Video saving and sharing

Every Timeline Blastar session is automatically recorded. The whole point of the game is the artifact: a 6-to-15-second clip of you blasting a specific post into pixel dust, with the original post visible on the card, your microphone curse audible, and the score banner on top. That clip is what posts back to X.

How recording works

The browser's MediaRecorder API captures the canvas at 30 FPS while you play. The recorder runs continuously during a session — when you kill a boss-post, the game grabs the last ~10 seconds of footage and packages it as the kill clip. You don't have to do anything to start recording.

Two output formats:

• Per-kill clips — one short MP4 per boss-kill, ready to share. The default share path.
• Full-session video — the entire run from title-screen-fade-in to game-over, downloadable as a single MP4. Useful for highlight reels.

The microphone overlay (🎤 hold) layers your distorted voice on top of the audio track when recording.

The kill peek card

Right after a kill, a small card slides in from the right edge of the screen labelled 🎬 BLAST CAPTURED. It shows:

• The handle you just blasted, prefixed by source (HN / 𝕏 / arxiv / etc.)
• A flashing hint: hit X to share
• Four action buttons:
• 𝕏 Reply on X — opens the kill-share modal with a pre-filled tweet that quote-replies to the original post + attaches the clip
• 📤 Share elsewhere — Web Share API → AirDrop, Messages, etc.
• 💾 Save video — downloads the clip MP4 directly
• 🏆 End session & share highscore — closes the run, opens the endscreen modal (see below)

The peek card is dismissible (× in the top-right) and auto-fades after a few seconds. The X hotkey works regardless — press it and you go straight to the share modal.

The kill-share modal (full)

If you click 𝕏 Reply on X (or hit X), the game pauses and a full share modal opens:

• A live video preview of the clip (loops)
• A pre-filled tweet body — you can edit it
• A character counter
• The Reply on X button posts the tweet via the X API (using your OAuth session) with the clip attached as native video

Posting back is free — we don't charge COINS for shares. We do rate-limit per day to stay under X's API quotas, but normal play is well under the cap.

Endscreen highscore card

When you end a session (game over OR explicit "end session"), the endscreen modal opens:

• A 400×400 canvas renders a highscore card — game logo, your handle, score, kill count, top victim, and the timestamp
• A pre-filled tweet body summarizing the run
• Post Highscore to X button — same flow as a kill share, but the clip attached is the full session video (or the last few highlights if it's too long)

The highscore card is also saved to your profile so you can show it off later.

Full-session download

If you don't want to post but you want the file:

• During play, click the trophy 🏆 in the kill peek card
• Or, in the endscreen modal, click 🎥 Download full session video

The browser saves an MP4. Filename format: timeline-blastar__<handle>__<score>__<timestamp>.mp4.

Mobile recording

Mobile recording works the same way — MediaRecorder is supported on iOS Safari (16+) and Chrome Android. The clip lives in your browser's storage temporarily; tap Save video to push it into your Photos library.

Video bitrate

Default is 4 Mbps — good balance of quality and file size. You can change it in Options → Settings → Video:

• Low (1 Mbps) — small files, suitable for slow connections
• Medium (2.5 Mbps) — default for mobile
• High (4 Mbps) — default for desktop
• Cinema (8 Mbps) — for the highlight reel

Higher bitrate = bigger file = longer to upload. Cinema is overkill for X (X compresses videos hard) but useful for offline editing.

Replay storage

Recent kill clips are kept in your browser for the duration of the session. They're cleared when you close the tab. Save the ones you want to keep. We don't store videos server-side — that's a privacy choice, and it's also how we keep the game cheap to run.

If you posted a clip back to X, the clip lives on X.com forever (or until the post is deleted). Your X profile is the canonical archive of your best blasts.

Privacy

A few important notes:

• We never auto-post anything. Every share requires a click.
• We never reuse a video for any purpose — your clips are not training data, not analytics, not anything. They're yours.
• Microphone audio is captured only while you hold 🎤. The browser's hardware-level mic indicator is on whenever it's recording, per browser policy.
• Podcast preview audio (Podcast Blastar mode) plays the public RSS-published episode mp3 directly from the podcast's host — your browser fetches it like any podcast app would. We never proxy the file, never re-host it, and never record it into your blast clip (we deliberately route podcast audio outside the canvas-stream graph). Podcasts can opt out by removing the file from their feed.
• Full privacy details: Privacy Policy.

Wondering how to score high enough that the clip is worth posting? → Blasting tactics.