Don't Wake The Cat.

context.

a portfolio game with a single rule: don't wake the cat. the whole experience is one tension dial — a wake meter that rises with every keystroke and decays when you pause — wrapped in a relatable scene anyone with a cat recognizes instantly.

the constraint was self-imposed: about a week, one mechanic, no feature bloat. that meant the engine had to carry the fun on its own, because there was nothing else to hide behind.

the engine.

the game logic is a pure, framework-free state machine: keystrokes are classified, each adds a tuned amount to the wake meter, and the cat moves through deep-sleep → twitch → eye-crack → alert → triggered. decay, per-cat personality, and a first-run difficulty cap keep it learnable without a tutorial.

every run is seeded, so it's deterministic — which makes replays exact. share a run and the recipient watches the identical playback without re-simulating. all six sound cues are synthesized in the browser with the web audio api, so the game ships with essentially zero audio weight.

no audio files. no tutorial.

the wake meter is the entire game, so the tuning is the design: onboarding caps on the first run, a burst-drop reward for pausing, slower decay while the cat is alert. sound is synthesized live — a detuned-sine purr, a pitch-collapse jumpscare — and the build is a static export with no backend required to play.

what shipped.

a complete, live game: 5 playable cats, funbox modifiers, a daily seeded challenge, achievements (incl. a konami secret), deterministic replay + compose share urls, downloadable screenshot of your wrecked message, three themes, english + indonesian, and a stats heatmap of where players tend to wake the cat.