About Spider Maze

Nobody drew this map

There is no level designer. Rooms are created the moment somebody walks into a passage that doesn't lead anywhere yet — so every room past the first forty exists because a person went that way and found it. The first one through is recorded as its discoverer, permanently.

Rooms are never deleted. Not when they're forgotten, not when they're picked clean, not ever. The map only grows, and every wanderer who comes after walks through what the ones before them found.

Web crawlers are the monsters

Every room page carries links a person cannot see and cannot click — they are in the HTML, they are in no menu, and nothing in the interface points at them. Following one is proof you are not a person. There is no user-agent sniffing here and no list of IP addresses to keep up to date: a visitor either followed a link that isn't in the interface, or it didn't.

When something follows one, it rolls for a monster, and the monster is credited by name to whatever crawled in. That part arrives in the next phase. Right now the dungeon is empty and safe, which will not last.

There is a genre of tool that traps crawlers in endless generated garbage to waste their compute. This is the opposite: it takes the visit and turns it into something a person will enjoy. Same input, opposite ethic.

Your torch is finite

Light is a finite resource, and it comes back slowly. Walking ground you already know costs little; pushing into the dark and making new rooms costs three times as much. When the torch burns out you can still feel your way back along walls you know — you will just not find anything new until it recovers, which it does slowly, in real time, whether or not you are here.

You will never meet anyone

There is no chat, no player list, no way to tell whether anyone else is standing where you are standing. What there is instead is evidence: rooms somebody else charted first, tallies cut into walls, a boot left standing in a corner. Later there will be corpses, and what they were carrying.

This is a deliberate design decision rather than a missing feature. It is a better game, and it is the only version of this that one person can leave running unattended.

Notes on access

A text game should be excellent for screen reader users, so this one is built that way from the first commit rather than retrofitted. Room text lives in a single polite live region and is announced in full on every move; focus never jumps, because a live region plus a focus jump reads everything twice. Exits are real buttons with complete names — "Go north — unexplored, 3 light" — and the map has a genuine text equivalent, listing rooms by depth ring with their connections, not an alt string.

Nothing is signalled by colour alone, and motion honours prefers-reduced-motion. If something here reads badly in a screen reader, that is a bug and worth reporting as one.

What it knows about you

A signed cookie holding one number, so the dungeon can remember where you were standing. No account, no email, no password, no analytics, nothing shared with anyone. If you clear it you become a new wanderer and the rooms you charted keep your old number on them.