Dino Runner

Jump the cactus, duck the birds, and run as far as you can. A Caputchin first-party game, recreated from the Chrome offline dino in clean, framework- free TypeScript and rendered with inline SVG so every pixel is skinnable.

How it plays

The runner sprints over a scrolling desert. Obstacles arrive from the right: ground cacti (which clump up to three wide as the run speeds up) and, once the run is fast enough, flying birds. Jump the ground obstacles, duck the low fliers, and survive. Speed ramps up the whole time. The light and dark looks are separate skins the host picks (the dark skin runs under a moon-and-stars night sky); the palette stays fixed for the session.

The game is endless, so success is evaluated at crash time: the first run that reaches the configured pass score reports success (bridge.pass), and so does every later run that beats it. Best score is tracked in memory for the session (the sandboxed iframe has no storage).

| Input | Keyboard | Touch | |---|---|---| | Jump | Space / Up / W | tap the field, or the jump button | | Duck | hold Down / S | hold the duck button | | Restart | Space / Up on the game-over screen | the Restart button |

Customization

Everything is driven by caputchin.json and resolved by the widget into the game's runtime context:

• Locales: all on-screen text (including the game-over title the original hard-coded) ships in the 11 official languages and is fully overridable.
• Skins: light and dark are separate presets the host picks (no in-game switching); each sets the background, foreground, and button colors. All 16 sprites are currentColor SVGs decoded and inlined at runtime, so a customer skin can recolor them or swap the art wholesale (e.g. a different runner) without touching code.
• Configurations: speed, acceleration, gravity, jump strength, obstacle spacing, the pass score, whether birds spawn, and sound on/off. Ships with default (tuned for short sessions), classic (the original's exact speed + bird timing), casual, hardcore, and calm presets.

Accessibility

Keyboard- and touch-operable, screen-reader labelled, with live-region announcements for run start / game over / new best. Honors prefers-reduced-motion by freezing decorative parallax (clouds, moon, stars) while keeping the core run intact. Note the core challenge is a visual reflex task by nature.

Build

pnpm --filter @caputchin/game-dino-runner build

Produces a single self-contained IIFE at dist/dino-runner.js with every sprite and sound inlined as a data URI, per the Caputchin game bundle constraint.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.

The sprite art and sound effects come from the Chromium open-source "t-rex runner" offline game and are used under its BSD-3-Clause license; see THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.md.