Maxine's Quest

The game draws on a canvas 2,100 pixels wide and 1,181 high. Most of it is the arena, an ellipse centered on the pore, a plain red disc 64 pixels across. Around the ellipse runs a ring of 300 short radial lines, which the code calls the signal ring; each line holds one slot of the signal.^[2] In Live Signal mode a line is written for each packet of data from the instrument, and the line is drawn magenta, orange where the packet contained a spike, or grey while the ring is still filling. In Random mode the lines are random: the cursor advances one slot per frame and writes a line of random height, so the fake signal completes a lap of the ring about every five seconds, and each new monster is marked by a white line at the cursor.

Maxine moves at 360 pixels per second, with the arrow keys or toward any point the player clicks. She cannot leave the ellipse: a move that would take her center outside it is undone.^[a] The pore is fatal. When she touches it, the game plays a sound file named "eep.wav", hides her, runs a 30-frame explosion where she stood and returns her to her starting point, a little to the right of the pore.^[2]

The background is a 144-pixel tile of dark tubes, called "background_living_tissue" in the code, which scrolls diagonally by one pixel each frame. A 26-megabyte video of mountains sits in the game's folder; the lines that would load it are commented out.

Three kinds of mushroom appear on the first level. Pink oyster mushrooms are born on the ring and travel inward along a spiral until they reach the pore, which destroys them. On the way they spit spores toward Maxine every 2.5 to 5 seconds, but only while she is more than 300 pixels away. SpinShrooms, yellow with red spots and a grumpy face, enter from the left or right end of the arena's long axis and cross it at 180 pixels per second, passing straight over the pore. Purple DoomShrooms travel at 300 pixels per second and choose a new random heading each time they reach the edge of the ellipse.^[2]

In Random mode the first monster arrives four to eight seconds after the game loads and the rest every two to six seconds. On Spores and Pores two thirds of them are pink oysters and one third SpinShrooms; DoomShrooms are reserved for later levels.

In Live Signal mode the game receives spike events from the company's server, which relays the current recorded by an EDR4 amplifier during a live molecular stream. It spawns at most one monster per half second and discards spikes that arrive during the wait. The kind of monster depends on the latest packet of signal, scored on two numbers: its span, as a fraction of the largest span among the last twelve packets, and its persistence, the fraction of those twelve that contained a spike. A packet with a span under 0.6 and a persistence under 0.1 produces a SpinShroom; one with a span of at least 0.7 and a persistence of at least 0.15 produces a DoomShroom; anything else produces a pink oyster.^[2] The comment above the rule reads "Simple 2D mapping (tune by feel)". The comments label the first case "Easy: short/weak isolated events" and the second "Hard: strong + sustained", and below them sits a disabled third rule, "Rare 'jump scare': very strong spike even if not persistent". Oysters and DoomShrooms born from the live signal appear near the point of the ring where the latest packet was written, and the game reports each new monster back to the server together with the signal that produced it.

A spike here is a current blockade: when a particle enters the pore it displaces part of the conducting salt solution, and the current dips for as long as it stays. The size of the dip reflects the particle's volume and its duration reflects the time spent in the pore, which is why a long, deep event and a short, shallow one can be told apart and turned into different monsters.

Two rows of points sit in the top left corner, each beside the picture of a small handheld console. Once a level has loaded, the upper row is labeled "Kent", after the company's founder Kent Kemmish, and the lower one carries a second first name. Every event is worth 100 points and each row stops at 1,000.^[2]

The Kent row gains 100 points whenever Maxine is hurt: by the pore, by a spore, by a SpinShroom or by a DoomShroom. The other row gains 100 points when she catches a pink oyster, which plays a chime from a file named "good.wav", and when a DoomShroom bounces into the pore. If the second row reaches 1,000 first, the status bar announces "You win!" If the Kent row gets there first, it announces "Slightly less successful". Either way the level restarts five seconds later.^[2] The status bar is an HTML marquee element; it scrolls "Welcome to Maxine's Quest!" while the game loads and the level's name once play begins.

The game checks the scores on every frame, and on every frame that a row stands at 1,000 it schedules another restart five seconds ahead. The end of a level therefore queues a restart for each of the roughly 300 frames that pass before the first one runs, and for the next five seconds the level is restarted, and both scores set to zero, about 60 times a second.^[b] The game's folder holds two unused images, a green speech bubble reading "Slightly less successful" and a yellow one reading "Level Complete!"

The lower right corner holds an instrument panel modeled in pink clay: a blue clay voltage knob with three positions, negative, zero and positive, an LED readout of millivolts, and a red-handled lever, the zapper, which in the company's instruments applies "a brief spike of maximum voltage", used to clear clogged pores and to etch new ones.^[1] In Live Signal mode a turn of the knob or a pull of the lever is sent to the server as a "control intent" for the amplifier on the bench; in Random mode the panel is hidden.^[2]

In the upper right is the Clay TV, a clay television frame meant to show the live current. In the standard version it is connected to the random signal ring, which keeps no record of the signal, and it displays a flat, dim line in both modes; the second version reconnects it. On the left is a parchment-framed chat window. A message typed there appears under the name "You" and is written to the browser's developer console, beside a comment that reads "Later: send to server / multiplayer / session log here."^[2]

The game descends from Spyke Hunter, which the founder calls the company's first molecular game, written for signals from knots in a nylon string pulled through a hole about 2 mm across. He named it, he has written, "because I was making a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)".^[5]

The company's December 2022 overview describes Maxine's Quest much as it now looks: "The central elliptical region is the arena in which different data-generated video games happen. In the very simplest case, the number of 'spikes' (brief changes in current caused by analytes transiting a pore) determine how many enemies appear."^[1][e] Its control panel has a blue bias knob and a "zapper stick" with a red handle, as the 2026 panel does, and a "Data TV" for the live current in the place where the Clay TV now stands. It also has parts the 2026 game lacks: two switches that apply a sawtooth to the voltage and an oscillation to a syringe pump for ping-pong sensing, a "potion platter" for telling the system which reagents have been added, and a chatbot, the brainbot. Games were to be "solo player, player vs. player, and battle-royale mode a la Fortnite", and results were to be written up for the preprint server bioRxiv "with author order corresponding to the leaderboard for top experimentalist-gamers".^[1] The console that the panel was drawn for, the demonpore 64, had a plug for a custom joystick.

The game was always meant to carry others. A memo of about 2022, Early Releases on Maxine's Quest, announced eight titles, from Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant to Poop of the Gods, each "the beginning of a franchise within the Molecular Reality Player Scientist universe".^[6] When the founder reposted the memo in March 2026, he wrote that the titles were "only intended aesthetically/ludologically as 'wrappers' for MQ".^[7] The company's streaming plan of May 2026 spells the idea out: "Maxine is one wrapper", and the other titles would "all use the same ring + spike → spawn primitive but with different art and lore", defined in files that "non-technical contributors" could write. Among the hard-coded things the plan lists for conversion into wrapper fields is the phrase "Slightly less successful".^[8]

The first full version was written in Python with the Pygame Zero library. According to the company's plan it was the fuller version, with the maze of the Labyrinth level, a "dataview" mode, playback of prerecorded data and a "challenge mode" in which the founder played against a challenger, the arrangement the two scoreboards still reflect.^[8] The browser version uses the Phaser 3 game framework, and its function for making mushrooms still contains the comment "Translate the Python lines to JavaScript".^[2]

By March 2026 the game's main developer was the company's AI lead, Jade O'Neill.^[9] On May 7, 2026, the game was added to the company's website in four commits made within about an hour, among them "Attempt to add support for Maxine's Quest as a standalone page." and "Remember to add all the maxine files."^[10][11] The other two were "Fix Maxine some more" and "Include imports for Maxine".

The experimental copy received nine commits in a little over two hours on May 19. They include "Fix maxine-v2: restore original clay TV and add stub methods for experimenter mode", "Fix: revert enhanced clay TV and fix toggle function" and "Fix: remove duplicate resetLevel function that was causing page reloads".^[12][13] On May 27 the simulated current was wired in, and the television's display was rewritten to draw a continuous trace. The commit explains that the old display, which drew each moment as a separate vertical bar, had let the simulator's discrete levels pile up into "horizontal 'tiers' creating a bar-chart appearance".^[14]

The source carries the marginalia of its authors. Above a function that would draw spirals in the arena, and whose calls are commented out: "Somehow doesn't do anything. I'm mystified." Beside a distance calculation: "Calculate the 2 norm because it's what StackOverflow told me to do. It's just the distance." A constant named worldSpeed, used nowhere, is annotated "For speeding up or slowing down the whole game. Doesn't work yet." In the drawing code for the signal ring, a disabled loop is explained as "Oops don't remember what this bit does except slow it down".^[2]