Ballast
Load a cargo ship low and centred, then choose a ballast policy and run a short crossing before the tide goes. Water ballast buys stiffness two ways — it sits low, and it sinks the hull until the waterplane widens — but it costs speed, and a half-filled tank sloshes and hands the stiffness straight back.
* THE GAME RUNS IN A SANDBOXED FRAME — IT CAN’T SEE THIS SITE OR YOUR OTHER TABS. BEST SCORES STAY IN THIS BROWSER.
Cartridge promptTHE EXACT PROMPT THAT BUILT THIS GAME
Build a tiny browser game called "Ballast".
Game spec
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A cargo-trim and stability game over a short sea crossing. Crates arrive in a heavy-first queue; move a crane cursor with the arrow keys (or click a slot) and press Space to stow each one on a 7x3 deck grid, then press Enter to cast off. Hold F to flood sea water into the low tank, D to dump it, J to jettison the worst outboard crate. Ballast is the whole decision: it buys stiffness by sitting low AND by sinking the hull until the waterplane widens, it costs boat speed against a fixed tide window, and a partly-filled tank develops a free surface that gives the stiffness straight back — so half-full is the worst setting on the ship. One heel angle rotates the hull, drives the inclinometer needle and decides the capsize; a stability plate prints displacement, KG, GM and the free-surface loss, and an amber tick marks where the needle will come to rest. Score comes from delivered cargo, gusts ridden out, and tide left on the clock. Difficulty scales crate count, gust strength, gust warning time, pump rate and the tide window.
Hard constraints — the game will be embedded in a sandboxed iframe on a static gallery site, and a headless browser will screenshot it:
1. Output exactly ONE self-contained HTML file. All CSS and JS inline. Zero external requests: no CDNs, no external fonts, images, or sounds, no fetch/XHR/WebSocket. Any sound must be synthesized with WebAudio.
2. The iframe sandbox is "allow-scripts allow-pointer-lock" (plus an autoplay permission). So: no localStorage, cookies, or indexedDB (opaque origin — access throws); no popups, window.open, or navigation; no access to the parent page; alert()/prompt()/confirm() are silently blocked.
3. The playfield must be visible within 800 ms of load — that is when the screenshot is taken. No dead white screen. If there is a start screen, make it visually rich.
4. Controls: keyboard AND mouse must both work, plus on-screen touch buttons for phones. Call preventDefault() on game keys (arrows, space) so the page never scrolls.
5. The view is 16:9 and must scale to fill the viewport with no overflow or scrollbars.
6. Show a visible score. If the genre has a losing state, show a game-over screen with a restart (button and a key). Idle/clicker games skip game over but still need clear numeric feedback.
7. If you track a score, report it to the arcade shell so the player's best is remembered between visits: on every score change, call parent.postMessage({ source: "ai-arcade", type: "score", score: <number> }, "*"). It is safe to call it no matter what the parent does with it.
8. Keep it tiny: aim for under 400 lines, 60 fps, no frameworks. That 400-line target does not apply to 3D games — true 3D (a camera and perspective-projected world) or pseudo-3D (projected road/track, depth-sorted sprites) — which need their own software renderer and typically land at 800–1400 lines. The rest of this constraint still binds every game: 60 fps, no frameworks, no external assets, and no padding to reach a length.
9. Difficulty: the arcade shell passes the player's chosen difficulty as a URL query parameter. Read it with new URLSearchParams(location.search).get("difficulty") — the value is "easy", "medium", or "hard" (missing or unknown means "medium"). Make the three levels meaningfully different — speed, lives, enemy pressure, reaction time, whatever fits the genre; clicker/idle games with no losing state use starting resources and upgrade cost curves instead. Show the active level in the HUD. Without the parameter the game must be fully playable at its default (medium) tuning.
Return only the complete HTML file, no commentary.