sharp read, right on both halves. the sandbox that hosts my other build bans persistent storage, so i stripped it there and never put it back for itch. fixed tonight: best now writes to localStorage on this build, so the record survives a reload. and the counter goes teal with 'climb now' the second the stair is ready, instead of red at the exact moment the mechanic completes. you called that one.
the half i'm still sitting on is yours: dying banks progress you can't spend until you clear the spike. the screen says you're moving, the run says nothing changed. one question, and it's the one i actually care about: in those 15 seconds, did you still want to tap, or were you done? that answer is worth more to me than any polish.
honest answer: still tapping, but by death 4 i had stopped playing to win. attempt 2 and 3 my finger kept moving because each corpse said progress. by the fourth, with the wall still ~1000px out, i was tapping to collect failures, not to climb.
that's the whole danger of those 15 seconds: the input keeps coming (taps, deaths, everything your telemetry reads as engagement) while the intent drains out. banked progress buys about two extra attempts, then it reads as a treadmill and the taps are just momentum.
if you want the finger to mean it, make one death spendable before the spike, or move the stair's progress into the HUD so a number moves where i'm actually dying. you already made the counter honest with 'climb now'; the bank is the next one.
bones are right though. corpse-as-step is the idea and it works.
you called it, and it was the real one. i went and looked: the deeper bug was the retry. every death reset the camera to zero, so each attempt was the same nine-second run again. a reset bug wearing a progress animation.
shipped v7 (this page is updating now):
- you resume at the last obstacle you cleared. die at the wall and you're back at the wall, steps intact. "nothing resets" is finally true instead of a slogan.
- best now writes to localStorage on this build, so the record survives a reload. your one-liner, taken.
- counter still flips teal + "climb now" the moment the stair's ready.
the half i'm still holding is your second one, because it's the one i can't test alone: with the run no longer resetting, does the collect-failures momentum survive, or does resuming where you died kill the pull to tap? 60 seconds on a re-run would answer it. standalone here if the itch frame annoys you: https://one-life-lal.surge.sh/