Touch controls, take three, and I think this is the one. The flick was clever and not quite there, so it's gone. The screen is now two zones, the way a keyboard is two hands: the left three-fifths is the arrow keys, steer left or right depending on which side of the split your thumb lands on, and the right two-fifths is the space bar, hold to open the chute, lift to dive. Nothing needs aiming; a sloppy thumb anywhere in a zone works. A faint pair of chevrons and a round chute button appear once the run starts, so you can see where the zones are without them taking over the screen, and the chute meter is drawn as a ring around the button, under your thumb where you're already looking. It dims white while the cord re-arms and blinks red if you press it when there's nothing to pull.
Splat!
You jump out of a plane after a bank robber. The only way to catch him is to fall faster than he does. The name is a spoiler for how it usually ends.
This is a small browser game about chasing a masked robber down through the sky, into a canyon of skyscrapers, through the road and into a hole that ends, eventually, in lava, while he sheds a trail of cash. Holding the screen (or the space bar) opens a parachute, which jerks you upwards, sends your hair flying and slows everything down - handy for dodging the girders and birds, but every second under the canopy is a second the robber pulls further ahead. The tension is the whole game: dive to close the gap and grab the money, or play it safe and watch him go. Skimming close past a girder tops your chute up faster, so the safest way to play is, naturally, dangerously.
It's built with Phaser 3 loaded straight from a CDN - no build step, no packages, just a handful of files and some hand-drawn SVG sprites. The sounds are synthesised in the browser with WebAudio, which is why the wind sounds like a radiator. Made in conversation with Claude Code.
Diary
Touch controls, take two. The first version steered him towards your finger, which worked but felt nothing like the keyboard, and the keyboard is where the game feels right. So touch now mirrors it: a still thumb on the left or right half nudges that way, like the arrow keys, and a flick anywhere pulls the cord. The direction of the flick matters: flick left and the canopy sails left as it opens. Keep the thumb down and the chute stays open; slide it and you steer under canopy; lift and it closes. Two thumbs work at once, one steering and one on the cord, and one thumb can still do everything. A flick when the cord's dead (empty or re-arming) blinks the meter red so you know why nothing happened. And there's a ripcord now: a little red ring on a cord yanked out from his shoulder on every pull, in the direction you flicked. The title tells touch players "tap sides to steer, flick to pull" instead of "hold to open your chute".
Cash you fall through while tumbling now counts. The score used to lock the instant you clipped a girder, so a dying man could pass straight through a bag of money on the way down and get nothing for it, which felt mean. It locks when you actually land now.
Sound on the iPhone, which had none. Two separate iOS rules were in the way. Safari only starts audio from inside a gesture it trusts, and the game's first touch wasn't reliably one of those, so the audio module now listens on the page for the gestures it does trust and wakes the sound from any of them, and again whenever you come back to the tab. And an iPhone's ringer switch silences synthesised sound unless the page is also playing "media", so the game now plays a looping 60 millisecond silent track alongside it, which is enough to count. Also the about link now fades out while you're falling and comes back on the end screen.
Steering on a phone. Until now a finger could only steer while the chute was open, because any touch was a pull; keyboard players got free freefall steering from the arrow keys and touch players paid for every course correction, which the ripcord cost made properly unfair. Now a press decides once what it is: hold still for a beat and it's a pull, start moving sideways and it's a steer, with no chute and nothing spent. A hold that drifts afterwards keeps its chute. The beat is 90 milliseconds, short enough that the pull still feels instant.
Each zone now sounds like somewhere. The wind is still the base note, but a low hum comes up between the skyscrapers and hangs on, quieter, in the hole, where the odd drip pings in the dark, and a slow throbbing rumble swells as the lava gets close. It's the same crossfade the pictures use, so the ear changes at the same moment the eye does.
Snipers. Some of the still ledges in the city have a masked figure kneeling at the edge of the gap, and when you're above him and in range he goes hot for a moment, then takes a shot. The bullet is slow enough to see and slightly led, so you can't just dive straight down the middle any more. A hit knocks you into a tumble. My son asked for bosses that shoot at you a while back; this is the small, cheap version of that, and it's already the bit of the city that gets a reaction.
Catch streaks. Consecutive catches without dying multiply the payday: one and a half times, then double, up to four times. A small gold multiplier sits under the money once you've got one going. The point is to reward the person who keeps diving rather than the one who cashes out and coasts.
A visual pass. Speed lines streak in at the edges once you're really shifting, there's a proper sun and moon tracking the day, and the robber has a warm rim-light so he stops vanishing against a night sky or a cave wall, which had been bugging me since the chase went in.
Zones. The fall is still one continuous drop with no cuts and no level screens, but it now passes through four places. You start in the open sky among the girders and gulls. Around 100 m you punch through a cloud deck into a canyon of skyscrapers, with lit facades sliding past on both sides, ledges instead of girders and pigeons instead of gulls. At 260 m you smash through the road itself, tarmac flying, and you're underground: rock walls, rock shelves, bats, no sky at all. And from 460 m the walls glow, embers drift up past you and the whole thing turns to lava. Each boundary has its own set-piece so you feel the change rather than notice it. This is what "levels" always meant for this game: one fall that keeps changing under you.
Closed the ripcord exploit. You could tap the chute open and shut over and over and float through anything, which my son had worked out long before I had. Every pull now costs a fixed chunk of chute up front, and after you let go the cord takes a beat to re-arm, with the meter dimming while it does. Four pulls from full, roughly, so you pick your moments again.
Gave the interface a proper going-over. It's Space Grotesk now - a clean, slightly sharp typeface that plays nicely against the soft cartoon art rather than trying to match it. Stripped the on-screen text right back: while you're falling all you see is your money, and everything else waits for the end screen. The old emoji speaker is gone, replaced by a little hand-drawn one, and the chute meter is a thin gold line instead of a chunky bar. Less to read, more to look at.
Booby-trapped the chase. The robber now lobs live grenades in among the cash he sheds, so the trail you're diving through is half reward, half minefield. Each one sits there with a fuse, flashing faster as it's about to go; touch it, or just be too close when it blows, and you're knocked into a tumble. It gives the greedy line real teeth - the money's right there, but so is the thing that'll end you. Also settled the scoring while I was at it: money is earned now, never given. It used to tick up slowly just for falling; now the only way to make it is to grab the cash or catch the man himself.
Two small things that make the deaths and the falling read better. Clip the end of a girder now and you don't just vanish - you're knocked into a tumble and keep dropping, arms and legs everywhere, until you hit something flat and splat for real. The tumble is the fall; the splat is the ending. And his hair finally sits where hair should: tucked behind his head so it streams out from the back, instead of hovering above him like a detached little flame.
Tightened the chase. You still scoop up the cash he sheds - that's real money - but catching the robber himself now means actually touching him, not just falling past his depth. Overtake him without lining up and he's gone off the top of the screen, though there's always another one falling below, so it's really a stream of robbers now. Also nudged the camera back up where it belongs (I'd accidentally dropped our guy too low), planted his hair back on his head, and gave him a proper falling screech for when it all ends the way the title promises.
The big one: it became a chase. Until now it was survival - fall, dodge, don't splat. Now you're a secret agent who jumped after a bank robber, and he's below you shedding a trail of cash. The catch is that the only way to close on him is to fall faster than he does, which means not opening your chute - but the chute is exactly what keeps you off the girders. So every dodge costs you ground, and every greedy dive toward the money risks a splat. Catch him and it's a payday; he bolts to a fresh lead and the chase starts again, faster. The score is dollars now, not metres. The trail does double duty - it's the temptation and it's how you tell how close he is, no meter needed. The title screen watches the robber fall; tap and the camera hands over to you sliding in from above. It reframed the whole game, and I think it's the version that was always trying to get out.
Added birds, and made them two different problems. The big slow gulls are walls with wings - hit one and you're knocked into a tumble, feathers everywhere. The little fast ones don't kill you; they just clatter into you, shove you off your line and leave you flapping for a moment before you get your steering back. Which is worse, really, because the shove is usually into something solid. There's a nice wrinkle with the chute: in freefall you blast past the birds, but the moment you open up and slow down you're hanging in their airspace. Size tells you the threat - cool and big is lethal, warm and small is just a menace.
Gave the girders a sense of rhythm. They used to snap from all-static to all-moving at a fixed depth; now they ease through it - static to start, then gaps that wobble gently within a bounded range, and only much deeper do they slide the full width. The spacing is a steady beat now, mostly one unit with the odd two- or three-beat breather, which makes the moving ones actually readable rather than a coin toss. The chute got a softer voice too: a breathy floof of fabric filling with air instead of the old crack, to mark the drop into the calmer glide.
Leaned into the splat. It's the whole personality of the game now, so it got gorier - a proper spread of comic red, flung wide, that sits there as a stain - and a wet squelch to land it, all synthesised in the browser. The title screen is alive too: the dude falls through the sky the whole time you're reading it, and the first tap just carries that fall straight on into the game with no cut, so there's no dead moment before you're playing. Next: what a "level" actually means here.
Made him earn the name. Land square on a girder now and he pancakes flat onto it; clip the end of a bar on the way past and he still tumbles off the edge, arms and legs going. Two different ways to fail, and the direct one is the one the game is named after. His freefall pose changed too: he now falls belly-flat like a real skydiver, face to you, limbs spread, and only goes vertical once the chute is open. It reads much more like falling and much less like standing in mid-air.
Named it. It was called Parachute, which described the equipment but not the experience; Splat describes the experience. Two feel changes went in at the same time: pulled the camera back so you can actually see what's coming, and made the chute lift you a little on deploy rather than just slowing the fall. That upward kick turns the parachute from a brake into a dodge, and it makes the early falls gentler, which is no bad thing while I'm still working out whether any of this is fun.
First playable version. The core loop landed quickly once the chute felt right: the snap-open gives a little upward kick, the hair whips up on a spring, and the juice meter forces you to choose your moments. Girder gaps narrow as you fall, some rows slide sideways past 120 m, and the sky cycles day to sunset to night to dawn, roughly one whole day per 280 m of falling, which feels like a reasonable rate. Near-misses refund a bit of chute, an idea that arrived unbidden and turned a survival game into a style game. Levels can wait; first I want to know if falling is fun.