Credits
Periodic Panic is a small family project: a game about the periodic table, made for two kids who wanted one.
The game
- Original idea and characters — the kids it was made for.
- Design, code and artwork — Winmar David.
- Built with help from — Claude (Anthropic), used as a coding assistant.
How it is made
Everything is hand-written HTML, CSS and JavaScript. There is no game engine and no framework. Every character, background, explosion and icon is drawn at run time with the Canvas API — there are no image files in the game — and every sound is generated live with the Web Audio API, so there are no audio files either. The whole thing is one page that works offline once installed.
Typefaces
- Bungee by David Jonathan Ross, under the SIL Open Font License.
- Baloo 2 by Ek Type, under the SIL Open Font License.
Hosting
Served as static files on Cloudflare Pages. No servers, no databases, no accounts.
The chemistry
The element facts, the reactions and the uranium-238 decay chain follow the standard published chemistry you would find in any reference table or school text. Any mistake in how they are presented here is ours, not chemistry's — see the terms on how far to trust a game.
Thank you
To Dmitri Mendeleev, who arranged the whole thing in the first place, and to every kid who has ever asked what an element actually is.