What it is

A summer night on Toronto’s harbour. Five barges sit in a line across the harbour with the city lit up behind them, and a piece of music plays. Pick a shell (2, 3, 4 or 6 inches, each printed with how long it climbs) and an effect (peony, chrysanthemum, willow, ring, crossette, palm or glitter), and tap the sky: the shell rises from the barge nearest your tap and breaks where you see it. Bigger shells climb longer, so you fire them earlier. A bright line on the beat lane shows where the selected shell would break if you fired now: fire so a beat is about to meet it.

The crowd scores by a printed rule

10 for a break on the beat (within a tenth of a second either way), 5 near it, 2 otherwise; 15 more for a 4-inch or 6-inch on a big beat; 4 for a shell that isn’t one of the last three kinds; 6 for a big shell after a pause; 3 for a hit in the finale. In the finale, one tap of Finale fires a 6-inch from every barge and a run of small shells, and each 6-inch that breaks on the last big beat earns 10 more.

Smoke is real here. Every break leaves a puff that drifts with the night’s wind and fades faster in a breeze. On a still night, firing fast from one barge hides your own shells in their smoke, and they score nothing; spreading them across the barges keeps them clear. The wind is shown before the show and doesn’t change during it.

Where you watch from

The Island shore, the ferry stopped in the harbour, or the waterfront by the ferry dock looking across to the Islands. The booms arrive as late as they would from there: about 3 seconds from the Island.

Six pieces of music made in the browser, one a waltz, about two minutes each. Today’s show is the same piece and wind for everyone that day, with its own best. A Free show has no music and no score. And Design a show lets you place every shell on the music’s timeline, play it back, and share it as a short code or a link. On a first show, until you’ve landed three on the beat yourself in one show, a shell that would just miss is held back a moment (never more than 0.45 s) so it breaks on the beat, and the banner says it was helped.

How to play

FireTap the sky: the nearest barge fires
A quick runHold on the sky for small shells
Shell and effectThe rack at the bottom
FinaleAbove the rack, in the finale
End showTop right; it asks first

On a short screen (a phone on its side, a small window) the rack folds into two pickers beside the beat lane: tap the left of one to step back, the right to step on. In the designer, tap the timeline to place a shell (tap it again to take it away), drag to move along the music, and tap the strip along the bottom to jump; the rows are the barges, left to right as you see them. The show waits while End show asks.

On a desktop, click as you would tap. Or use the keys: 1 to 4 pick the size; Q, W, E, R, T, Y and U pick the effect; Left and Right aim at a barge; Space fires; F is the finale; M turns the sound on or off; Escape asks to end the show; Enter starts and restarts.

What isn’t settled yet

It is for one player. Your bests, today’s best and your designs live in the browser they’re made in, so clearing the site’s data loses them; a design’s code or link is the way to keep one elsewhere. An older phone may struggle: the glow on the bright things turns itself off if a show’s frames come slowly. Without WebGL the show can’t run. There is no gamepad support, the keys can’t be remapped, and it isn’t playable with a screen reader.

Build Log

Credits and licences

Built on three.js, used under the MIT licence with the copyright notice retained in the shipped file. Typefaces are licensed under the SIL Open Font Licence. Cover drawn from the game’s own harbour, skyline and fireworks code.

Lake Ontario: Fireworks is original work by Launchway Games.