gaota

About the game

The hero is a small teal dinosaur, and every stage is a single screen of bricks, ladders and holes. At the end of each one a golden pot is waiting, and getting to it is the whole job. The catch is that the dinosaur cannot jump.

What it can do is eat and spit. The stage is dotted with rice balls, and each one you walk over becomes a rock that you can spit out in front of you. A rock falls until it lands, and then it stays where it is, so a rock dropped into a pit becomes a floor you can walk across. You never have more rocks than rice balls, so the question each time is where to put them: a well-placed rock fills a gap, a badly placed one blocks the way and cannot be taken back.

The first stage teaches the trick with a seven-tile pit and two rocks, and the later ones add ladders, tight corridors and walls that make you think about the order of things. gaota was written in 2019 by an author who, as a child, drew dinosaurs and walls on grid paper for a game idea that a friend had passed on, and decades later finally made it with Pyxel. The author calls it unfinished, and there are five stages.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads Pyxel and the Python runtime (about 15 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that the game shows a "click to start" prompt, and one more click starts it with sound. Nothing is loaded from other sites, and nothing is saved.

The game was written for Pyxel 0.9, an older version of the engine. For it to run on the current Pyxel we converted the picture data to the new file format and adapted a few calls (the changes are published as a patch with the source), and we added the arrow keys and the game pad next to the original H, J, K, L and Z keys. We also turned off the Q key that closes the game on the desktop, because on a web page it would only freeze the screen.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Think before you spit. The rock lands two tiles in front of you, on the way down, and stays there. If the spot is already occupied, nothing comes out.

One foot is enough. The dinosaur is two tiles wide and only falls when both tiles under it are empty, so a bridge of rocks does not need to be continuous.

If you get stuck, reload the page. R only moves the dinosaur back to the first stage; rocks you have spat and rice balls you have eaten stay as you left them.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a save? No. The game starts at the first stage every time.

Why does it end on an empty screen? The author never finished it: the five stages are all there is.

Does it work on a phone? The game was made for a keyboard. The page offers an on-screen pad on touch devices, but we have not tested the game with it.

Is it free? Yes: gaota is open source under the MIT licence.

Credits and licence

gaota was made by 44O: the code and the pixel art, drawn by hand on grid paper and typed in as hexadecimal data. The game has no sound. It is released under the MIT licence; the build served here has the changes described above, all published as a patch and scripts next to the source, and the licence text goes inside the game file. It runs on the Pyxel engine (MIT) and the Pyodide runtime (MPL-2.0), whose licences and source are linked from the Licenses page.