Monster Arcade Game Glossary

Movement and control

• Coyote time — a grace window of about 85 ms after walking off a ledge during which a jump still counts as grounded.
• Jump buffering — a jump pressed up to about 110 ms before landing fires the instant you touch down.
• Variable jump height — jump height determined by how long the button is held; releasing early cuts upward velocity to a floor.
• Commit cost — how long a response locks you out of acting again. A jump is about 0.55 s, a slide 0.45 s, a dash 0.4 s.
• Invulnerability frames — the brief window during a dodge roll when nothing can hurt you, about 0.24 s.
• Wall slide — gripping a wall to slow a fall, allowing a jump off it. Used in Lava Beast.
• Deadzone — the central 16% of a virtual stick that reads as neutral, so a resting thumb causes no drift.

Enemies and combat

• Telegraph — a visible wind-up before an attack, 0.25-0.5 s. Creatures freeze while it runs.
• Overshoot — a charging creature passing through your position and beyond, creating a punish window.
• Recovery window — the period after an attack when a creature is vulnerable and cannot act.
• Phase — a set of boss attacks, entered at a health threshold or on a timer.
• First-cycle bonus — the first cycle of a new boss phase telegraphs about 20% longer, so a new attack is learnable.
• Armoured — a boss state in which damage does nothing at all, shown with a blue ring and a label.
• Wave director — the system deciding how many creatures spawn, how fast, and how many may be alive at once.
• Mid-distance — close enough to be reached, too far to punish. The worst place to stand in a battle game.

Scoring and collection

• Chain — consecutive successful actions without a miss or a hit.
• Multiplier — the value derived from the chain, applied to everything you earn while it is active.
• Chain window — the time you have before an idle chain resets. Two seconds in Monster Coin Rush, 2.5-3 elsewhere.
• Spawn pattern — how collectibles are placed: single, trail, arc, zig-zag, cluster, moving, orbit, bonus, risk line, hidden.
• Risk line — a row of pickups leading toward danger, with values increasing along the row. Bait.
• Greed pocket — a cluster of the highest-value items placed as far from safety as a map allows.
• Banking — returning carried items to a safe point, after which they cannot be lost.
• Magnetisable — whether a magnet can pull an item. Eggs and treasure are not.

Difficulty and generation

• Asymptotic curve — a value rising toward a ceiling it never reaches. The shape of almost every difficulty curve here.
• Half-life — the constant controlling how quickly a curve approaches its ceiling.
• Reaction allowance — extra time added to the minimum obstacle gap, shrinking from about 420 ms to a floor of 260.
• Floor — the tightest a value is allowed to become. Below a floor, outcomes become luck rather than skill.
• Chunk template — a hand-checked piece of level, tagged with what it requires and the earliest level it may appear on.
• Per-obstacle generation — generating each obstacle individually under constraints rather than from templates. Used in Endless Monster Run.
• Value noise — smooth layered randomness used for continuous terrain and tunnel walls.

Technical

• Delta time (dt) — seconds elapsed since the last frame. Everything moves per second multiplied by dt, and dt is clamped at 1/20 s.
• Device pixel ratio — how many physical pixels make one CSS pixel. Capped at 2 here.
• Pooling — allocating objects once and recycling them so a long run never triggers a garbage-collection pause.
• localStorage — browser storage used for favourites, recently played, bests and preferences. Never transmitted.
• prefers-reduced-motion — an operating system setting that cuts particles, disables shake and flattens parallax.

Terms we deliberately do not use

A short list, because their absence is itself informative:

• Leaderboard / ranking. There is no server, so a submitted score could not be verified.
• Currency / wallet / balance. Collectibles are scoring objects with no value of any kind.
• Energy / lives system. Nothing here limits how much you can play.
• Premium / unlock / shop. Every game is fully available immediately.
• Players online / times played. We do not measure either, so we do not claim either.

Every one of these is standard vocabulary on free game sites and every one would be false here. Where you see a number on this site, it is either your own local result or a count of something you can verify by looking.

Terms specific to this site

A handful of words are used throughout these guides in a particular sense, and it is worth collecting them.

• Commit cost. How long an action locks you into it — roughly 0.55 seconds for a jump, 0.45 for a slide, 0.4 for a dash.
• Telegraph. The freeze, wind-up and flash that precede any attack that can hurt you.
• Learning bonus. The longer telegraph on the first cycle of each boss phase, roughly twenty per cent.
• Chain window. The two to 3.4 seconds you have to perform another qualifying action before a multiplier resets.
• Recovery space. The guaranteed sparser section that follows a dense one in generated content.
• Risk line. A trail of collectibles deliberately routed through danger — always a genuine choice, never a trap.

None of these are standard industry terms. They are the vocabulary this site uses to describe its own systems, and they are defined here so that the guides can be specific rather than vague.

Metrics you will see on game pages

Each game page carries a small block of metadata, and the fields are consistent across the library.

• Category. Which of the six sections the game belongs to.
• Difficulty. Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert — the skill floor rather than the ceiling.
• Length. Endless, wave, short or level, which predicts how interruptible a session will be.
• Gameplay. The core verb — jumping, dodging, collecting, fighting.
• Creature type and environment. Used by the filters, and useful because environment cuts across categories.
• Best metric. Which number the game stores for you, and what it is called.

All six are filterable from the games index, which is generally faster than reading a list when you already know what you are in the mood for.

Alex Morgan

Browser Games Editor & Interactive Gaming Content Specialist

Alex Morgan is the editorial byline for everything published on Monster Arcade — the design notes behind all 30 original games, the strategy guides, and the tuning decisions that set every difficulty curve on the site. More about our editorial byline.

Published September 8, 2026 · Last updated September 14, 2026

Games mentioned in this guide

Runner

Monster Dash

Two actions, endless forest, instant restart. The best first game on the site.

Easy Jump and slide

Battle

Monster Arena

Clear each round of creatures, then pick one of three permanent upgrades. Builds compound fast.

Medium WASD + mouse / attack

Collection

Monster Coin Rush

The fastest collection game here. A two-second combo window and coins arriving faster than you can think.

Hard Arrows / WASD

Platformer

Monster Castle

Climb a trap-filled castle as a small round monster. Eight hand-built levels with a real ending.

Easy Arrows / WASD + Space