imsai-sh/zhuzhiliao

Zhuzhiliao is a web version of a traditional Chinese spinning toy that makes a croaking sound when you twirl it, called zhuzhiliao. The whole thing is built as a single HTML file with no external dependencies, and it is designed to work on mobile phones first. You can try it live at the project's official site, or open the index.html file directly in a browser with no build step and no internet connection required. You can play with it by dragging a finger or mouse across the screen the way you would spin the real toy, and it also supports letting it spin on its own. On a phone, holding the device and tilting it can drive the spinning motion directly through the phone's motion sensors, once you grant permission for that. The sound is not a synthetic beep. The creator recorded audio from a real zhuzhiliao toy, took a short clip timed to loop cleanly, and blended the start and end so it repeats cleanly with no audible gap, embedded directly inside the HTML file. The playback speed changes to match how fast you are spinning it, so spinning faster makes it sound faster and more urgent, closer to how the physical toy actually behaves. The underlying motion is simulated with simple rope and pendulum style physics rather than being purely decorative. A small counter on the page counts how many times you personally have spun it, stored only in your browser's local storage, with nothing sent to any server. The README is explicit that this is not an open source project in the licensing sense, even though the source code is publicly visible. Reading and studying the code, and running it locally for personal or learning purposes, is allowed, but redistributing it, deploying it publicly under another domain, or using it commercially is not permitted. The only authorized deployment is the project's own official website.