A game I made in 2011, based on a database of value-laden words. Its runners are two avatars of me, chasing each other round a planet. Each runner's speed changes with the value of the word it meets when it jumps. I showed it in 2011 at Words: a user's manual, an exhibition curated by Himali Singh Soin at Exhibit 320 in Lado Sarai, New Delhi. It ran on a screen in a wooden box and was played with one large red button.
Playing it
You are the runner in blue trousers, on top of the planet; the computer runs in red, underneath. A new game begins by itself a few seconds after the last.
To jump, press the 1 key or the space bar, or tap the screen. These stand in for the red button. A jump that meets a word eats it, and the word changes your speed. Some words speed you up and some slow you down; the game does not say which.
When the two runners meet, one of them, usually the slower, loses a life; each has three. M turns the sound on and off, P pauses, F goes full screen, R starts again and Q stops the game, as it quit the program in 2011.
This is the 2011 game
The page runs the 2011 code, ported line by line from Lua to JavaScript. It reads the same word file and keeps the original rules, timings and quirks. Two quirks you will see: a runner's place is worked out as its speed times the time since the round began, so when its speed changes it jumps to a new place on the circle instead of speeding up from where it was. And words left from one game stay on the planet in the next.
The lettering is new, because the original font is not mine to share. The sounds and the marks that show how many lives are left are new for the same reason, and the original music was not mine either, so there is none. The start screen shows the title, centred with its line under it, where the original showed the logo of LÖVE, the engine the game ran on. The sky is the 2011 image, but here it fills the whole screen; in 2011 it filled an 800 by 600 picture. Pause and full screen belong to the page, not the game. The sound is off when the game starts, as it was in 2011.
The runners, the planet and the sky are the 2011 images.