Tentacle Lash
A thick, tapering tentacle whips out from the edge with a wobbling curve and a row of suckers, grabs and pulses, then retracts and dissolves. It hunts drifting prey on its own and lashes toward your click.
Build a self-contained, performant Canvas 2D visual effect in a single React + TypeScript component.
Effect: "Tentacle Lash".
Description: A thick, tapering tentacle whips out from the edge with a wobbling curve and a row of suckers, grabs and pulses, then retracts and dissolves. It hunts drifting prey on its own and lashes toward your click.
Current settings: thickness = 16, wobble = 1, lash speed = 1, curve = 0.35, suckers on, color = Single, hue = 285, second hue = 200.
Tags: Canvas 2D, click, pooled, organic.
Requirements:
- Use requestAnimationFrame with a delta-time (dt) step, clamped to avoid jumps on tab switches.
- Render crisply: fully clear the canvas every frame (clearRect). Do NOT fake motion blur by painting a translucent background each frame, because that causes permanent 8-bit "ghost" burn-in. If you want trails, store each particle's recent positions and draw them as an explicit fading tail.
- If many short-lived particles are spawned, use an object pool (pre-allocate, reuse, swap-remove on death) to avoid GC pauses.
- Scale the backing store by devicePixelRatio (cap ~2) and handle resize.
- Pause when the tab is hidden or the canvas is off-screen; respect prefers-reduced-motion.
- Expose the listed settings as adjustable props/controls.