Ember Drift
Your light is going out. Drift into the sparks and take theirs.
How to Play Ember Drift
- Steer the ember by dragging, or thrust with the arrow keys.
- Drift into a spark and its light becomes yours.
- Your glow shrinks constantly, and it is also how far you can reach. When it goes out the run ends.
Controls
| Keyboard | Arrow keys or WASD to thrust |
|---|---|
| Touch | Drag to steer the ember |
Tips
- Do not chase a fleeing spark head-on. Cut across where it is drifting to — turning costs more than aiming ahead.
About Ember Drift
You are an ember losing its glow. Sparks drift across the arena and reaching one restores your light. Your glow is also your reach. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Ember Drift was built
One line contains the whole difficulty curve: pickup range is tied to the light you have left, lightR = U * (0.075 + 0.165 * min(1.15, light)). Losing light shrinks your reach, which makes sparks harder to catch, which loses you more light. The spiral is the game, and it is why a run that goes badly goes badly quickly.
Sparks are not simply fleeing. Inside your light radius they are pulled towards you; in the shell between that radius and 2.6 times it, they are pushed away. The result is that you cannot drift up to a spark and absorb it — you have to commit to a dash that crosses the repulsion band, which is the entire feel of the game and about eight lines of code.
The wind is a closed-form function rather than a stored grid: two sine terms evaluated at the position you ask about. That keeps the field identical at every screen resolution and costs no memory, where a baked grid would have to be sized against the viewport and would quietly differ between a phone and a monitor. Large ember shards are distinguished by being a four-point star at 1.45 times the radius, not by colour alone — the same accessibility rule the rest of the catalogue follows.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do the sparks move away from me?
They flee when your glow gets close, so a big light pushes them off. Approach from the side rather than straight on.
How do you steer on a phone?
Drag anywhere to point the ember. Lift your finger and it coasts on its own momentum instead of stopping dead.
Is there anything that can kill me?
Nothing chases you. The only thing that ends a run is your own light running out.
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