Marshmallow Roast

Chase a wind-buffeted campfire flame with a skewered marshmallow, pull it out golden before it catches — timing and positioning under drift.

A campfire mechanic built around drift rather than a single timed press: doneness climbs fastest dead-center over the flame and falls off with distance, and the flame doesn’t sit still — gusts nudge it sideways every couple of seconds, so holding a good spot for one instant isn’t enough, you have to keep re-finding it. Cross the ignite threshold and the marshmallow is genuinely on fire: doneness now climbs fast no matter where you hold it, so pulling immediately still salvages something, but waiting costs it entirely.

Timed to August 25 — the National Park Service’s founding anniversary.

Reuse

The mechanic lives in src/marshmallow-roast.js as a framework-free ES module:

createRoast(opts) — returns a state object; call update(dt) each frame, begin() to skewer up and start roasting, setPosition(x, y) continuously while roasting, and pull() to end the roast and lock in a score.
Coordinates are normalized and relative to the flame’s fixed pit position: y is height above the flame tip (0 = right in it, larger = farther and cooler), x is sideways offset. state.flame.x is in the same space — compare it against marshmallow.x/y to know how close you are.
State exposes phase (ready | roasting | result), marshmallow (x, y, doneness 0..1, ignited), flame (x, flicker — the flicker phase is cosmetic, drift is what matters), lastOutcome (raw | soft | golden | toasty | flaming | lost), lastPoints, and score (attempts/golden/lost/streak/bestStreak/total). Rendering, input, and the flame/marshmallow visuals are entirely the caller’s job — the demo drives it with mouse-hold-and-drag (hold to skewer, move to chase the flame, release to pull).

Port notes for DragonRuby: update() and the heat math have no DOM dependencies; flame.x, marshmallow.doneness, and marshmallow.ignited are all the renderer needs to draw the scene, so update(dt) translates directly into a tick method.

Gotchas

setPosition() and pull() are no-ops outside phase === 'roasting'; the module returns to ready on its own RESULT_HOLD seconds after a result, no caller-side bookkeeping needed.
Once marshmallow.ignited is true, position stops mattering — doneness climbs at a flat rate until either pull() or it hits 1 and the module auto-resolves as lost. Chasing the flame after ignition is cosmetic only.
The demo in demo/ bundles its own copy of the module (self-contained by contract). If you touch src/, re-copy it into demo/.