Sixty seconds, and no endless mode
An endless run ranks patience. A fixed minute ranks decisions, and a decision is what we are selling.
The first version of this game was endless. It lasted four days.
Endless arcade scoring rewards whoever sits still the longest. Within a day the leaderboard was a list of people who had a free afternoon, and a scripted pilot beat all of them, because a machine never gets bored at minute nineteen.
A fixed minute makes runs comparable
Every run is 3,600 frames on the same seed. Two scores from the same day came off the same candles and the same crash at the same second, so the comparison is real. That is also what makes a daily seed worth talking about: everyone hit the same wall at 45 seconds, and everyone has an opinion about it.
The bell burns your wax
Crossing a gap drips molten wax into an unsealed pot. Pressing the seal moves the pot into your score and resets your chain to one. Hitting a candle burns the pot. So does the bell at sixty seconds.
That last rule is the one people argue with, and it is the rule the whole game is built on. If the bell banked your wax for you, the last fifteen seconds would be a formality. Because it burns, the end of the run is a decision: seal now at a small chain, or hold and hope you survive to the bell with a big one.
The economy balances itself. Sealing every second keeps your chain at one and pays almost nothing. Never sealing pays nothing at all. The interesting play is in between, and it is different on every seed.
One minute is also the right clip length
The tail behind the ember is exactly as long and as bright as the unsealed wax. A stranger scrolling past a sixty second clip can see greed without reading a number, and that is the only reason anyone shares an arcade score.
Every number here comes out of sim/constants.ts, the one file the game reads its balance from.