Gnomtastic Gnomular Quest: Those Who Gnome

Embark on a whimsical journey through a series of underground tunnels as you navigate through traps and collect gold. With timed challenges and challenging enemies, only Those Who Gnome will prevail.

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Inspiration

We started by asking ourselves: what makes a game so fun you just have to play it “one more time”? We realized it’s not about flashy graphics or complex mechanics, it’s the little things: a quick learning curve, levels that never feel quite the same, the thrill of beating the clock, and a steady climb in challenge. We wanted to pack all of that into a tiny, tunnel-crawling gnome adventure. With some help from simplex noise and a lot of coffee-fueled brainstorming, we built something we hope feels as fun to replay as it was to create.

What it does

In this game, you play as a determined little gnome with a big sense of adventure, diving headfirst into a maze of mysterious tunnels. Your job? Dodge traps, outsmart enemies, and scoop up as much treasure as your tiny arms can carry. But don’t get too comfortable—the deeper you go, the trickier things get. The tunnels shift, the challenges grow, and only the craftiest gnomes make it out rich.

How we built it

We built the game using JavaScript and HTML5 Canvas, but the real magic (and chaos) happened behind the scenes. We challenged ourselves to use simplex noise to generate procedurally crafted tunnel level, so no two runs are ever the same. That meant writing a custom level generator from scratch, tweaking noise parameters until it felt just right. On top of that, we built our own physics engine to handle movement and collisions. It was equal parts math, madness, and debugging marathons, but 100% worth it.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest hurdles was building and fine-tuning our custom physics engine. Getting a gnome to move smoothly through tight, twisty tunnels sounds simple until you’re knee-deep in collision logic, edge cases, and velocity bugs that send your poor gnome flying into the void. On top of that, integrating all our custom utilities with procedural generation meant constantly verifying that the randomly created levels were not only playable, but fun. Making sure every level had a clear path (and didn’t trap the player in a gnome-sized dead end) became a puzzle in itself. It was a messy, head-scratching process, but incredibly rewarding when it all came together.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built an entire physics-driven, procedurally generated tunnel game in just 36 hours. From designing a custom level generator to building our own physics engine from scratch, we pushed ourselves on the technical front. And while the code was coming together, our art team dove into uncharted territory creating pixel art, even though none of us had ever done it before. Between the bouncing gnome sprites and the shifting tunnel tiles, every piece was handcrafted with love (and a sizeable amount of sleep deprivation). It was a whirlwind, but seeing it all come to life was absolutely worth it.

What we learned

TEAMWORK IS ESSENTIAL. It’s the glue that holds everything together when you're racing against the clock. From the coding team battling through physics bugs to the art team figuring out pixel art for the first time, every piece of the puzzle relied on collaboration, communication, and a whole lot of trust. We quickly learned that no one can do it all alone, and when everyone pitches in with their unique strengths, magic happens.

What's next for Gnomtastic Gnomular Quest: Those Who Gnome

While that's a wrap on GGQ:TWG, our game development journey neither starts nor ends here! If you enjoyed with our quirky gnome-filled adventure, we invite you to check out our passion project of the past year: Chicken Society, an MMO that’s just as offbeat, fun, and full of surprises. Check out the demo at chickensociety.net, or explore the code behind the chaos on our GitHub repo.

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