Welcome to damm - Damon's Amazing Mouse Maze - a web-based JavaScript game written by Damon Harper! If you don't want to read the preamble, go ahead and skip to the game itself, but hear this first: expect a bit of slowness.
The name is something of a misnomer, I'm afraid, but I don't quite know what else to call it. Have you ever seen that common science project, the twisty piece of wire strung between two poles, with another piece of wire looped around it and stuck into a handle, where you have to move the wire loop along the twisty wire from start to finish without letting the wires touch, completing a circuit and sounding a buzzer?
Well, one day I had the idea that something like that could possible be written for JavaScript under Netscape 3.0 (or higher). So over the weekend, I set out to write it, and here you see the results.
By the way, feel free to use or abuse this code for non-commercial purposes - though it's pretty messy - but do please give me credit and let me know about it if you do. Thanks.
Upon starting the game you will (eventually - see Caveats, below) be presented with the game grid, which is a grid of squares, most black, with a twisty path of white squares cut through it. The starting square is coloured red.
When you move the mouse over the red square, it will jump to the next square along the path. Now the game has started. You must follow the red square through to the end of the path without touching any black squares.
You may also not backtrack, or skip forward on the path. Skipping forward might happen if you accellerate the mouse down a straight stretch; the browser may not register that you've passed over a square. So try not to move too fast.
Moving outside the path, backtracking, or skipping forward all generate error messages and reset the game grid.
Once you've reached the end of the path, the game grid disappears and a (rather boring, I'm afraid) congratulations screen is displayed. You can also quit at any time by clicking the "Quit" button or simply closing the game window.
For that reason, I've set an upper limit of a 40x40 square game grid. The default, horizontally-oriented grid size seems to load reasonably quickly.
Things seem considerably snappier under Linux, happily. I haven't tried the game on a Mac yet, but given my general experiences with Macs and Netscape, I imagine damm could be quite unplayable, except maybe with a 10x10 grid - the minimum.