Overview
Players die with the fire button held — that’s how everyone dies. Without protection, the game-over screen reads that held button on its first frame, snaps to the title, the title reads the same held button, and a new game starts before the death tone finishes. Three screens in three frames; the player never reads their own ending.
The fix is a dwell: entering any screen that waits for a button loads a frame counter, and the screen refuses to believe the button until the counter runs out. A second of stillness on game over; half a second on the title. The pause isn’t dead time — it’s the punctuation that makes win and loss land.
This is the timer-based sibling of edge detection. Edge detection ignores a held button entirely (act on the press, not the level); the dwell slows everything down regardless of edges, which also gives the moment room to breathe. Finished games often want both: the dwell for the beat, the edge for the button.
Pseudocode
; entering an ending screen — wherever the state changes
enter_game_over:
state = GAME_OVER
ui_lock = 60 ; a second of stillness
enter_title:
state = TITLE
ui_lock = 25 ; half a second
; in the screen's per-frame handler
game_over_update:
draw the screen
if ui_lock > 0:
ui_lock -= 1
return ; the button is not yet believed
if fire pressed:
enter_titleImplementation Notes
The lock loads where the state changes, not where the screen draws. A screen that repaints every frame would reload the lock every frame and never expire. Flock’s endtick dwells via WINWAIT/ENDWAIT loaded at the win/loss moment; Starfield’s ui_lock loads in the out-of-lives branch and in enter_title.
One variable serves every screen — the title and the game-over screen never run at the same time, so a single ui_lock byte with different load values per screen is enough.
Differentiate the two endings. Flock dwells longer on a win (180 frames, then straight to the next level) than on a loss (300 frames, then the long walk back to the title) — the dwell length is part of how each ending feels.
Verification note: the dwell is invisible in screenshots. Starfield’s was verified frame-exact by scripted runs — GAME OVER must survive a held button at +30 and +55 frames, flip to the title at +75, and start a new game at +105. If you can’t see a behaviour in a still, script it.
Trade-offs
| Aspect | Cost |
|---|---|
| CPU | One decrement and branch per frame on ending screens |
| Memory | One byte |
| Complexity | One byte and a branch — the discipline is loading it at every state change |
When to use: every screen that waits for a button, in every game.
When to avoid: mid-game prompts where responsiveness matters more than ceremony — there, use edge detection alone.
Benefits
- Endings land — the player reads the screen because the game makes them
- No accidental skip-through — a held button can’t chain across screens
- Tunable feel — the dwell lengths are two bytes of game-design intent