FLAGFALL — broadcast graphics that break when the clock does

Bullet chess is the only sport where the clock kills you more often than the opponent does. Both players drop under fifteen seconds, the moves start landing faster than you can read them, and every broadcast package I have watched answers that moment by getting louder. Bigger numbers, more chrome, a graphic for the tension.

This one does the opposite. It starts to break.

The move list slides off its own edge and leaves. The modules lift off their registration marks and drift, each at its own rate, until the whole rack is out of true. By the end there is a board, two clocks, and not much else.

The board never moves. Not once.

The instrument is failing; the game is completely fine. That contrast is the whole piece, and it is why it is called FLAGFALL.

Open the live page and it draws whatever game Lichess TV is showing at that moment — real players, real ratings, a real clock draining. Nothing is pre-rendered, nothing is a mock, and it will happily draw a boring game badly if that is what is on.

A Stockfish sits inside the graphics chain and evaluates every position as it arrives, which buys three things a television feed cannot give you:

how often the move played was the engine's own first choice

a premove detector, read off the feed's own timing floor

the move that wasn't played, drawn across the board as a ghost

Same .riv. Same artboards, same view models, same Luau, same state machines. 02 / MOVES re-captions itself to 02 / LAP GAPS out of the same bound text, and a DRS gap inside one second trips the same failure state a flag scramble does.

Only the adapter changed.

That is the real claim of the piece. The package is not about chess. It is a state machine for a sport under time pressure, and the sport is a parameter — which is the difference between a graphics design and a graphics system.

flagfall-eta.vercel.app — overview

/live.html — wired to Lichess TV, live right now

/f1.html — the same file, driving an F1 replay

Built for the Rive Broadcast and Livestream UI Challenge.