Dolphin Beyond

Why I made Dolphin Beyond

Dolphin Beyond is my love letter to Dolphin Olympics, the little Flash game I lost hours to as a kid. The loop was hypnotic: build speed underwater, breach the surface at the perfect angle, chain tricks in the air, and land clean so the sea throws you even higher. When Flash died, that feeling mostly died with it.

I wanted it back — and I wanted to see how far the idea could literally go. So in Dolphin Beyond, if you play well enough, the ocean stops being the ceiling. You climb through the sky, past the clouds, and out among the stars.

How I built it

The heart of the game is a deterministic game engine written in pure TypeScript — no physics library, no framework in the simulation. Every frame is a pure function of the previous state and the player’s input. That one architectural decision quietly powers everything else:

• Replays for free. Because the simulation is deterministic, a full run can be stored as just the input stream. Play it back through the engine and you get a pixel-perfect reconstruction.
• Cheat-proof leaderboards. When you submit a score, the server re-runs your input replay through the same engine and checks that it produces the score you claimed. If it doesn’t, the score never lands on the board.
• Two games from one core. The iPhone edition is portrait, played with one thumb, with haptics and Sign in with Apple. The web edition is landscape and keyboard-driven. Same engine, two shells — and deliberately separate leaderboards, because a touch score and a keyboard score should never compete against each other.

The shell around the engine is React + Vite, packaged for iOS with Capacitor. Firebase handles accounts and leaderboards, and Capgo lets me ship over-the-air fixes to the live game without waiting on App Store review.

What’s in the game

Two main modes. Two Minutes gives you exactly that — 120 seconds to squeeze out the highest score your trick chains can carry. Slipstream is the long game: manage your momentum, keep the chain alive, and see how far beyond the ocean you can travel. Along the way you collect pearls, unlock skins and clear missions.

It’s free to play in the browser, and on the App Store for iPhone.