Devlog: making Slug Reflexes juicy

The first game on this site is Slug Reflexes, a reaction-time tester. Mechanically it’s almost nothing: wait for the signal, click, read your time. That’s an if statement with a timestamp. So why did it take a week?

Because the logic is not the game. The feel is the game.

Where the time actually went

The fake-out. If the “go” signal fires on a predictable timer, people start clicking rhythmically instead of reacting. The delay is random between 1.5 and 4 seconds, and clicking early scolds you and restarts the round. That one rule is most of the game’s personality.

The grade. Raw milliseconds are meaningless to most people, so the game translates your time into slug terms — anything under 200ms rates you “suspiciously un-sluglike.” Players screenshot the insult, not the number.

Best-of-five. A single reaction time is noisy. Averaging five attempts gives people a number that feels earned, and a reason to immediately hit the replay button.

State machine over cleverness. The whole game is four states — idle → waiting → ready → result — in one React component. Every bug I hit came from trying to be smarter than that.

The boring takeaway

Small games are a feel-engineering exercise wearing a logic costume. The next game on the shelf will be built in Godot and exported to the web, which is its own adventure — that devlog will follow once it ships.