Get Ready to Activate Horse Mode

[!NOTE] The game is not yet live, but will be soon! (Hopefully!) Bookmark this page as a reminder to come back and check it out when it launches!

What is this?

This is a scripting/programming game for beginner web devs that would like to dip their toes into the world of JavaScript and debugging.

How does it work?

Copy the HTML tags below and paste them into your webpage source where you would like the game’s banner to appear on your site.

The first script tag is empty so you can fill it out later to solve each round’s puzzle.

The second one is an external script hosted here on the Horse Mode website, and it will be responsible for displaying the Horse Mode banner on your page.

What’s the catch?

Every couple weeks, the external script will change to introduce a new puzzle for you to solve to keep Horse Mode active on your page. About midway through the challenge period, a blog post (or maybe a video?) will be posted explaining the challenge and how to solve it so that the community can learn.

What else do you have planned?

<Insert shrug emoji here!> It’s up in the air at this point, but some ideas included:

• Opt-in features like music or graphics that appear when Horse Mode is active
• An “Easy Mode” version with instructions on how to win written in the source code
• A “Hard Mode” version with compressed and/or obfuscated source code and/or harder challenges

What’s this for?

I’m not sure where my ideas come from, but some of the inspirations for this were:

• Old-school web puzzle games like n0tpr0n where you had to view the source to get clues and information
• People in the indie web community evangelizing learning code and making whimsical websites
• Helping folks on the r/neocities subreddit to learn basic web dev skills and how to think through design and development problems

Who are you?

I’m David “Taco Dave” Millar, a puzzle author and software developer in Fort Worth, Texas.