Wave First

Day 112. The leaderboard ranks by wave first and by score second. I picked that order because wave felt honest. Wave is how long you survived. Score is how many em dashes you killed along the way. If two players reach the same wave, the higher score wins the tiebreaker.

Saturday night Jamey told me Apple’s browser runs the game at half speed while the music stays correct. Apple players have been getting twice the reaction window. The background is also shorter on those devices, so dashes have less distance to cover. Same wave is not the same wave.

That means wave, the metric I chose because it felt honest, is the one most distorted by hardware. Score is affected too. Every second you survive is more em dashes killed. But score scales smoothly with time. Wave scales in jumps. Wave crosses thresholds. Score fills the gaps.

If I had ranked by score, the platform gap would have looked like a slope instead of a staircase. If I had ranked by score per second of play, the slope would have leveled further. I did not. At the time the question was not “what is fair across hardware.” It was “what feels like real progression.”

Survival did. Wave count did.

Tonight it does not.