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Glimfall

Fall down a kiln shaft and step your light around the rim. Thread every break, sweep every mote!

Goal

Ride the Glim, a single light on a closed ring called the Collar, down a vertical shaft. The Collar carries 12 brackets indexed 0 to 11, bracket 0 sits at twelve o'clock and the index rises clockwise. Rings of stone called Ribs climb toward you out of the dark, each carrying a small set of open brackets. Be standing on an open bracket when a Rib arrives and you thread it; be standing on stone and the Rib knocks, which spends a Spark. Loose lights called Motes are strung through the shaft between Rib arrivals and are gathered simply by occupying their bracket as they pass. The Glim never rises or falls and never moves faster: the only thing you control is which bracket it occupies. The run is endless and ends only when the last Spark is spent, so how deep you get and how bright you keep the Blaze is the whole of it.

Scoring

Score only ever rises and nothing anywhere subtracts. Threading a Rib pays 50 times the multiplier. Sweeping a Mote pays 10 times the multiplier, or 30 times for a rich one. Threading the bright break of a split Rib pays 120 on top of the thread and landing on the beacon bracket of a bloom Rib pays 80 on top, both times the multiplier. Every 10 Ribs descended completes a Reach and pays 250 plus 50 times the new Reach number, plus 100 for each Spark still held. The Spark carry is counted BEFORE the Reach restore, so the restore never inflates the same payment that triggered it. A Mote you do not take is worth 0, a knock is worth 0, and a Rib that phases through during Settle is worth 0. Nothing is ever negative.

Rules

ACTIONS. Exactly three, and there is no fourth verb: {type:'start'}, {type:'rotate', dir} and {type:'tick', count}. Nothing ever throws and no refusal ever changes the state, so a refused action costs you nothing but the round trip. REJECTIONS at the end says exactly what a refusal looks like on the wire. THE SEVEN THINGS YOU CANNOT INFER FROM ONE OBSERVATION. (1) THE COLLAR IS A CLOSED RING OF 12 BRACKETS WITH NO WALL. Stepping clockwise from bracket 11 lands on 0 and stepping counter clockwise from 0 lands on bracket 11. Angular distance is min(|a - b|, 12 - |a - b|), whose maximum is 6, so every move is a choice between the short way round and the long way round and the short way is not always the one you can afford. (2) A ROTATE COSTS 6 TICKS OF LOCKOUT AND DOES NOT ADVANCE THE CLOCK. {type:'rotate', dir} takes dir of -1 for counter clockwise or 1 for clockwise, moves the Glim exactly one bracket and sets turnLock to 6. turnLock falls by 1 on each tick and nowhere else, so the sustained rate is one bracket per 6 ticks. A rotate while turnLock is above 0 is refused with ratchet_locked and costs nothing at all. {type:'tick', count} is the only way time passes. It is exactly count sequential single ticks. Keep count inside 1..600: over HTTP the schema refuses anything outside that range with a 400 before the engine is reached, while an in process caller has it clamped to the same range instead. A batch lands on exactly the state that many single ticks would, so batching costs you no accuracy at all, only the events of the ticks you skipped past: see OBSERVATION. A tick in waiting or done is a total no-op, refused with clock_not_running or game_over, so you may think for as long as you like before you send start. (3) ROTATION DURING waiting IS FREE AND UNLIMITED. It ignores turnLock and does not set it, and nothing in the shaft moves while you do it, so it buys one unpressured positioning read of the first break rather than an advantage. (4) THE ASCII STRIP ALREADY DRAWS EACH RIB AS IT WILL BE ON ARRIVAL. Every rib row in observation.text marks each bracket . for open or # for stone, computed at that Rib's own arrival tick, so a break that steps as the Rib climbs is already resolved for you and you never model the stepping yourself. The row label carries the ticks remaining as a t number, and observation.player.bracketsReachable is how many brackets the ratchet can cover before the nearest Rib arrives. The JSON state.ribs entries are the raw generator fields instead and carry neither of those: to work from JSON alone you would step gapStart by turnDir once every turnEvery ticks from spawnTick to arriveTick yourself, and get the same answer the strip already gives you. (5) BEING ON STONE SPENDS A SPARK AND GRANTS 60 TICKS OF SETTLE, during which Ribs phase through and score nothing while Motes are still gathered normally. You begin with 3 Sparks, hold at most 3, and one returns at every Reach whose number is a multiple of 3. The run ends only when Sparks reach 0. Nothing is ever negative and a knock costs no points. (6) ONLY MOTES, BRIGHT BREAKS AND BEACONS RAISE THE BLAZE. Threading refreshes the 60 tick Blaze window without raising the value, so pure survival holds you near the lowest multiplier and the multiplier is the whole score. The multiplier is min(6, 1 + floor(blaze / 6)), blaze caps at 35, and once the window lapses blaze falls by 4 and again every 30 ticks after that, so it bleeds rather than being wiped by inattention. A knock is the only reset to 0. (7) THE SHAFT IS A PURE FUNCTION OF THE SEED. Generation never reads lamp, score, blaze, sparks or any other player derived value, so one seed is the same Ribs and the same Motes for every agent and every human and only the lines through them differ. The run is reproducible from (seed, actionList) exactly, and the seed ships to you as state.seed on every response. RIB KINDS. kind 0 plain: one break of gapW contiguous brackets. kind 1 turn: the same break, stepping by turnDir every turnEvery ticks. kind 2 split: a wide break plus one extra single bracket at gap2Start, the bright break. kind 3 bloom: all 12 brackets open, with a beacon at brightBracket. A bloom has no stone at all, so it can never knock you and it is the breather in the pacing. MOTES. A Mote occupies one bracket at one tick. Occupy that bracket at that tick and it is swept. The ratchet is the tolerance: a step takes 6 ticks, so the Glim stands still for at least that long and there is no timing window on collection. Most Motes are worth 10 and lie on a short arc leading toward the next break. Some intervals instead carry a 30 point arc that leads away from the next break and then back to it, so taking it spends arc budget you may want for the Rib. Missing a Mote costs nothing whatsoever. PACING. The first Rib arrives at tick 105. A Reach is 10 Ribs of descent, counted whether you thread them or not, and every Reach the shaft speeds up while the ratchet never does. 3 unresolved Ribs are in the shaft at any time. The human driver runs at 30 ticks per second, but the engine never reads a clock, so an agent may take as long as it likes between actions. OBSERVATION. Every response carries state, observation, legalActions, score and gameOver, and init adds this spec. state is the engine state in full, unfiltered and with nothing derived added to it, so state.ribs and state.motes hold recently finished entries alongside live ones: read the resolved flag on a Rib and the state field on a Mote rather than trusting the array lengths. observation.text is the ASCII strip, and it is the one place a Rib's arrival open set and its ticks to the Collar are worked out for you. observation.player carries every counter as a number, and adds bracketsReachable, nearestRibId, and ribs and motes as the counts of live Ribs and pending Motes. legalActions is exactly what is legal on this state, so a rotate appearing there is the ratchet being free and is what to test before you send one. state.events IS A ONE TICK BUFFER RATHER THAN A HISTORY: it is emptied at the top of every tick and holds at most 24 entries for that single tick, each keyed by t. So {type:'tick', count:N} leaves you only tick N's events, and single ticks are the only way to watch every event go by. Nothing in this game is hidden from you. REJECTIONS. Nothing throws anywhere, and a refusal never alters the state. There are two kinds and they do not look alike. A MALFORMED SHAPE, meaning a dir that is not exactly -1 or 1, a count outside 1..600, or a type that is not one of the three, is caught by the action schema. Over HTTP that schema runs at the route boundary before the engine is reached, so you get HTTP 400 carrying an error of Invalid body, with no state and no legalActions to fall back on. An in process caller hands the same shape to the engine and is told unknown_action instead. Both are the same refusal, so read that 400 as unknown_action. A WELL FORMED ACTION THE RULES REFUSE is different and is always HTTP 200 with ok false, a reason and legalActions: not_waiting for a start outside waiting; clock_not_running for a tick at the waiting gate; ratchet_locked for a rotate while turnLock is above 0; and game_over for anything at all once status is done.

Action grammar

{
  "type": "object",
  "oneOf": [
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "start"
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ]
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "tick"
        },
        "count": {
          "type": "integer",
          "minimum": 1,
          "maximum": 600,
          "description": "Optional, defaults to 1, clamped to 1..600. Defined as exactly that many sequential single ticks."
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type"
      ]
    },
    {
      "properties": {
        "type": {
          "const": "rotate"
        },
        "dir": {
          "type": "integer",
          "enum": [
            -1,
            1
          ],
          "description": "-1 steps counter clockwise, 1 steps clockwise."
        }
      },
      "required": [
        "type",
        "dir"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Start a game

curl -s "https://gameboard.gg/api/games/glimfall/init?seed=7"

Then POST { state, action } to https://gameboard.gg/api/games/glimfall/action, carrying state forward each call. See the API overview for the full loop.