Dear player, we had to keep the main area of the web page to display a word from our sponsors. Sadly, it means that we are running out of space to display the wonderful game that you want to play.

Therefore, we had to use the only space left to display the game: the URL address bar at the top of your browser window.

How to play?

Look up at the URL bar!

You are the "X" running out from the deadly "Space" at the left of the screen.

From time to time, you'll see "o" shaped obstacles on the floor.

Press any key to jump over the obstacles.

You'll earn 1 point each time you evade an obstacle.

If you hit an obstacle, you'll fall back and will come closer to the space of the left.

Once the space catches you, you're dead!

Your current score is displayed between the two "#" signs.

About the game

Sadly, due to real life constraints, I had only 2h30 in total to work on a game for this compo.

I really loved the theme, and while I knew I had to keep the scope very small due to very limited time, I thought that it could be funny to interpret the theme as "we are running out of space in the web page to display the game, so you have to play it from the URL bar".

So that's it, "Outrunning Space!" is a very simple game taking place in the URL bar, where you have to avoid obstacles in order to outrun a deadly "Space" in the URL.

It was made in Javascript, using the location.replace() method to modify the URL display inside the browser URL bar.

Extra theme constraints

At first, I thought that the theme could be a cool way to make a "small game", as in "taking as less disk space as possible for the source code". So, there you have it: once minified (striped comments + regpack'ed) the whole code source is only 792 Bytes, so way below the famous 1KB code limit of the JS1K code compo :).

The source code is inside the HTML page of the game (due to its small size, I wrote it directly inside the HTML page, with comments and all).

Conclusion

All in all, I hope you enjoy this game despite its very "simplistic" nature (using a 1x20 display area is though!)

By-the-way, it's a Javascript game, it should work on every browser, except Safari (and maybe others) as it doesn't display the whole URL in the address bar.

I've only tested it on Firefox, so I hope it will also run well on others browsers (I lacked time to do more thorough testing, sorry!)

!WARNING!

As several of you reported in the comments, playing this game will add a lot of entries to your browser history. If you don't want this to happen, please play the game in "private / incognito" mode (or simply delete the entries after playing). I'm very sorry about this issue, it's a side effect of the Javascript function I used (location.replace()) to display the game in the URL bar. Thanks to those of you who reported it!