Whack-a-Mole

This Whack-a-Mole runs on an HTML5 canvas (450x400, rendered with a requestAnimationFrame game loop and a fixed 60fps-normalized delta of deltaTime / 16.67) over a 3x3 grid of nine holes. Seven mole types spawn from a weighted table, each with its own point value, up-time, and hit-points: Normal (+10), Golden (+50, glows and stays up only 0.8x as long), Speedy (+25, 0.4x up-time so it's the fastest to disappear), Helmet (+30, takes 2 hammer blows to clear), Ninja (+40, 0.6x up-time), King (+100, 3 hit-points and 2.0x up-time), and the Bomb (-100), which you must NOT hit. Bombs are the skill ceiling: clobbering one triggers a 15-frame screen shake, a 20-particle explosion, and instantly resets your combo to zero, so the game is as much about inhibitory go/no-go control as raw clicking speed.

Scoring stacks two multipliers. A consecutive-hit combo multiplies every hit by 1 + floor(combo / 5) * 0.5 (so points scale up every fifth mole, and an Nx COMBO! banner pops on each multiple of five), while the doublePoints power-up multiplies the result by 2; both compound, so a Golden mole on a hot streak can pay out far more than its base 50. The combo resets not only when you smack a bomb but also when a non-bomb mole falls back down un-whacked, so letting moles escape actively costs you. Hitting a Golden or King mole has a 30% chance to drop one of four short-lived power-ups (timeFreeze, doublePoints, slowMo, hammerSize); hammerSize widens the hit radius from 40 to 60 pixels and slowMo stretches both the spawn interval (1.5x) and mole up-time (1.8x), giving you breathing room.

Difficulty is set before the round (Easy/Medium/Hard) and reshapes both the spawn table and the clock: Easy gives a 45-second timer, up to 2 moles at once, a gentle 1200ms spawn interval, and only a 5% bomb weight; Hard runs 90 seconds with up to 4 simultaneous moles, a 650ms spawn interval, a 13% bomb weight, and is the only difficulty whose regular spawn table includes the King mole (Helmet and Ninja already join the spawn table on Medium). On top of that, an internal wave/level system ramps things further: each wave advances after 10 + level*2 kills, every third wave bumps the level, and rising levels shrink mole up-time, tighten spawn timing, and (past level 3) skew the table away from harmless Normal moles. The audio is fully synthesized in real time with the Web Audio API (oscillator tones per event type, not sample files), high scores persist in localStorage, and the whole thing is keyboard-friendly: Space/Enter start, pause, or restart, Escape pauses, and M toggles mute.