DAD RUSH 🏗️👷‍♂️

▶ Play it: https://maximstark.github.io/dad-rush/

A Father's Day gift — a side-scrolling, Sonic-style auto-runner. Dad sprints down the I-4 in his hard hat, collecting rings and blazing past the real things he built (Spaceship Earth, the Universal globe, the Star Tower, the VAB at Kennedy Space Center, a NASA launch pad, schools, hotels) while the sky rolls from dawn to night — then comes home to a hero's welcome from the family, balloons, dancing cactuses, and a heartfelt note.

Vanilla JavaScript + HTML5 Canvas in one self-contained index.html — no build step, no dependencies. It runs inside a Game Gear cabinet on desktop and fullscreen with touch controls on phones, with a chunky 16-bit/Genesis look and a chiptune soundtrack.

Controls

• Desktop: hold →, D, or Space to run — or click-and-hold the on-screen D-pad / buttons / screen.
• Phone: tap and hold the HOLD TO RUN bar.
• 🔊 (top-right of the screen) toggles sound; the START pill mutes too.

Hold to run, release to idle. The world is on rails — no fail state, just the journey.

Run it locally

Serve over http (not file://, which blocks some asset loading), from this folder:

python -m http.server        # then open http://localhost:8000

Make changes

Everything tunable lives in the CONFIG object at the top of the <script> in index.html:

• finale.note — the message to Dad · finale.bannerText — the headline
• trackLength, runSpeed, acts — pacing & the day/night cycle
• landmarks.list — which of Dad's projects appear, and where
• clutter, rings, retro (pixel chunkiness), character, audio

Art lives in assets/ (character / bg / ground / props / finale / clutter / ui). Every asset is optional — the game falls back gracefully and upgrades the moment you add a file. Two nice optional drops:

• assets/audio/music.mp3 — a real soundtrack (otherwise a built-in chiptune plays)
• assets/ui/endcard.png — custom art to replace the finale headline

Deploy

Hosted on GitHub Pages (branch main, served from root). Any push to main redeploys automatically in ~1 minute.

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Made with love for the best dad of all time. 🤍