Path Lab Simulator

Read the protocol. Remember the volume. Open the right cap. Fit a fresh tip, draw from the reagent tube, transfer into the sample and close everything before handing it over. Simple enough. Now do it smoothly.

Path Lab is about the gap between understanding a procedure and being able to perform it quickly. The satisfying part should be the moment your hands know what comes next. The frustration should come from the work: an overlooked cap, a reused tip, a rushed transfer. Finding the tube through an awkward camera is a problem for the design to fix.

A small, complete shift

The current loop is deliberately short: prepare three labelled transfers, hand over the batch, see the quality and time score, then retry. A local top ten records your best runs. Feedback can be saved with the run’s event trace so an awkward moment can be examined afterwards.

The reagent lives in a capped tube. Tips fit reliably and the rack gradually empties. Quality depends on volume, contamination and caps; the speed bonus rewards accepted samples. Going slowly can still produce excellent work.

Two hands, one bench

The mouse moves the pipettor. Hold and release the left button to work the plunger, use the middle button for blowout, and right-click to eject the tip. The left hand controls the tube, including its position, tilt and cap. The Electron desktop window keeps those controls out of the browser’s shortcut system.

The tip ejector is wildly overpowered. A dry tip escaping the waste jar is background chaos, with no direct score fine. Ejecting a tip while it still contains reagent really does lose that liquid. The joke belongs inside a larger game about laboratory work.

What still needs work

The next useful step is human playtesting: where do the controls interrupt a clear intention, what becomes easier on the second run, and does accuracy become rewarding at speed? The final visual identity is unresolved. Liquid is a quantity model; hands and tools can still intersect solid geometry.

More assays, tube families, procurement misery, furniture moving and VR are future directions. This build contains one simplified fictional procedure. It is a game prototype, not clinical training software.

Play the shift

From the source repository, with Node.js and npm installed:

cd playtest
npm ci
npm start

The game runs locally after installation. The playtest guide has every control, the scoring rules and packaging instructions. Save feedback from the handover screen; nothing is uploaded automatically.