The 60fps budget: performance as a contract
A worm arena earns its keep in the crowded moments — thirty crews, a thousand pieces of treasure, everyone sprinting. That's exactly when cheap games stutter.
The gate
Before a visual change ships, it runs a sixty-second automated scene: a crowded practice arena and an authoritative live room, measured for average frame rate, worst-frame percentiles, long tasks, input-to-paint latency, and memory growth. The thresholds are strict — a 55fps floor, tight percentile caps, effectively zero tolerance for long tasks — and a miss blocks the release. When we added the animated materials, the gate ran with them active: the crowded scene held its frame rate to within a fraction of the plain version, or the materials wouldn't have shipped.
How the drawing stays cheap
The tricks are boring on purpose. One traced path repainted at nested widths instead of four rebuilt paths per worm. Scale chevrons batched into a single stroke. Sprites cached at bucketed sizes. Materials that spend two or three batched passes, never one paint per body segment. Glow effects behind a user toggle because shadow blur is the most expensive pretty thing a canvas can do. None of this is clever; all of it is counted.
Why players should care
Frame pacing is fairness. If the game hitches exactly when four crews converge, the player with the smoothest machine wins the collision, not the player with the best line. A strict budget is how a browser game keeps a fight winnable on a mid-range phone.