Ratventure

About the game

Ratventure is a platformer written by j4y_boi for Sprig, the open-source game console made by Hack Club that you program in JavaScript. You are a rat with a simple goal: find the cheese. The way there is a row of single-screen levels, each one a short run from the left edge to the right, and when you step off the right side the next screen takes over.

The first screens are a gentle welcome with a few text lines and the kind of obstacle a rat can hop over: stacks of crates and a grey enemy sitting on top of them. Further on the crates give way to rocks and crystals, and enemies come in rows, some facing one way and some the other, so a jump has to be planned rather than just made. Touch an enemy or fall off the bottom and the screen restarts, and the game quietly adds one to your death count. Reach the cheese on the final screen and the game tells you that you won, how many times you died on the way, and lets you start over.

The jump is a fixed one-tile hop that lasts half a second, and you can steer in the air, so most of the game is about planning the line you will take across a pile of crates. A duck button is there too, and the rat shrinks for a moment.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game starts in the page, on the Sprig's own 160×128 screen scaled up so the pixels stay sharp. There is a looping background tune, a jump sound, a failure jingle and a fanfare for the cheese; I turns the music off if you prefer silence. The game keeps no save, so closing the page starts you from the beginning again.

On a phone or tablet, two groups of buttons appear under the screen, like the eight buttons of the console. On a computer, use the keyboard.

Controls

Tips

Jump, then step. While the rat is in the air you can still move sideways, so press W and then D to climb onto a crate and over to the next one.

Wait out the jump. After a hop the rat comes back down when you press the next key, so a pause before the next move is fine.

Enemies do not move. They stay where the author put them, so you can study a screen, see how far a jump reaches and plan the line before you step in.

Dying is cheap. The screen restarts instantly; only the counter on the last screen remembers.

FAQ

Is this an official Sprig game? It comes from the public Sprig game gallery, where anyone can send in a game. This one was sent in by its author, j4y_boi, and it runs here unchanged.

What is a Sprig? A small console with a 160×128 screen and eight buttons, made by Hack Club to teach programming by making games. Its games are plain JavaScript programs, and the engine that runs them is open source.

How long is it? Thirteen screens, a few minutes for a first run.

Does it save my progress? No.