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Game Dev HTML5

TarabTendo — Designing a Game That Hates the Player

AJ Team 2025 7 min read
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TarabTendo is our extreme-difficulty HTML5 browser platformer — a game that genuinely tries to beat you. Visual glitches distort your screen at critical moments, traps appear mid-jump, platforms accelerate the better you perform, and sound design escalates with your stress. It is deliberately cruel and we are proud of every pixel.

Not Yet Hosted — Server Needed for Leaderboards

The game runs in the browser without a backend for basic play, but persistent leaderboards and multiplayer require server hosting. Help us host it.

Design Philosophy

Most games let you win. TarabTendo does not. The design is built around the idea that near-impossible difficulty — when crafted deliberately — produces a unique satisfaction when you eventually crack it. Think Getting Over It, Flappy Bird, and classic hard-mode platformers where the difficulty itself is the artform.

Every mechanic punishes assumption. You think you know the platform trajectory? It changes direction. You master the timing? A screen glitch fires at the exact critical frame. You reach what looks like the end? There is another section.

Technical Features

Glitch Effects

Canvas-based RGB channel splitting and pixel displacement — real visual corruption mid-play.

Dynamic Difficulty

Platform speed, trap frequency, and visual noise all scale with your live performance.

Reactive Audio

Sound layers are added as difficulty rises — simple beat to full chaotic noise.

Score System

Points based on distance covered, time alive, and current difficulty level.

Pure Canvas — No Engine

No game engine, no physics library. Every collision, every animation frame, every glitch effect is hand-written Canvas 2D API code. The game loop runs at a target 60fps via requestAnimationFrame with a fixed timestep for consistent physics regardless of frame rate. Total payload: under 30 KB.

Help Us Host TarabTendo

The game is complete — we need server budget for hosted leaderboards and wider distribution.

Support the Launch