The Girl Who Kept Asking Why
A browser RPG with a pixel-art world, a dialogue engine, and a story about curiosity as a form of resistance.
Stack TypeScript · Canvas · HTML5 · Vercel
The game began with a character rather than a mechanic: a girl who takes clocks apart to see how they work, and keeps asking why long after the adults have run out of answers.
The build
A small browser RPG with a tile-based world, a dialogue engine, and a story that branches on what the player chooses to examine. The engine is hand-written TypeScript on a canvas: sprites, collision, camera, and a scene format that keeps the writing separate from the code.
The dialogue system was the part worth keeping. Each line is a node with a speaker, a portrait, and optional choices. A scene can set flags, call a callback, and hand control back to the world. It is small enough to read in an afternoon and expressive enough for the story.
The constraint
No engine, no asset store, no backend. Everything is a static file, and the whole game runs from a Vercel deployment. That constraint made the writing the expensive part, which is where the time should go.