Transistor Run: about the game

Inside a living board

The field engineer gets a call: the lab bench has come alive, and the signal dies in broken traces. To handle the fault, the engineer shrinks to the size of a chip and steps onto the breadboard.

The board answers with malfunctions. Glitches roam the traces and knock the signal out on touch, pits are burnouts where traces used to be, and spikes are shorted contacts. Every level has one goal: carry the signal from the power source to the receiver door. The door opens only when the circuit is closed and the signal arrives.

Transistors are the currency here. Collected on a level, they are banked into your wallet at a checkpoint and spent on the "Show solution" hint. The 18-level course leads from a single wire to the final task: assemble the Ershov Computer in full.

How to play

The goal is to close the circuit: the door opens on signal, and without it the doorway stays dark. You read the schematic by sight: a wire without signal is dark, a live wire is light blue. Gates sit on chips with the element's symbol printed on the case.

You get three lives. A glitch, spikes or a fall into a pit costs a heart, and a checkpoint restores the stock and becomes your respawn point. After each level comes a comprehension quiz: answer correctly and the next level unlocks. Pick up transistors along the way: at a checkpoint they go to your wallet, and from there you can spend them on the "Show solution" hint if a level puts up a fight.

The world through an engineer's eyes

The sprites are drawn in code and rendered on this page from the same js/platform/sprites.js module the game uses: the picture always matches what you see on screen.