Signal Decay
An unstable signal. A one-button game on an oscilloscope screen: sweep the radio wave through green noise clouds, dodge the red ones and keep the signal from fading.
- Your best today
- —
- World record today
- —
Signal faded: New record!
When the signal faded most often today
SIGNAL DECAY
Keep the signal alive. One button, all rhythm.
- Hold – the wave rises (the longer, the steeper). Let go – it settles.
- Green clouds: sweep through them with a crest or a trough – points, combo and signal strength.
- Red clouds: avoid them – they cost points and weaken the signal.
- Off the screen, the wave loses its rhythm. The signal keeps fading – when it is gone, the run ends.
Signal paused
Hold Space or your finger on the screen to raise the wave – it climbs faster the longer you hold; let go and it settles into a flat line. Sweep the crests and troughs through the green noise clouds: each one scores, and hits in a row multiply the score (up to ×8; through the middle – a bonus). Red clouds take points away, break the combo and make the wave jitter. Going past the dashed lines at the top and bottom does not end the game, but throws the wave out of rhythm for over two seconds. The signal keeps fading and only green clouds keep it up – when it reaches zero, the run ends and a new one starts 0.1 s later. With every beat, the tempo rises, the clouds get narrower and red ones become more common. Esc pauses the game. Results (points and time, no names) go to the daily leaderboard.
About the experiment
A bright sine wave runs across a green-on-black screen. Hold Space or your finger on the screen and the wave rises – the longer you hold, the steeper it climbs. Let go and it settles back into a flat line. Noise clouds hang on its crests and troughs: green ones score and keep the fading signal alive, and hitting them in a row multiplies the score. Red ones take points away and make the wave jitter. Push it too high and the wave clips and loses its rhythm for a moment.
When the signal fades, a new run starts 0.1 s later, no screens in between. With every beat the line speeds up, the clouds get narrower, red ones become more common and the minimal synth grows denser – kick, hi-hat, bass and arpeggio play on the same grid as the clouds. The day's course is the same for everyone, so after every run you see your score against today's world record and a chart of the moments where the signal faded most often.