GENERATION 03 · 26 OCTOBER 2026
A complete run.
A reason to move.
Surge now has five 30-second encounters followed by a final battle. Within each round the field evolves through fixed Barkley reaction–diffusion equations. Between rounds all excitation, recovery, effects and pending warnings are cleared. Changes to the game come from excitation geometry, source timing, cutter choices and objectives. Bloom drift has been removed from the main game.
The run
| Time | Encounter | Challenge |
|---|---|---|
| 00:00 | First contact | Isolated expanding fronts and safe wakes. |
| 00:30 | Break the wall | Cut through a line-generated advancing front. |
| 01:00 | Between two fronts | Navigate opposing fronts. |
| 01:30 | Cross currents | Navigate staggered arrivals from several directions. |
| 02:00 | Silence the sources | Disable two optional emitters. |
| 02:30 onwards | The last three | Disable all three final emitters to complete the run. |
One health point is restored at each encounter transition and for each emitter disabled, up to three. Surviving alone does not finish the final battle. Survival points stop increasing at the final battle; the completion bonus rewards quicker source removal and remaining health.
Difficulty and power-ups
Easy offers a power-up every 10 seconds of run time, Medium every 30, and Hard every 60. Choice screens pause both timers. The first choice selects a cutter, the second refines it. All subsequent choices stack faster cycling (12%), extra reach (4 units) or extra width (1 unit) and repair one health point. Limits are 0.09 seconds minimum between pulses, 50 reach and 12 width. Power-ups continue in the final battle. Records are separate per difficulty.
Three cutters, three refinements
Lance has a long, narrow beam. Fan trades range for width. Double pulse fires twice in quick succession, followed by a longer recovery. At the second upgrade, choose faster cycling, extra reach with reduced width, or extra width with reduced beam length. All nine specialised combinations preserve a gap between the player and the suppression beam, preventing a permanent shield under the ship.
Generation 03 checks
Exact recurring schedules for all three difficulties, paused choices, stacked upgrades and limits, clean fields and warning cancellation at every round transition, practice jump scheduling and preservation of the unprotected player position were checked automatically. The ship and laser changes are visual; beam suppression still uses the same capsule geometry. Earlier functional checks below refer to Generation 02 where timing differs.
Earlier checks
- Native front propagation, safe refractory wakes, bounded concentrations and repeatability.
- Full campaign progression in unlimited-life practice, including scheduled upgrade gates and all six encounters.
- Frozen time and fields during upgrade selection; invalid and duplicate choices rejected.
- All nine specialised loadouts leave the player’s own position unprotected.
- Local emitter damage, single-count scoring, cancellation of destroyed-source pulses, and victory only after all three final emitters are disabled.
- A scripted approach-and-fire policy completed the standalone final battle with all three cutters and normal damage rules. With Quick cycle, completion took approximately 11–13 seconds. This is a functional check, not a balance target.
- Browser checks covered the start screen, practice selector, both upgrade screens, selecting and applying upgrades, final battle, movement, firing and pause.
What remains to playtest
Difficulty and enjoyment still require human feedback. Simple idle and repetitive movement policies fail early; that does not establish that the opening is well balanced. The standalone boss test establishes that the objective can be completed through ordinary game inputs, not that the full scored run is easy or optimally paced.
The boss layout is fixed, so repeated seed values are not independent boss scenarios. The numerical solver is deliberately coarse and has not undergone convergence verification. Touch controls are implemented but have not been tested on a physical phone or tablet.
Practice and records
Practice offers unlimited lives, direct access to every encounter and the initial cutter-choice screens. It never changes the personal-best record. The game stores the best score locally in your browser, with no external analytics added by the game. Sound effects are optional and start muted.
Model
Barkley excitable medium on a 160 × 104 grid. Fixed a = 0.75, b = 0.025, epsilon = 0.04, activator diffusion 1, spatial step 1, Euler step 0.025. Four chemical steps advance per 60 Hz game tick. Outer grid edges are absorbing. The cutter clears excitation and raises recovery to at least 0.9 within its beam. This is an excitable reaction–diffusion game, rather than a classical stationary Turing pattern.