GhostRun II

GhostRun II is a frantic maze-chase arcade game about greed, panic, hostile ghosts and weaponized wizardly indigestion.

Ghosty has become rather wealthy after his previous adventures in castles and ancient tombs.

Naturally, somebody has noticed.

That somebody is you.

You are a greedy wizard with a simple objective:

Steal all of Ghosty's gold.

Unfortunately, Ghosty has friends.

They are unpleasant.

And unlike you, they do not appear to have any concerns about cardiovascular health.

How to Play

Guide the Wizard through a randomly generated maze and collect every gold bar.

Once all the gold has been collected, the level is complete and another maze awaits.

The problem is everything wandering around between you and the treasure.

Ghosty's friends pursue you through the corridors, but they do not all behave in the same way.

Some are clever.

Some are less clever.

All of them are inconvenient.

Learn their behaviour, exploit their limitations and keep moving.

Controls

• CURSOR KEYS — guide the Wizard
• CTRL — release a pool of green acid

If you stop directing the Wizard, he will eventually choose a direction himself.

Randomly.

Delegating navigation to him is therefore possible.

Whether it is advisable is another matter.

Energy

Running costs energy.

Using magic costs energy.

Panicking while running and using magic costs, unsurprisingly, even more energy.

Keep an eye on your reserves.

The temptation is to sprint constantly through the maze while covering every corridor in acid.

This is an excellent strategy right up until it isn't.

Sometimes slowing down, watching the enemies and planning your route is considerably cheaper than frantic competence theatre.

Green Acid

Being a wizard, you possess the traditional mystical ability to...

spit green pools of acid.

The curriculum at wizard school has clearly changed.

Press CTRL to leave acid behind in the maze.

Enemies encountering it are confused and delayed, giving you valuable time to escape or reach another section of the maze.

Acid is therefore extremely useful.

It also consumes energy.

Use it strategically rather than decorating the entire dungeon in fluorescent digestive consequences.

Know Your Enemy

One of the main ideas behind GhostRun is that its enemies have distinct personalities.

They do not all use identical pursuit behaviour.

Each antagonist follows its own rules and responds differently to the maze and the Wizard.

Some are smarter than others.

Some are more predictable.

Some are dangerous primarily because you assumed they were going to behave like somebody else.

Observe them.

Learn the rules.

Then exploit them shamelessly.

They would do the same to you.

Random Mazes

Every maze in GhostRun II is generated randomly.

There is no single layout to memorize.

Each new level therefore requires you to quickly understand:

• where the treasure is,
• where the useful routes are,
• where the enemies are coming from,
• and which corridor is about to become an extremely bad idea.

GhostRun II has no final level.

You can continue for as long as you survive.

Difficulty increases through the early stages, but levels above 10 remain approximately at level-10 difficulty rather than becoming indefinitely harder.

The game eventually stops becoming crueler.

It merely remains cruel.

Features

• Fast maze-chase arcade gameplay.
• Randomly generated maze on every level.
• Endless progression.
• Difficulty progression up to level 10.
• Enemies with distinct behaviours and personalities.
• Energy management.
• Green acid used to confuse and delay enemies.
• Simple keyboard controls.
• Gold-collecting objective.
• Retro C64-inspired design.
• Runs directly in the browser.
• An alarming amount of exercise for a wizard.

A Little History

GhostRun is a tribute to Radar Rat Race, released for the Commodore VIC-20 and C64 in the early 1980s.

Radar Rat Race has particular significance for me:

it was the very first game I played on my Commodore 64.

I remember it as frantic, difficult and deeply annoying.

I kind of hated it.

Naturally, several decades later I decided to recreate it.

Nostalgia is an unusual disease.

GhostRun keeps much of the spirit of the original maze-chase gameplay while adding its own setting, mechanics and — most importantly — individually designed enemy behaviour.

GhostRun II

Version II is intentionally very similar to the original GhostRun from the player's perspective.

Most of the important changes happened under the hood.

The game was moved onto substantially reworked versions of my ENGINE and GRID libraries, improving performance and replacing the earlier maze system with fully random maze generation.

So while the Wizard remains greedy, Ghosty remains rich and the monsters remain objectionable, the machinery responsible for their suffering became considerably better organized.

Under the Hood

GhostRun II was written in JavaScript and uses jQuery together with my own game-development libraries.

It became another step in the development of the reusable LaughingSkull systems, particularly:

• ENGINE
• GRID
• spatial indexing
• enemy AI behaviour
• terrain and maze handling
• reusable game-object management

The deliberately different enemy personalities were especially important.

Rather than simply making every monster pursue the player using the same algorithm, each antagonist is constrained by its own behavioural rules.

This creates opponents that can be learned rather than merely outrun.

Although outrunning them remains highly recommended.

Play GhostRun II

▶ Steal Ghosty's Gold on LaughingSkull.org

Free to play. No account. No installation.

Steal the gold.

Avoid the monsters.

Try not to die from exhaustion while fleeing with somebody else's retirement fund.