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HOW THE STORM WORKS

You are a thunderstorm crossing a sleeping coast, one hour a round from 22:00 to dawn. Each hour you get five drops to reach its quota of Thunder. Miss one and the storm blows itself out.

Pick where to drop. The ball falls through the cloud's ice crystals, and every crystal it touches adds +5 Charge. When the last ball lands, Charge × Surge is the drop's Thunder.

The return stroke. A ball that lands on a rooftop with a lightning rod fires a bolt back up the exact path it fell, and every peg it touched fires again, from the bottom up. That is what real lightning does: the flash you see is the stroke climbing back from the ground.

Because strokes run bottom to top, a multiplier placed high fires last, after the adders below it. Adders low, multipliers high. And more balls are more strokes, which is when multipliers fire.

Between hours you get Static: 5 for the hour, 1 for every rod struck, 1 for every drop you didn't need, and 1 for every 5 you were holding (up to 5). Spend it on pegs, rods and rerolls. Click a peg you own to move or sell it, and a rod to move it.

Levels. Buy a peg you already own and drop it on that peg instead of an open socket: it goes up a level, to 3 at most. Pips under a peg show its level, and its tip says what that level does. A peg sells for half of everything paid into it.

Fronts. Hours 4 and 8 bring a front: one rule changes for that hour, and its quota is cut by 15%. The bar on top names it and the rain shows it.

Storms and Force. Each storm starts from its own pegs and Static. Reaching dawn with a storm opens the next Force for it, up to 12, and every Force keeps the rules below it. The daily storm is the same storm, Force and seed for everyone on a calendar day (UTC); it counts as a dawn, but opens no Force.

The pegs

The fronts

The storms

Force

Every drop is simulated whole, from its seed, the moment you release it; what plays back is that simulation and nothing else. Hold the mouse button, a touch or the space bar to watch a drop at two and a half times the speed.

Type: Anybody and Martian Mono, both under the SIL Open Font License. Sound is synthesised as it plays.

a StuStudios game