Redemption Arc
Oct 17, 2026 · The arcade ramp-ball game as a roguelike. Flick the ball up the lane, clear eight shelves of the prize counter, and every prize you take rewires the machine, until the owner rigs it.
Redemption Arc is one evening at the arcade, spent trying to win the prize on the top shelf that nobody has ever won. You flick the ball up the lane into the rings, and each shelf of the prize counter has a ticket quota to meet with nine balls. The direction of your swipe is the aim and its speed is the power. Clear the shelf, take one of three prizes, and go up a shelf.
The prizes don't just add points. They bolt onto the machine. A rubber duck becomes a bumper, and a ball that bounces off it pays double. A roller skate puts the 40 ring on wheels, sliding side to side and paying triple. A trampoline over the gutter throws a bad roll back up the board, every third ball comes as twins, and pool chalk doubles a bank shot. By shelf six the machine looks nothing like the one you started on.
Then the owner notices. On shelves 3, 6 and 8 he rigs the machine: syrup on the lane, a board that leans, a taped-up 100, rings tightened by a fifth. The bulbs go red. Dot, the bored attendant behind the counter, warns you he's coming, takes your side as the night goes on, and slips you two tokens when you beat him. Clear the eighth shelf and Dot gets the ladder for the box. Nobody knows what's in it, and every win opens something different. At the end of a run you get a result card to share: the shelves you lit, the prizes you bolted on, and Dot's last line.
The idea is Jeff's. It's built with three.js. The physics is about 200 hand-written lines (lane, ramp, flight, board) at a fixed step, so every roll is deterministic. That's how the slow-motion replay of the ball that clears a shelf works, and the promo above is the real sim with every shot found by searching it. The ball's roll is recorded with ElevenLabs; every other sound is synthesized.