Downpour

neon city typing survival

Words fall through a rain‑soaked city at night.
Type them before they hit the water.

The waterline rises with every miss. Clear words fast enough and it falls back. Let it flood and the game ends. That's it. No tutorials, no cutscenes, no loot boxes. Just you and a storm of words getting faster.

The loop

Words spawn at the top of the screen and drift down. Start typing and the game locks onto matching words. Finish the word, it clears. Miss it, the water rises. Build combos for higher scores. Your WPM is tracked in real time.

Difficulty

Five modes from Very Easy to Very Hard. Each one changes how fast words fall, how often they spawn, and how many can be on screen. The game also gets harder as you play — levels advance every 15 seconds or 7 cleared words.

Under the hood

Tauri desktop shell with a Rust game engine handling physics, scoring, and word selection over IPC. React frontend with a three-layer canvas pipeline. Words come from curated SCOWL lists bucketed by phonetic difficulty.

Get it running

macOS only. No binary download — you build it from source. The install script handles everything: Xcode CLI tools, Homebrew, Node, pnpm, Rust, the build itself, and copying Downpour.app into /Applications. 

git clone https://github.com/richer-richard/Downpour.git
cd Downpour
git checkout v0.2.1
./install.sh

First build takes a few minutes (Rust compilation). After that, rebuilds are fast. If macOS Gatekeeper complains on first launch, right-click the app and choose Open.

What's in v0.2.1

  • Structured error handling — Rust errors now serialize as typed {code, message} objects instead of flat strings.
  • Test coverage — 60 frontend tests (React Testing Library) and 33 Rust engine tests covering scoring, waterline physics, difficulty scaling, session lifecycle, pause/resume, and game over.
  • CI/CD pipeline — GitHub Actions with parallel lint, typecheck, frontend tests, Rust tests, and a full Tauri build on every PR and push to main.
  • Cleaner state management — App.tsx broken into focused hooks (useSettings, useBootstrap, useRecords). Dead state machine files removed.
  • Polished settings — Custom neon toggle switches and inline dropdowns replace the native browser controls.
  • Documentation — Every game constant is commented with its purpose and tuning rationale. New architecture doc covers the dual-engine design, Tauri bridge batching, and canvas pipeline.