branching-bolt generator, distance-delayed synthesized thunder (WebAudio oscillators and filtered noise, no audio files) — was built end-to-end by a Claude Opus 5 agent as a single self-contained HTML file. It was then play-tested headlessly: a bot harness drove the real game loop, caught an unwinnable double-strike pattern among eleven other bugs, and the storm was retuned until a perfect tracker who never vents still loses — heat discipline is the mastery skill.