About Raptor Runner

This is a handcrafted homage to the Chrome "No Internet" dinosaur game.

The story

I made the first version of this game a few years ago, mostly for fun as a little side project. It already had the things that matter: a core loop that felt good to play, a charming raptor, a changing sky, some clouds, a handful of cacti. For a quick weekend thing, it worked. I shelved it as good enough, but with a list of things that could still be improved if I ever felt like coming back to it.

What you're playing now is that same game, brought back and polished with the time and care I never found the first time around. The bones are still the same. Most of the new work went into the finishing details. All the small things that make something like this feel more *polished*. More alive, more like a real game and less like a prototype.

What "polishing" means, in practice

If you've only ever shipped the fun 80% of a side project, it's easy to underestimate the last 20%. Polish isn't glamorous. It's a pile of quiet decisions, most of which nobody will consciously notice, but which together make a big difference.

• The sky gradient and a small overlay so that the raptor colors adjust to the sky tint.
• Different cacti types with more beautiful sprites.
• Unlockable cosmetics that let you customize the raptor with small, fun details that reward you for playing the game.
• A full day/night cycle with a sun and moon that arc across the sky, parallax background dunes, and a night sky that feels alive with rotating stars.
• A dynamic weather system with rain that builds and fades naturally, and lightning strikes that blacken nearby cacti in the background.
• Quirky easter eggs and rare events that reward patient players, things you might spot if you keep running long enough.
• Granular sound controls so you can toggle music, jump sounds, and rain ambience independently.
• A proper start screen, a settings menu, achievements + unlocks with remembered preference, persistent personal high-scores, a shareable score card... the list of improvements goes on and on, but now this is something that I am genuinely happy with.

None of these is hard to do in isolation. They just take time to get right, and getting all of them right, is the part I never had the patience to do before. My ADHD brain loves the fun, creative part of building something new and shiny... but the polishing is difficult, especially when something doesn't work right away. It can be hard to keep the motivation up when I have to stare at the same thing for hours, trying to figure out why a small detail isn't looking quite right, or why a new feature isn't clicking with the rest of the game. Now, I don't have to do this anymore.

Why?

Honestly? Because AI code agents finally made the polishing fun. The grunt work that used to feel like a chore, is now a conversation, and that conversation has a collaborator who doesn't get bored, who can manage all these little details, where you can just dump it a list of things you would like and *magic* it get's done. I have a pile of half-finished side projects that I intend to give this same treatment, to give them the attention and polish that they always deserved, but that I never had the patience to give them.

Raptor Runner is the first of them. If you enjoyed it, stick around, I am building at a speed that I previously thought impossible.

Made by

Rico Trebeljahr —freelance developer, writer, and side-project enthusiast. If this resonated, come say hi on ricos.site , or poke at the source on GitHub.