Halation

Halation is a game of predator-prey with hundreds of opponents across an infinite canvas.

Your opponents harass, hunt, and hide with play styles that vary by personality and what’s nearby.

The game has a few core mechanics:

• Bigger dots eat smaller dots.
• Dash and sprint to pursue or flee.
• Shooting big dots may break them into more palatable parts - or just more opponents that still have enough mass to eat you.

I nerd-sniped myself into making this game while building a design playground for the Terminal (Green) and Terminal (Amber) themes on this site. I needed sliders and demo renders to tweak chromatic aberation, static bursts, blooms, scanlines, noise, flickers, and a dozen other effects. Looking at the [slow ghosts from cooling tubes on early IBM PC’s P39 phosphor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EOa-Jj3uzg) led me to tuning motion smears by making a few dots dance. Then I varied their sizes. Then I made them vary their own sizes by combining collisions. Then I wanted to steer one myself.

A few days and too many tokens later, I had this game.

The final visual effects in both the site themes and this game are a grab-bag of eras and technologies. It’s more of a vibe than an emulation. I’ll share the design playground and in a followup.