A desert that's actually alive
The sky cycles through twelve color bands, from warm dawn pastels to a starlit night with a Milky Way band and a moon on a realistic arc. Rain builds from scattered drops to a full storm with lightning — and everything on the ground is tinted by the sky, so dusk genuinely reads as dusk.
Full day/night cycle
Sun and moon on parabolic arcs, ~300 twinkling stars, a rotating Milky Way.
Weather that builds
Rain swells naturally into a downpour; lightning blackens nearby cacti. Rainbows after.
Cosmetics you earn
16 hats, glasses, and accessories bought with coins collected in the run — never with real money.
Small game, finished properly
- 27 achievements — milestones, near-misses, storm survival
- 5 rare easter-egg events: UFO, Santa, comet, tumbleweed, meteor
- Coin chains — ten in a row earns a diamond
- Pterodactyls at two altitudes: duck one, jump the other
- Persistent personal bests and shareable score cards
- Full controller support — Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo
- Independent audio sliders for music, SFX, and rain
- Installable as an offline PWA
- No ads, no tracking cookies, no microtransactions
- 1–10 minute runs — perfect coffee-break length
Platforms
One TypeScript codebase, every screen. The web version is live now; store builds are in preparation.
From weekend prototype to real release
Raptor Runner started in 2022 as a four-evening "what if the Chrome dino game had weather?" experiment, then sat in a folder for almost four years. In 2026 it was revived and finished — properly — as the first in a series of half-finished side projects being brought back to life with AI-assisted workflows. Read the full story, or follow the series at ricos.site.
Writing about the game? Screenshots, factsheet, and descriptions are ready to use in the press kit.