🎯 Ink Cannon

Twelve rooms, built by hand, in the same order every time

There is no level generator here. The twelve stages are written out as literal coordinate lists in the page's own source — a shelf is three numbers, a barrier is four, a can is two — so stage 7 is the same stage 7 for everybody who loads the page. Between them the twelve layouts hold 57 cans and hand out 42 shots, which is more or less the whole difficulty curve in two numbers.

The first four stages contain no barriers at all: a shelf, a few cans on top, a clear line from the slingshot. Stage 3 stacks six cans into a three-two-one pyramid, which is the game quietly showing you what a full sweep looks like before it starts charging you for one. Barriers arrive at stage 5 as a single 40-pixel column planted in front of the shelf, and from there every layout is a question about getting behind something. Stage 10 is the nastiest: a column 412 pixels tall in front of the shelf, a flat slab strung across the approach, four cans in the pocket behind — and two shots. The finale opens back out again: three shelves, two barriers, seven cans, six shots.

Ammo is the real difficulty dial. The open stages give four or five shots, the walled ones give three, and stages 8 and 10 give two. When a stage feels unfair it is usually not the layout; it is the allowance.

What the dotted line actually knows

The preview is not a simplified sketch of the shot. It calls the identical function the live ball uses — same 1,500-pixels-per-second-squared gravity, same 1/120-second steps, same bounce arithmetic — and plants a dot every ninth step. So it tells the truth about the parts you would expect a preview to fudge. The ricochet is drawn where the ball genuinely arrives, including the tenth of its speed that a bounce costs on both axes, and if the dots stop dead against a barrier it is because the shot really does die there.

It has one blind spot, and it is length. Eight dots spaced 0.075 seconds apart cover six-tenths of a second of flight. A flat shot on an early stage reaches the shelf inside that window and the aiming is nearly free. A high lob off the ceiling is airborne for considerably longer, so the line simply runs out in mid-air and the last stretch is yours to estimate — which is the actual skill the back half of the campaign is testing.

Cans, incidentally, deflect nothing. The ball passes through them at unchanged speed and knocks them off as it goes, so the preview stays accurate even after it has drawn straight through an occupied shelf. It is also the reason a whole row can go down to one ball.

Where the big numbers come from

A shot is worth 100 points, doubled for every extra can the same ball topples: one can 100, two 200, three 400, four 800, five 1,600. The multiplier belongs to the ball, not to the stage, so two separate two-can shots come to 400 while one four-can shot is worth 800. That single rule is why the pyramid on stage 3 and the seven-can finale are worth staring at for a while, and why picking cans off one at a time is the expensive habit.

The other source is leftovers: clearing a stage banks 50 points for every shot you did not fire. Retry rebuilds the stage and gives its ammo back, but it never claws back points you have already earned — so on the two-shot stages, retrying early is usually better value than a hopeful final ball, because emptying the ammo with a can still standing ends the run on the spot.

Your score stays in the page unless you decide otherwise. When a run ends you can type a name and press Post, which writes a single record — the game id, the name you typed, the score, and a server timestamp — to a shared public leaderboard, and remembers that name in your browser so you don't retype it next time. Skip the name box and nothing leaves the page. If the leaderboard code fails to load, the game itself is unaffected; only the board reports itself offline.