Rollermaze

About the game

You are a cuboctahedron, a shape with twelve corners that has no business being this fast, and somebody is after you. Each level gives you thirteen seconds to get from the drop point to the safety of the trees. The clock is on screen the whole time, and it is not generous.

You move by rolling one square at a time across a checkerboard that floats in the sky. Some paths are blocked until you roll onto the nearest button. Longer routes have a safe spot in the middle that resets the timer, so planning means finding the order: which button first, where to rest, and how to get past the grey sentinel cubes. Touch a sentinel and it wakes up, sends you back to the drop point and starts chasing you.

picosonic made Rollermaze for the 13th js13kGames, in 2024, with the theme "Triskaidekaphobia", the fear of the number thirteen. It is drawn with plain WebGL and flat-shaded 3D, and the game has 25 levels. The music is an excerpt of Schubert's "Trout Quintet".

Playing it here

Click Play and click on the game once so it has the keyboard, then roll with the arrow keys or WASD. With a mouse or a finger you can press and drag in a straight direction to roll that way. Nothing is saved between visits.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Plan the route first. Thirteen seconds is short, so know which button and which safe spot you are heading for before the first roll.

Safe spots are worth the detour. A longer path that passes one can be faster in practice than a short path that runs out of time.

Keep your distance from sentinels. They only chase once you touch them, so walk around the ones you can.

Credits and licence

Rollermaze was created by Jasper Renow-Clarke (picosonic). The 3D models are generated by his own code, and the music is an excerpt of Franz Schubert's "Trout Quintet" (D. 667), in the public domain. The game is released under the MIT licence; the licence texts are linked from this page. The image on this page is our own screenshot of the game.