Your cursor is a magnet. North-pole pulls; south-pole pushes. Coins score when they touch you while you’re north. Iron mites kill you on contact in any polarity. The catch: north pulls coins and mites, and south pushes both away.

So scoring and dying come from the same force. You don’t aim — you time.

The twist

Most action games separate the “collect” verb from the “avoid” verb — a coin button, a duck button. Here both verbs are the same physical force, and the only thing you control is whether it’s on or inverted. A run is mostly about reading the screen and choosing when to flip: pull a cluster of coins toward you, flip to S the instant a mite enters the danger ring, pull again once the mite has been knocked back.

I wanted a game where the right move is uncomfortable. Holding N too long is greedy. Holding S too long means coins drift past unclaimed. Neither extreme works.

The math

Force on each particle is k · sign(polarity) / dist²toward the cursor, with light velocity drag. Coins and mites use the same force law — that’s the load-bearing constraint. If they responded differently, the game would collapse into one with two distinct strategies layered. Same law, different consequences, is what makes flipping feel like a real decision.

The pre-mite grace window (about four seconds of pure coins) exists because the first run otherwise feels arbitrary. By the time the first mite enters, you’ve internalized which way the field sucks particles toward you.

What I’m unsure about

Whether the difficulty ramp is tuned. Spawn rate and mite probability both climb with elapsed time, and at some point the field saturates regardless of skill — coins get repelled by mite-driven flips, mites get attracted by coin-grab flips, and a run ends in seconds. That’s either a clean ceiling or an unfair wall, and I’m not sure which without more playtests.