GRAZE: Edge Rush

GRAZE has a soundtrack now. It is a different song every day, nobody recorded any of it, and the app did not get any bigger. Here is how it works and why I built it this way. THE CONSTRAINT GRAZE has never shipped a single asset. No image files, no audio files. Every obstacle, particle and glow is drawn with canvas primitives at runtime, and every sound is a Web Audio oscillator. That started as a practical decision, since I was building this in twenty minute windows at 3am after my son was born and could not afford a toolchain, but it turned into the thing that made the soundtrack possible. Adding music the normal way would have meant bundling megabytes of audio and picking one track everyone hears forever. Generating it meant I could do something a file cannot. THE IDEA The daily course in GRAZE is generated from the date. Seed a small PRNG with today's UTC date string, and every phone on earth produces an identical course, with no server and nothing downloaded. The date is the level file. So: do the same thing to the music. Seed a second PRNG with the date and let it choose key, tempo, chord progression, bass figure, hi-hat pattern, arp figure and rate, waveform, filter resonance, and how long each chord lasts. Every player hears the same song on the same day. Tomorrow is a different one. Nothing is stored, nothing is streamed, and yesterday's song is reproducible forever because the date has not changed. WHAT MAKES TWO TRACKS SOUND DIFFERENT My first version varied key, tempo and chord progression. It sounded identical every day. That was the lesson. Key is almost inaudible without an A/B reference, eight BPM is nothing, and six progressions that are all cousins of each other read as one progression. What actually separates two house records is rhythm and timbre. So the seed now picks a bass figure from five patterns over sixteen steps, a hat figure from four, sixteenth or eighth note arps, saw or square oscillators, filter resonance, and one or two bars per chord. It also picks from eight progressions chosen for contrast rather than similarity: a Phrygian flat-II for a dark day, a Dorian major IV for a bright one, a harmonic minor major V when it should feel tense. Now the days sound like different tracks instead of transpositions. THE PART I LIKE MOST The arrangement is gated on your score, not on time. Under 150 points you get a pad. At 150 the kick arrives, 250 brings the bass, 600 the arp, and it keeps filling in until the whole thing is playing at 10,000. Score only ever rises, so a part can never drop back out mid-run. The effect is that you can hear how a run is going before you look at the number. A great run sounds like a great run. And because most players never break 10,000, completing the arrangement is a real thing to chase. Heat, the risk multiplier, does not add parts. It rides the filter, so grazing an edge audibly opens the track up and playing safe closes it down. Layers gated on Heat lurched in and out, because Heat can go from nothing to sixteen times in a few seconds and it decays when you play safe. That was version two of three. TWO THINGS THAT BIT ME The arp was playing a minor third over every chord. I had written the arp figure as fixed semitones, which meant it sounded a minor triad against the major chords in the progression. Indexing the chord itself instead of hardcoding intervals fixed it, and it is a mistake that is completely invisible until you look at the numbers. And audio must never be scheduled from the animation frame. Notes are scheduled ahead on a timer, roughly 100ms of lookahead, because frame-driven audio jitters the moment the game gets busy, which is exactly when the music matters most. ALSO IN THIS UPDATE The soundtrack picks back up where it left off if you watch an ad to continue, keeping its place in the bar and every layer your score has earned, rather than restarting like a new run. GRAZE: Edge Rush is free on iOS. Score by almost dying: the closer you graze the edge that kills you, the higher your multiplier climbs, and playing it safe scores nothing. Same course for everyone, every day. Today's board resets at midnight UTC and it is still open.

GRAZE: Edge Rush update - four new obstacles, a faster course, and a bug that only showed up as a feeling If you have not seen it before: GRAZE is a one-tap arcade game where you score by almost dying. Points come from proximity to the thing that kills you, not from surviving it. The closer you graze a lethal edge, the faster your multiplier climbs, up to x16. Play it safe and you score literally zero, so the optimal line and the terrifying line are the same line. Everyone on earth plays an identical course each day. It is generated from the date itself, so there is no server and nothing to download. Resets at midnight UTC. Here is everything that has landed recently. FOUR NEW OBSTACLES Each one changes how you fly, not just what you dodge. CANYON is a corridor you live inside rather than a gate you cross in a frame. Ride the wall the whole way and your multiplier climbs the whole way with you. There is a dead zone down the middle that pays nothing, so coasting through safely is worth exactly zero. FORK gives you two ways through. The wide lane is free and pays nothing. The needle lane is barely wider than you are, and it pays. DRIFT is a current pushing you toward the edge the entire time you are inside it. Same one tap, completely different hands. MINEFIELD has no wall and no gap to aim at. Just a field, several viable routes through it, and you pick your own. Placement is random every time, with a guaranteed minimum spacing so it can never generate something unflyable. A MUCH FASTER COURSE This one started as a bug report I could not reproduce. Players kept saying the pacing "felt wrong" near the new obstacles. Nobody could point at a moment. It turned out wide obstacles were spawning further off screen than narrow ones, which silently added their own width to the gap in front of them. Up to two full screen widths of dead air. Your multiplier decays after 1.5 seconds without a graze, so arriving at a big hazard cost you a whole multiplier tier before you even reached it. Players were being punished for empty space. I instrumented the level generator, ran it headless across 200 screens of course, and measured every gap in seconds instead of pixels. Gaps that cost a tier: 9.8% before, 0% after. Worst gap went from 3.95 seconds to 1.40. The course is denser and reads as continuous now. It is the single biggest change to how the game feels since launch, and it came from taking a vague complaint seriously enough to find the number hiding behind it. YESTERDAY'S BOARD NO LONGER DISAPPEARS The daily board used to vanish the moment it reset. Now you can open it back up and see exactly how yesterday finished, who took it, and what it cost them. Daily wins are settled off that final board too. Previously a win was judged from whatever standing your app last happened to observe, which meant someone leading at 7pm and closing the app could be credited alongside the player who actually won at 7:55. Now first place is decided by where the day genuinely ended. SHARE YOUR RUN Finish something you are proud of and send it straight to a friend: a rendered card with your score and exactly where it put you on today's board, one tap into a text or onto your feed. SMALLER THINGS The death screen now shows your actual standing on the leaderboard rather than your position among your own past runs. The canyon's scoring band is slightly wider. A run started before midnight that ends after it now counts for all-time only, and tells you why, instead of quietly landing on a different day's course. FROM THE BOARD A player called WGJC3107 posted 50,943 this week. First score over 50k anyone has hit, and it took the all-time record off me two days running. I am currently second on my own leaderboard. Free on iOS. No forced ads, no in-app purchases. Today's board resets at midnight UTC and it is still open.