Spice Expert: Ramu
A tower-defence game about a line cook, built solo for RUN's September Jam 2026.
Theme: "Back to Work: any job, and the real story behind it."
▶ Play it: https://w.run/puneetmakes/spice-expert-ramu
6th of 100 entries — 638 daily unique players, 942 plays, 15 days in jam.
Still live: 104 deployed versions, 25 build rounds, 100% crash-free on the current build.
Tickets come down the rail. You set up stations — grill, prep board, tandoor, fryer —
to cook each dish before it reaches the pass. Let one through and a customer walks out.
The kitchen is the job, and the game is the part of it nobody puts on a menu: the
rush, the rail, and the arithmetic of keeping a line moving.
The theme isn't a skin. A customer who reaches the pass is a walkout — the thing the
game punishes is the thing the job punishes, so nothing in the loop needed renaming.
Start here
| Read | For |
|---|
| portfolio.md | The design decisions and what they returned — the balance baseline as a regression test, the economy cliff at level 11, the measured funnel, and the three things that went wrong |
| Transfer.md | Platform and jam learnings, written to be carried into the next jam — RUN tag behaviour, SDK traps, analytics pitfalls, and a day-one checklist |
| Retro.md | 153 dated lessons, most of them mistakes, kept in full |
What is in this repository
This is a jam entry shipped in public, and the planning is committed alongside the
code — including the parts that went wrong.
| Path | Contents |
|---|
jam-entry/ | The game. Vite · Pixi.js v8 · React 19 · Tailwind v4, from RUN's september-jam-tower-defense kit |
Ramu - The Chef/docs/ | The working documents — design, plan, specs, retrospective, task board |
Ramu - The Chef/references/ | Layout references and bug screenshots |
Logic and DIscussions/ | Jam guidelines and the day-one runbook |
The documents
| Doc | Answers |
|---|
| GDD.md | What the game is — frozen design |
| Plan.md | What we intend to do, in what order, by when |
| Specs.md | How it is built — contracts, budgets, risks |
| Ideas.md | Proposals, the decision taken on each, and the open debts |
| Retro.md | What actually happened — findings, corrections, lessons |
| Tasks.md | Where we are — sprint × phase board |
| Implementation Handover Record.md | Every build round handed over, and every return verified |
| Agent Returns.md | Every agent's report, verbatim and unedited |
Retro.md is the interesting one. It is written to be useful rather than flattering,
and it keeps the mistakes: a title that overflowed twice because glyph widths were
estimated instead of constrained, a 16 MB preload shipped to an audience that turned
out to be three-quarters mobile, an art pass that replaced names and palette when
it was supposed to replace the content, and a retention feature placed on the one
screen the game never boots into.
How it holds together
The simulation is a pure deterministic engine kept separate from rendering, which is
what makes the headless balance verifier possible:
npm run balance
→ fox-spam 35 · balanced 36 · miser 11 · pad0-rush 4 · maxed-meta 90
Five scripted play styles, five levels-died-on, each one a contract rather than an
observation — balanced must lose no lives before level 12, miser must still lose,
maxed-meta must die between 85 and 110. The five numbers stayed byte-identical across
24 consecutive build rounds, so any change that moved one unintentionally showed up in a
single line.
Paired with a short list of sealed files — the engine and the four data tables that no
routine change may touch — it is what made it safe to keep shipping quickly.
Running it locally
cd jam-entry
npm install
npm run dev # Vite dev server; RUN SDK calls are mocked
npm run build # production build into dist/
npm run balance # headless balance simulation over the wave data
npm run art:resize # re-derive public/images from the 1024px masters in art-source/
Deploying requires the rundot CLI and an authenticated RUN creator account.
Built with
Pixi.js v8 · React 19 · Vite · Tailwind CSS v4 ·
TypeScript · the RUN.world SDK, scaffolded from RUN's
official tower-defence kit.
English and हिन्दी throughout — 395 string keys in each table, symmetric difference
zero, verified by executing the real modules rather than searching the text.
Credits
Solo entry by OffroadingGamedev.
Planning and production assisted by Claude Code.
Game art generated with rundot generate image.
