Cooldown

Cooldown is the example game for a build-along series on YouTube, where I build it with Claude Code one lesson at a time. It's free and it stays small. The code is the point, and you can follow along with it.

Dash in the air and you leave a white-hot streak behind you. You can stand on it for about a second. Then it cools and you drop. The whole game is one shader that draws like a thermal camera, so the color of a streak tells you how long it has left.

The ten rooms build on that dash. First you learn to stand on the streak, then carve through ice and chain dashes with heat pickups. Diagonal dashes open up new routes halfway through. In the later rooms, leave a hot streak to bait a seeker and move before it charges. There are resting ledges and faster routes through the air.

Controls

Move: arrow keys or A and D
Jump: Space, Z, W or up
Dash (in the air): X, Shift or K
Diagonal dash (from room 6): hold W/up or S/down, then press dash
Mute: M. Open Sound to adjust music and effects separately.

Keyboard only. Ten rooms, a timer and a death counter.

What it sends

This game sends anonymous play events to Playloop, the playtest tool I make, so I can see where people die: when a run starts, which room you're in, where and how you died, and your time. It also sends a random ID kept in your browser, your browser's type and language, and a rough location from your connection (country, region and city). Playloop doesn't store your IP address. No account, no names. Playloop's privacy policy: playloop.gg/go/cooldown-privacy-itch

How it's made

Each lesson gets two tags in the GitHub repo, one where it starts and one where it ends, so you can check out either and build along. The repo is public, and the original episode 1 tags still contain the four-room version. More about the series at playloop.gg/go/cooldown-itch