Arc Menu

a launcher whose items ride an arc. press the plus and five marbles file out from under it, swing round a circle and settle.

key insight: one scalar carries the whole strand, and that has a consequence nobody expects. whichever ball is last through the mouth spends its entire passage in whatever part of the curve the end of the move lands on, so an ease-out puts the crawl on the last one in. measured per frame: 408ms for the leader, the biggest ball, against 33 for each of the others, which is why the two directions cannot share a curve.

the strand is a chain rather than a rail. each ball follows the one ahead through its own exponential instead of sitting a fixed arc behind the leader, so it pays out under a fast hand and gathers when the hand stops. a hover peeks a sliver of the leader past the button's rim, and a crank turns a degree of strand per degree of hand.