Scuttle

A lane-crossing game built around one asymmetry: moving sideways along a lane is smooth and instantly responsive, while stepping forward into the next lane takes four tenths of a second, ignores every input while it runs, and cannot be called back. Committing to a gap is the whole game.

The beach is generated from the calendar date, so everyone gets the same one on the same day. Some lanes hold beachgoers walking across, some hold towels and sunbathers that never move, and every fourth lane is clear — enough of a rhythm to make the choice of when to step a real one.

What runs today is phase 1: the movement prototype, and deliberately nothing more. The tide, the surf, the seagull, the dog, the frisbee, collectibles, the streak, sharing and the one-run-a-day limit are all specified and none are built — so the beach has no sea to reach and the lanes simply go on as long as you survive, and you can retry as often as you like. It exists to answer whether the asymmetry is fun before anything else is built on top of it.