Apple Master Revived

About the game

Apple Master Revived is a catching game with a clock inside. Apples fall from the top of the screen, and you slide a basket along the bottom to catch them. The ripe ones, red, green or yellow, are the ones you want: each is worth points and gives a little health back. Some of the apples have a worm in them, and those you have to let fall past, because catching one costs you points and health. Your health bar, shown on the right next to a striped apple, drains by itself all the time, so the only way to stay alive is to keep catching good apples.

Each level asks you to catch a number of apples, shown as "Apples: 0 / 5" in the panel on the right, and every level brings more of them, falling faster. A good apple that you miss costs you points as well, so there is always a pull between playing it safe and going after the one at the edge. When the health bar is empty, the game is over.

Manuel Huber made the first Apple Master a long time ago and this remake in 2024, in the Zig language with the raylib library. All the pictures in the game, the apples, the basket, the background and the bars, are the author's, drawn in pixel art and released into the public domain, and the lettering uses the font that raylib includes. The game has no sound.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click once inside the game so it gets the keyboard. The game starts straight away: move the basket with the left and right arrows and keep Shift pressed when you need to cross the screen quickly. The key map in the top right corner can be hidden with K, and P pauses. There are no saved scores, so a new game starts every time.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Look at the apple, not at the basket. The worm is on the apple from the moment it appears, so you can decide while it is still high up. Heading for the wrong one is the usual way to lose.

Do not wait in the middle. Apples fall everywhere along the row, and the basket is narrower than it looks. Stay close to the centre of the action and use Shift for the long moves, not to wait at the edges.

Missing a bad apple is a small win. A wormy apple that falls to the ground gives you a point, and a good one that you miss costs you ten, so when you have to give up on one of two apples, give up the wormy one.

Credits and licence

Apple Master Revived was written by Manuel Huber (zahnputzmonster). The source code is under the MIT licence and the images and artwork under CC0 1.0. It is built with Zig, raylib (zlib licence, Ramon Santamaria and contributors) and raylib-zig (MIT, Nikolas Wipper), and runs in the browser through Emscripten. The only change made for this site is a rule that blocks any request to other sites. The licence texts, the sources of every piece, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.