WHAT IS THIS?
Contribution Run is a browser arcade game that turns a GitHub contribution graph into a race track. You enter a username, and that person's year of commits becomes the road you have to survive.
Where the track comes from
A contribution graph is 52 weeks by 7 days. Every one of those cells becomes a tile on the road, in calendar order, from the first week with anything in it to the last. Dead road before a repository existed gets trimmed; a quiet spring in the middle of a year does not, because that gap is part of what makes the year theirs.
How much someone committed on a given day decides what stands on that tile: nothing at all, a low column, a medium one, a tall one, or a column too high to jump. Quiet days are open road. Busy days are a problem.
The grades are relative to that person's own year, not to some global scale, so a track reads as their year rather than as a ranking against other developers. A quiet contributor still gets peaks where their peaks were.
The same graph always gives the same track
Nothing about the layout is rolled fresh each time. The username seeds the generator, so you and everyone you send the link to drive an identical road — which is the only reason comparing scores means anything.
How a run ends
One collision. There are no lives and no second chance — you hit something and the run is over. Your score is how far you got plus what you cleared on the way.
Reaching the end of the track completes a loop and the speed steps up. A short track laps more often, but each of its speed-ups is scaled down to match, so the difficulty climbs at the same rate whether the year is dense or nearly empty.
What you can race
Any public GitHub username. You can also race a repository by entering owner/repo — that track is built from the repo's commit activity instead of a person's, so facebook/react drives very differently from a side project.
Private accounts and private repos cannot be raced: the game only ever reads what GitHub shows the public.
What it knows about you
There is no sign-in and nothing to connect. You are not identified by racing your own graph — the game cannot tell you apart from anyone else who typed your username.
- One cookie, which records that you have played before, so the tutorial does not open every visit.
- Usage analytics with no cookie and no local storage. Every visit is anonymous and unlinked to the last one. Session recording and heatmaps are off.
- A name only if you choose to submit a score. Whatever you type on the game-over screen goes on the leaderboard with the score. Skip it and nothing is stored.
Credits
Soundtrack by Neon Husky. Built by karvidsson.