DAILY CHALLENGE · 2026-06-15 (UTC)

GLASS BOX RUNNER

A daily competitive runner where the whole world races the same course — and the backend is visible through the glass. Beat the ghost, then become one.

no sign-up — your nickname is your identity
peek at today's leaderboard →
🌍

One world, one seed

Every UTC day a new course is derived from the date — a seeded PRNG drives every obstacle, item and boss pattern. Everyone on Earth runs the exact same track.

👻

Race real ghosts

Your inputs (just jumps and slides) are stored in DynamoDB with your score. Pick anyone on the leaderboard and their ghost re-runs beside you, tick for tick.

📦

Watch the database work

The glass box: live player count from TTL sessions, and the real DynamoDB write latency shown the instant your score lands. The backend is part of the game.

THE LOOP

1.Run today's course
2.Score lands in DynamoDB (~ms)
3.See your global rank
4.Race the ghost above you

UNDER THE GLASS

Next.js shell on Vercelserverless API routesAmazon DynamoDB · single-table · on-demand · TTL

Rankings are a single Query (zero-padded score keys sort lexicographically), ghosts are input sequences of a deterministic sim, live presence is TTL-expired sessions. Designed access-pattern-first to scale to millions of runs.