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TIMELINE BLASTAR — HELP

🎮 CONTROLS

🔫 WEAPONS (hotbar)

• Slot 1 · 🔫 Bullets — infinite, upgrade with powerups. GLASSCANNON ship fires twin cannons.
• Slot 2 · 📢 Megaphone — parodius-style single giant shout (SEGFAULT, RTFM, L+RATIO…). Slow fire rate, lingers ~3s, high damage. Also hits arcade enemies.
• Slot 3 · 💣 Nuke — 3 per run. Instantly kills post boss + every enemy on screen. "@handle NUKED!" overlay. Nuked users never appear again in your feed.
• Slot 4 · 🎉 Celebrate — rainbow emoji spray, triggers "CELEBRATED!" + crowd cheer. Positive vibes, also hits enemies.
• Slot 5 · 🎭 Meme Blaster — 3-word rainbow meme burst (SKIBIDI, RIZZ, GYATT, SKILL ISSUE…). Also hits enemies.
• Slot 6 · 💬 Comment Gun — speech-bubble shots. First hit on an X post pauses the game + opens a comment modal to reply for real via X API.
• Slot 7 · ❤️ Like Gun — pink heart shots. First hit on an X post sends a real Like via X API + shows "+❤ LIKED!" toast.
• Slot 8 · 🔭 Discovery — shines a wide light-blue cone upward. If it connects with an arxiv paper, the game pauses for 20 seconds so you can read the abstract. SPACE or ESC skips. Also: the 📤 button on the hn-bar shares that paper's link + summary to your X feed.

🎯 SOURCES / MODES

• 𝕏 Your X Timeline — OAuth, blast your real home feed. Each load uses X API credits.
• 🟧 Hacker News Ballern — live HN front-page, free forever.
• 📚 Arxiv Blastar — latest cs.AI papers as bosses. Title + abstract + author + category pills (cs.LG / cs.CL …). Free forever. Abs link opens on arxiv.org.
• 💥 Blast The Mix — mix any of: X, HN, Bluesky, Mastodon, RSS (Ars / Verge / TechCrunch / xkcd / Wired / 404media / HN), YouTube Podcasts (curated: Fireship, Karpathy, Real Life Lore, Tier Zoo, Core Memory, Wes Roth, Acquired, Founders Podcast, Business Basics, 20VC, a16z), arxiv (cs.AI latest). Source picker appears after you tap the button.
• 🌌 Space Porch — chill mode (from Player Menu). No enemies, no kills. You sit in a rocking chair and watch timeline posts rain gently from the stars. Click any post to open its original in a new tab. Ambient YouTube video plays in the background.
• 🗺️ Memetic Universe Map — from Player Menu. A living map of all human-knowledge sources as planets. Blue ring = connectable, green ring + tractor beam = currently connected, red ring = blocked API (FB / IG / TikTok / YouTube). Click a blue/green planet to connect and start blasting that feed. ESC returns.

🚀 SPACE GARAGE (Player Menu)

• SCOUT — HP 3, FIRE 6, SPD 1.0. Standard balanced fighter.
• IRONBACK — HP 5, FIRE 12, SPD 0.75. Heavy armor, slow guns.
• GLASSCANNON — HP 2, FIRE 3, SPD 1.15. Twin-cannon rapid fire — two hits and you're out.
• ONE-OF-ONE — Procedural ship seeded & re-rollable. Auto-tinted with colors extracted from your X avatar.

🎬 CLIPS + SHARING

• Every kill auto-records from spawn to destruction + 5s afterglow.
• Press X anywhere to trigger the primary share button in whichever modal is open.
• X-mode one-click "Reply on 𝕏" posts the clip as a real reply. Optional 🎤 ADD COMMENTARY records webcam with green-on-black CRT filter and composites as PIP.
• Every share pauses the game. When you close the modal, a 3-2-1-GO countdown resumes play — no ambushes mid-post.
• All sharing stays in-game (no tab jumps). Intent-URL fallback only if you're not connected to X.

⚔️ COMBAT

• Arcade enemy waves spawn every 12s. Score = posts×100 + enemies×10 + waves×500.
• Kill streaks trigger announcer: DOUBLE KILL → TRIPLE KILL → MEGA KILL → MONSTER KILL → GODLIKE (via retro C64-style TTS).

🎬 GAME OVER + HIGHSCORE CARD

• Game-over screen embeds your 1200×1200 shareable highscore PNG: hero avatar, rank (ROOKIE → BLASTER → KILLER → NUKER → LEGEND → ELITE), 2×3 stats grid, grid of this-session's blasted targets with their avatars.
• POST HIGHSCORE TO X is a one-click direct post — no redirect page.

👤 PLAYER MENU SECTIONS

• 👤 Profile — X avatar, rank tier, lifetime stats, END SESSION & SHARE HIGHSCORE.
• 🚀 Space Garage — 4 ship presets (SCOUT / IRONBACK / GLASSCANNON / ONE-OF-ONE). Tap a card to equip; stats apply next game.
• 🚀 Ship Config — live preview of your equipped ship (real in-game renderer + X avatar in cockpit), cockpit source (X / upload / classic), tint swatches (apply immediately).
• 🏆 Leaderboard — top-25 global scores.
• 🏛️ Hall of Fame — every X reply you posted, metrics polling WIP.
• 🌌 Space Porch — enter chill mode.
• 🗑️ Nukelist (collapsible) — manage banned handles.
• ⚙ Advanced Settings (collapsible) — video config (auto-popup mode, bitrate, full-session recording, silent-audio toggle), reset.
• 🧪 Custom Blast Targets (collapsible, bottom) — paste custom post text + image for targets.

💡 TIPS

• Posts take progressive damage — cracks at 66% HP, heavy damage at 33%, chunk missing under 20%.
• Every 3rd post morphs: breaks into word-swarm enemies before reforming as 1.5× HP end-boss.
• Nukes ignore HP, instantly kill, and ban from feed.
• TTS announcer speaks wave starts, combo kills, nukes, player hits, rank-ups. Mute with M.
• Every fetched post across all sources is archived with full source metadata in the server corpus (re-served to free-tier users, powers analytics).