Energy meter

A resource that moves while you are not looking

Most trackers only move when somebody taps them. This one can move on its own, which changes the kind of game you can run with it. Stamina that runs down while you are in the open. Oxygen in a diving game. A shield that recharges while nobody is hitting it. A budget of attention that empties over a lesson. The clock becomes a player, and the room has to decide what to spend before it is gone.

The rate is the whole design. At one a second a full meter lasts nearly two minutes, which is a round; at twenty it is gone in five seconds, which is a sprint. Set it to whatever makes a decision urgent without making it impossible, and remember that the pause button stops every meter at once so the game can be interrupted without anybody losing out.

Why it cannot drift

A meter that counts itself down every tick is wrong the moment the browser stops giving the page time, which happens as soon as the tab goes to the background or a phone locks. This one never counts. It remembers the level it started at and the moment it started, and works out the number from the clock every time it draws, so the answer after a minute in the background is the same as the answer after a minute in front of you.

What it deliberately does not do is drain while the page is shut. Only the levels are saved, never the fact that a round was running, so closing the tab is a pause. The screen is held awake while a round is going, because a phone that sleeps in the middle of a timed resource is a phone that has ended the round without asking.

A focus meter for a classroom

The classroom version turns the idea inside out: set it to fill rather than drain, one a second, and the meters become a visible reward for a quiet working stretch. Filling is better than draining here, because a bar that goes up is something to protect rather than something to panic about, and the alert when somebody reaches the top is a moment worth having.

The names come from the same shared list every tool here with players uses. If what you want is hit points that only move when something happens, the health bars are the page for that, and for a plain clock with nothing attached the countdown timer is quicker to open and reads from further away.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.energy.state, pph.energy.rates and pph.energy.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.