Glitch

The player is Glitch — a robot with a movement bug. Every few steps, something unexpected happens: the jump doesn't work, the run goes backward, the crouch locks. The mechanic became the game.

My son and I built the engine from scratch — React for structure, a custom HTML5 Canvas renderer for the physics and animation loop. We built in Lovable, which let us move quickly on the level design and visual polish without getting bogged down in tooling.

Getting the physics feeling right — the variable-height jump, collision detection on irregular terrain — was the most interesting problem. The glitch mechanic added another layer: we had to make the randomness feel fun rather than frustrating. That required a lot of playtesting with a very honest critic.

• React
• HTML5 Canvas
• JavaScript
• Lovable