Bloatball

What is Bloatball?

Bloatball is a fast, original one-button arcade platformer you play right in the browser. You're a bundle — a literal rolling ball of code — bouncing along an endless deploy pipeline of platforms, pits, crates and firewall gates. The whole control scheme is a single button: tap to flap, hold to spin. What makes it different is the size dial: everything you eat is worth pointsand makes you physically bigger, and almost every problem in the game is downstream of your own appetite.

How to play

• The ball never stops bouncing — it rebounds off every platform on its own. You steer the arcs.
• Tap — space, W, arrow-up, or a finger anywhere on the field — and the ball pulses upward, mid-air included. That's how you clear pits and thread firewall slits.
• Hold and the ball spins up: in the air it tucks and dives; on the ground it grinds along the platform at boosted speed. Spinning smashes ▦ crates that would otherwise end the run, and tucks you slightly smaller — a spinning ball squeezes through meaner slits.
• Fall into a pit, smack a ledge, clip a gate wall, or touch a crate without spinning, and the run ends. Restart is instant.

The size dial — eat, grow, regret

Dependency pellets float everywhere: • bits (small),▪ chunks (medium) and ⬢ blobs (big, juicy, usually parked somewhere stupid). Eating pays points times your multiplier — and the multiplier is your bundle size, climbing from ×1 at a slim 64 KB toward ×4 near the 1 MB budget. But every KB is held against you:

• Flaps get weaker and bounces get deader — a fat ball handles like a fridge.
• Firewall slits stop fitting. A gate that's about to reject your current size glows red — that's your last call to shed.
• Cross the 1 MB budget and the run is OOM-killed on the spot, mid-bite.

The escape valve is the spin: spinning tree-shakes mass off(fastest while grinding), all the way back down to 64 KB. Shedding costs you multiplier, so the whole game is deciding how long you dare to stay fat.

Scoring

• Eat deps — the main dish, always at your current multiplier.
• Thread gates — a bonus per gate, and a fat snug bonus when the fit was tight. Yes, that rewards going through big. Yes, that's the trap.
• Smash crates — spin through instead of hopping over.
• Distance — a slow trickle for staying alive.

Tips

• Shed before the gate, not at it — the red glow means you already ate too much.
• A short grind after each feast keeps you in the comfortable middle: fat enough to score, slim enough to live.
• The blob above a gate slit is a test. You know it's a test. It's still delicious.
• Spin-diving out of a flap is the fastest way down — tap, hold, and you drop like a cannonball.
• Ground-level slits are grind-throughs: hold the spin and let the tuck do the fitting.