✏️ Recess Rocks

A browser clone of Boulder Dash — the 1984 First Star cave-digging game, the Super Boulder Dash mechanics two brothers played on a school computer — rethemed as an elementary school. Dig through notebook paper, dodge falling erasers, collect gold stars, and get out the classroom door before the bell.

Play it: https://charlesguse.github.io/whatever/ — or download that single page and double-click it; it runs straight from disk, no server needed.

The game

You are a kid with a backpack, tunnelling through a cave. Collect the cave's quota of gold stars and the exit opens; run out of time, get crushed by a falling eraser, or get caught by something that patrols the tunnels, and you lose a life. Eight caves, each one built to teach a mechanic and then make you use it under pressure.

The physics are the point, and they are the original's:

• Erasers (boulders) and gold stars (diamonds) fall when nothing holds them up, and roll sideways off other round things.
• A falling one crushes whatever it lands on. A resting one is furniture.
• You can push an eraser sideways into an empty space — never up or down.
• Paper airplanes (butterflies) explode into a shower of gold stars. That is the scoring trick the whole game is built around.
• The paste blob (amoeba) grows, and turns into stars if you seal it in or into erasers if you let it get too big.
• The pencil-sharpener wall (magic wall) turns falling erasers into stars while it runs, and it only runs once.

Themes

Element behavior and element appearance are separate by design. A theme is a plain data table keyed by element id — colors, glyphs, labels, sounds — so a new theme touches no game logic at all. Two ship in the box:

• Classroom (default): notebook paper, pink erasers, gold star stickers, lockers, a paste blob, and a door with an EXIT sign.
• Classic: the original's dirt, boulders, and diamonds.

Switch between them from inside the game, mid-cave, without losing your run.

Controls

Keyboard is the reference scheme; everything else is a bonus that is hidden where the platform cannot do it.

Keyboard	Arrows or WASD to move, hold the grab key to dig without stepping in, P to pause, R to restart the cave
Touch	On-screen d-pad and buttons, thumb-sized, shown only on touch devices
Gamepad	D-pad/stick and face buttons via the Gamepad API, when a controller is connected

How it is built

This repository is an experiment: the whole game is built through the Wing Commander spec-driven pipeline. Each feature starts as a GitHub issue; the spec-request label sends it through spec → plan → tasks → implement → PR. See the issues and specs/ for the full paper trail.

• Stack: Svelte 5 + Vite, built to a single self-contained index.html via vite-plugin-singlefile.
• The simulation is plain TypeScript over a typed-array grid, deterministic and tick-based, with no DOM and no Math.random — which is why every physics rule is pinned by a vitest test written as a small ASCII cave.
• Ground rules: .specify/memory/constitution.md

Local development

npm install
npm run dev     # dev server
npm run build   # emits dist/index.html — the whole game in one file
npm test        # vitest unit tests on the cave simulation

Credits

Boulder Dash was created by Peter Liepa and Chris Gray and published by First Star Software in 1984. This is an independent reimplementation of its mechanics with original cave designs and original artwork — no assets or level data from the commercial game are used here.