Blubber

A haunted maze game. Blubber is a blueberry ghost, and it floats through ten mazes from Halloween to midwinter: hedge mazes and graveyards in October, a corn maze and a barnyard in November, and palaces of ice in December. In each one it lights every lantern so the moon gate opens, eats what candy it can find on the way, and spooks off whatever comes shambling after it.

Blubber is said /ˈbluːbər/ (BLOO-bər), like "blue" and "brr" run together, so it rhymes with blooper. That suits it, because Blubber was a blooper. It was supposed to be a plain blueberry, but it was made in the same chat as a slime, straight after it, and it came out half slime: a squashy, glowing ghost of a berry.

It's a casual game. There are no fights, and nothing can end a run. Getting caught only makes Blubber spill some candy, and it can gather that up again if it's quick.

Run

git clone https://github.com/h1ddenpr0cess20/blubber
cd blubber
npm install
npm run dev               # → http://localhost:5173

It's a static page with no server and no keys. npm run build puts it in dist/, which runs from any folder or path.

Play

←↑↓→ or WASD	Float. The maze is square on to the screen, so the keys push along its corridors.
Hold the mouse or a finger	Float toward the pointer. The further it is from Blubber, the harder the push.
Space, the spook button, or tap a second finger	Spook. Anything close turns and runs for a few seconds. It has to recharge between spooks.
Q E, or drag with the right mouse button	Turn the view. Dragging up and down tilts it.
Mouse wheel, or + −	Zoom.
Two fingers	Pinch to zoom, twist to turn, drag up or down to tilt. A second finger that's only tapped spooks instead, and the first keeps steering.
C	Put the view back.
P / Esc	Pause.
M	Sound on or off.
The button in the title's corner	English or Japanese.
Gamepad	Left stick or d-pad floats; B spooks; right stick turns and tilts; shoulder buttons zoom; A starts, Start pauses.

A night

• Lanterns. Every maze has some unlit lanterns tucked into its far dead ends: pumpkins in October, white pumpkins in November, heaps of snowballs in December. Float into one and it lights. The map in the corner shows where they all are. Once the last one is lit, the moon gate opens, and Blubber floats out through it.
• Candy. Trails of sweets run down every corridor, with bigger treats in the corners. The sweets change with the season: wrapped bonbons and candy corn, then caramel apples, then peppermints, gumdrops and candy canes.
• Things in the way. Each season has its own chaser: zombies in October, turkeys in November, snowmen in December. They wander until Blubber comes near, then follow it through the maze. There are also hands that reach up out of the graves, giant pumpkins, hay bales and snowballs that roll up and down the long halls, and bats and crows swooping overhead. Being caught knocks Blubber back and spills up to five sweets.
• Spooking. Space sends every chaser close by running for a few seconds and scatters the flyers. It can't be used again straight away.
• Moons. A night escaped is tallied in moons. The first is for getting out, the second for coming out with four fifths of the candy, and the third for getting out before the clock strikes midnight. The title keeps the best moons for each night, and any night reached so far can be started from there.

The nights

		What's in it
October	1. The Pumpkin Patch	A hedge maze, with pumpkins, hay and a scarecrow round it and one slow zombie.
	2. Hollow Hill	Mossy graveyard walls, lamps, hands in the graves, zombies and a bat.
	3. The Crypt	Brick halls lit by candles, coffins and bones, pumpkins rolling down the long halls.
	4. The Witch's Wood	Bramble walls, a bog brewing round the edge and in a clearing, a cauldron, glowing toadstools.
November	5. The Corn Maze	Corn as tall as the walls, corn shocks and scarecrows, turkeys and crows.
	6. Gobbler's Barnyard	Plank walls, barrels, hay bales rolling, and more turkeys.
	7. The Harvest Hall	A panelled hall lit by candles, the feast laid in the middle.
December	8. Frostbite Hollow	Snowy hedges among the pines, snowmen, snowballs rolling.
	9. The Ice Palace	Walls of ice blocks.
	10. The Longest Night	The biggest maze, walled in ice, under the northern lights.

日本語

The whole game is in Japanese as well: the title, the nights, the banners, the clock and the tally. The button in the top corner of the title switches between the two. It starts in whichever language was picked last, or else the browser's own, and ?lang=ja or ?lang=en picks one outright.

Blubber, and the ice

Blubber is the Blueberry avatar exactly as it was made: the squashed berry with its calyx well, the waxy blue skin over a glowing juice core, the five dried sepals of its crown, the rim bloom, the two halos and the palette drifting through them. It also keeps its four moods with the same numbers, and the game shows what Blubber is doing through them. It's idle when it hangs still, listening as it floats along, speaking when it spooks, and thinking (spinning, its colour racing) just after it has been caught. The only changes are its size and the engine it's drawn on. src/blubber.js has the details.

The winter walls are the Ice Cube avatar, also unchanged: its rounded block, frozen-in facets, dished top, clear ice and frost rim, at rest on every wall tile. (Its cloudy core and trapped bubbles are left out of the walls: they're see-through, and the ice only shows what's solid behind it, so they'd never be seen.) The whole drifting avatar floats in the middle room of the last two nights. src/ice.js has the details.

How it's made

It runs on Dungeon Roller's engine. The renderer, the code-sculpting kit, the camera, the controls and the way the levels are built as tiles with corner heights all come from there. Everything else is new.

src/vendor/gfx/	Alan's renderer, as Dungeon Roller has it. It uses WebGPU where the browser has it and WebGL 2 where it doesn't (?renderer=webgl pins it).
src/blubber.js	Blubber: the Blueberry avatar, ported to this engine.
src/ice.js	The Ice Cube avatar, ported, and the winter walls built of it.
src/maze.js	Grows a maze from a seed: a depth-first walk, some dead ends knocked through into loops, rooms opened up. Plan lays it out on the tiles.
src/night.js	Builds a night from its recipe: the maze, the rolling ground, and where everything goes. Lanterns go at far-apart dead ends, candy goes down every corridor, and the scenery goes round the outside.
src/nights.js, src/themes.js	The ten nights, and how each kind of night looks: colours, textures, walls, light, sky, scenery.
src/grounds.js	The tiles as meshes. The light is baked into the ground and baked again each time a lantern is lit, so the maze warms up as Blubber goes round it.
src/float.js	How Blubber floats: a hover over the ground on a spring, sliding along walls, drawn to the middle of a corridor.
src/haunt.js	One night's rules with nothing drawn. The game draws it and the tests play it.
src/actors.js, src/decor.js	Everything drawn that moves or can be taken, and the scenery, merged into a few meshes.
src/models/	Every creature, sweet, lantern and piece of scenery is sculpted in code from signed distance shapes. Each is baked into a mesh in a Web Worker as the page loads. Nothing is downloaded.
src/textures.js	Every surface is painted on a canvas at startup: hedges, grass, earth, flagstones, brick, fieldstone, corn, straw, planks, panelling, snow.
src/stage.js	The lights, the painted night sky, the ground mist.
src/bog.js	The witch's brew: Dungeon Roller's lava shader, cooled and turned green.
src/lang.js	Every word on screen, in English and in Japanese, and the switch between them.
src/audio.js, src/score.js	Every sound and the music, synthesised with Web Audio. The music is a dance track for each season, built round its tune: spooky electro with a theremin lead for October, a barn-dance stomp with a fiddle and banjo for November, and future bass with a music box and sleigh bells for December. Each one has an intro, a drop, a lift, a breakdown that builds to a snare roll, and a second, bigger drop.

Script
npm run dev	Vite dev server. /models.html?m=zombie,jack is a turntable for the models.
npm run build	Bundles to dist/
npm test	node:test. Covers the mazes, the floating, the rules and every model. An autopilot plays every night: it has to light every lantern and get out, and also gather four fifths of the candy before midnight.
npm run lint	ESLint
node scripts/map.js 3	Prints a night as text.
node scripts/bake.js	Vertex counts and bake times for the models.
node scripts/fonts.js …	Cuts the Japanese fonts down to the characters the Japanese uses. Run it again after changing a Japanese word; the tests say when.

The fonts are Creepster and Fredoka, and for the Japanese Potta One and Zen Maru Gothic, all under the SIL Open Font License (src/fonts/). The renderer's licence is in src/vendor/gfx/LICENSE.