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Chaplinko

A one-button game: a ball runs down a walled track, you switch which wall magnet pulls it, and you race the clock to the goal.

Chaplinko in play in the Lab: a grey sci-fi test track seen from above and behind, with a green speed arrow on the floor, coins along both walls, the clock plate reading 26.80 for The Lab, Level 5, a progress line across the top and the red horseshoe magnet icon in the bottom corner

Chaplinko is a game with one verb. A ball runs down a walled track, both walls are magnets, and all you ever do is switch which one is pulling. There’s no steering and no jumping. The skill is timing: you learn a track well enough to switch at exactly the right moments, then come back and do it a second faster, the way you’d learn a Trackmania map. Levels last about a minute, restarts are instant, and a countdown keeps you honest.

It started life as a vertical slice in 2024, and there’s a video of that version further down. In September 2026 I took it apart and rebuilt it in Unity 6. The one thing that had to survive was the feel of the ball, which I had tuned by hand the first time round, so before any code moved, every one of those numbers was written down and moved into data, where they have been frozen ever since.

One button, used well

Every switch locks the magnets for 0.85 of a second. Without that you could hold the ball dead straight by hammering the button. With it, you commit to a wall and live with the choice for a moment. On a phone you tap the side you want pulling, or turn on one-button mode and tap anywhere. Since a one-button player’s first press always flips them to the left, nothing in the first forty metres of any level is allowed to care which wall you’re on.

Medals come from the time left on the clock, pickups included. Coin mode reuses the same levels with more coins than one run can reach, and the medal depends on how few runs it takes you to bank them all. If the ball wedges itself somewhere and stops making progress, a 3-2-1 appears and it’s lifted back to the start of that stretch, Lakitu style. The seconds you lost are the only punishment.

Three zones so far

The Lab is a Portal-ish test facility, and the tutorial: fifteen levels in three acts, from the first switch to an exam, each act closing on a level easier than the one before it. It teaches lanes, speed strips, time pickups, holes that teleport you (one of them lies) and magnetic junk that the pulling wall flings around.

The Arcade is a pinball table. Slingshots and pop bumpers throw the ball, rails carry it off and shoot it out, targets drop gates further on, and a ball lock holds you until it decides to let go. The magnet stays live through every throw and ride, so the trick is choosing your wall before you land. Its first fifteen levels got built, played and sent back, and the redesign is called “the table plays back”: flippers fire on their own, because the player only ever gets the one button.

The Site is a construction zone, still in greybox, and its trick is the wrecking ball. Every so often your ball turns into one for a while: it hangs from a cable, hovers instead of rolling, and the clock drains fast until you smash enough houses to win the seconds back. The first version caught the ball and let it go again, and my verdict after playing it was “no control whatsoever”. It’s being rebuilt as a heavy bob that the magnets can only drag slowly, with its full weight swinging behind it.

The front end had an art pass too. The title screen is a row of tiny tracks, one ball on each, every lane switching its magnets on its own beat, so the row drifts out of step into waves and zigzags and lines itself back up once a minute.

The title screen. The orange ball is the middle lane.

Where it started

The 2024 slice had the same single button: you flipped the pull between a magnet on the left and one on the right, against a countdown. When the clock ran low, pulsing text and a ticking sound turned up the tension, and the music followed the magnet from side to side. My part of that project was the magnet attraction, the ball behaviour, the bonus-time triggers, and the countdown and feedback logic, built on top of the Doozy UI toolkit. The magnet icon and the animated hourglass in today’s HUD both came over from that version, half-turn and wiggle included.

Where it stands

The Lab’s fifteen levels are built and tuned. The Arcade is being rebuilt around its redesign, and the Site’s fifteen levels are waiting for the heavy wrecking ball to be tuned. Next comes an alpha on itch.io with a feedback form, then a free release, and eventually phones. After the Site there’s a roster of eleven more zones on paper, among them a factory where you manage the heat, ski slopes with a long jump scored on speed, a jungle and a minigolf course. That is a lot of zones for a game with one button, and I’m aware of it.

The results panel over a blurred track: The Lab, Level 5 complete, Silver, 26.12 seconds left, a New best chip, gold at 27.00 left, the bronze, silver and gold thresholds, and buttons for Next: Level 6, Roll again and Main menu
Medals come from the time left on the clock. Silver, and 0.88 of a second short of gold.
Three portrait phone frames from the Lab: the start of a level with the prompt 'Click or press Space to roll', the same level mid-run with the progress line down the left edge, and the results panel
On a phone it plays in portrait, with the progress line running down the left edge.
The level select on a wide screen: a column of zones on the left (The Lab, The Arcade and The Site, then The Factory, The Slopes and The Jungle greyed out as coming later) and the Arcade's levels on the right as cards with best times and medals
The level select, laid out for a mock of the full roster. Three of the zones have levels. The rest say “Coming later”, and I’ve chosen to believe them.
The Arcade: a dark pinball-style table with orange bumpers, a wire rail curving across the track, a green target ring, a wire cage and the floor words BALL LOCKED and LOCK BALL
The Arcade mid-rebuild: bumpers, a rail, and a ball lock that holds your ball and lets it go on its own clock.
The Site in greybox: a grey track between blue walls under a yellow gantry, a load hanging from a crane cable, crates marked with orange crosses, and a crackle of blue lightning along the left wall
The Site, still in greybox. Cranes swing loads over the track, and the blue crackle on the left wall is a magnet switching on.
The Site in greybox: a yellow wrecking ball on a long cable smashing a crate to pieces beside a green speed arrow
The first wrecking ball, the one with no control whatsoever. It did smash things, though.
A single untextured sphere sitting on a flat yellow grid plane in the Unity editor, with its transform gizmo visible
Day one, back in 2024: one ball, one plane, no magnets yet.
A top-down block-out with a three-lane coloured floor, a toy car, a ramp and simple placeholder blocks
Blocking out the 2024 board: lanes, a ramp, and a car for scale, long before the magnets and the countdown.

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