View source for Maxine's Quest

{{Short description|Browser game and instrument control software by Molecular Reality Corporation}}
{{About|the game|its title character|Maxine (character)}}
{{Infobox video game
| title = Maxine's Quest
| image = Maxines_Quest_screenshot.webp
| caption = The first level, Spores and Pores, in Random mode. The ring of short lines is the signal display, and the red disc at the center is the pore.
| developer = [[Molecular Reality Corporation]]
| publisher = Molecular Reality Corporation
| engine = Phaser 3.87
| platforms = Web browser
| released = May 7, 2026<br>Version 2: May 19, 2026
| genre = Arcade action, instrument control
| modes = Single-player
}}
'''Maxine's Quest''' is a browser game made by [[Molecular Reality Corporation]] in which the player steers [[Maxine (character)|Maxine]], a red clay imp who stands for [[Maxwell's demon]], around an elliptical arena while mushrooms grow out of a ring that displays an electric current. In its Live Signal mode each monster is triggered by a spike in the current flowing through a [[nanopore]] on the company's laboratory bench, so that the enemies are made from a measurement taken during play. In Random mode, the default, a timer does the same job. The company described the game in 2022 as "both instrument control software AND the portal for all our early game releases".<ref name="overview-post">{{cite web |title=2022 sci-tech overview |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-28}}</ref>

The game went online on May 7, 2026, and an experimental second version followed twelve days later. Its menu offers two levels. Two scoreboards run to 1,000 points: one, labeled "Kent", counts Maxine's injuries, and when it fills, the game reports that the result was "Slightly less successful".<ref name="mq">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/play/maxine/ |title=Maxine's Quest |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=2026-05}}</ref>

== Gameplay ==
=== The arena ===
The game draws on a canvas 2,100 pixels wide and 1,181 high. Most of it is the arena, an ellipse centered on the pore, a plain red disc 64 pixels across. Around the ellipse runs a ring of 300 short radial lines, which the code calls the signal ring; each line holds one slot of the signal.<ref name="mq" /> In Live Signal mode a line is written for each packet of data from the instrument, and the line is drawn magenta, orange where the packet contained a spike, or grey while the ring is still filling. In Random mode the lines are random: the cursor advances one slot per frame and writes a line of random height, so the fake signal completes a lap of the ring about every five seconds, and each new monster is marked by a white line at the cursor.

Maxine moves at 360 pixels per second, with the arrow keys or toward any point the player clicks. She cannot leave the ellipse: a move that would take her center outside it is undone.{{efn|The sprites are labeled the other way round from her motion: moving up the screen, she is drawn with the image named maxine_down, and moving down with maxine_up.}} The pore is fatal. When she touches it, the game plays a sound file named "eep.wav", hides her, runs a 30-frame explosion where she stood and returns her to her starting point, a little to the right of the pore.<ref name="mq" />

The background is a 144-pixel tile of dark tubes, called "background_living_tissue" in the code, which scrolls diagonally by one pixel each frame. A 26-megabyte video of mountains sits in the game's folder; the lines that would load it are commented out.

=== Monsters and signals ===
{{Main|Bestiary of Maxine's Quest}}
Three kinds of mushroom appear on the first level. Pink oyster mushrooms are born on the ring and travel inward along a spiral until they reach the pore, which destroys them. On the way they spit spores toward Maxine every 2.5 to 5 seconds, but only while she is more than 300 pixels away. SpinShrooms, yellow with red spots and a grumpy face, enter from the left or right end of the arena's long axis and cross it at 180 pixels per second, passing straight over the pore. Purple DoomShrooms travel at 300 pixels per second and choose a new random heading each time they reach the edge of the ellipse.<ref name="mq" />

In Random mode the first monster arrives four to eight seconds after the game loads and the rest every two to six seconds. On Spores and Pores two thirds of them are pink oysters and one third SpinShrooms; DoomShrooms are reserved for later levels.

In Live Signal mode the game receives spike events from the company's server, which relays the current recorded by an [[EDR4]] amplifier during a [[live molecular stream]]. It spawns at most one monster per half second and discards spikes that arrive during the wait. The kind of monster depends on the latest packet of signal, scored on two numbers: its span, as a fraction of the largest span among the last twelve packets, and its persistence, the fraction of those twelve that contained a spike. A packet with a span under 0.6 and a persistence under 0.1 produces a SpinShroom; one with a span of at least 0.7 and a persistence of at least 0.15 produces a DoomShroom; anything else produces a pink oyster.<ref name="mq" /> The comment above the rule reads "Simple 2D mapping (tune by feel)". The comments label the first case "Easy: short/weak isolated events" and the second "Hard: strong + sustained", and below them sits a disabled third rule, "Rare 'jump scare': very strong spike even if not persistent". Oysters and DoomShrooms born from the live signal appear near the point of the ring where the latest packet was written, and the game reports each new monster back to the server together with the signal that produced it.

A spike here is a [[current blockade]]: when a particle enters the pore it displaces part of the conducting salt solution, and the current dips for as long as it stays. The size of the dip reflects the particle's volume and its duration reflects the time spent in the pore, which is why a long, deep event and a short, shallow one can be told apart and turned into different monsters.

=== Scoring ===
Two rows of points sit in the top left corner, each beside the picture of a small handheld console. Once a level has loaded, the upper row is labeled "Kent", after the company's founder [[Kent Kemmish]], and the lower one carries a second first name. Every event is worth 100 points and each row stops at 1,000.<ref name="mq" />

The Kent row gains 100 points whenever Maxine is hurt: by the pore, by a spore, by a SpinShroom or by a DoomShroom. The other row gains 100 points when she catches a pink oyster, which plays a chime from a file named "good.wav", and when a DoomShroom bounces into the pore. If the second row reaches 1,000 first, the status bar announces "You win!" If the Kent row gets there first, it announces "Slightly less successful". Either way the level restarts five seconds later.<ref name="mq" /> The status bar is an HTML marquee element; it scrolls "Welcome to Maxine's Quest!" while the game loads and the level's name once play begins.

The game checks the scores on every frame, and on every frame that a row stands at 1,000 it schedules another restart five seconds ahead. The end of a level therefore queues a restart for each of the roughly 300 frames that pass before the first one runs, and for the next five seconds the level is restarted, and both scores set to zero, about 60 times a second.{{efn|At 60 frames per second. Points scored in those five seconds are erased as they are made.}} The game's folder holds two unused images, a green speech bubble reading "Slightly less successful" and a yellow one reading "Level Complete!"

=== The control panel and the Clay TV ===
{{Main|Clay TV}}
[[File:Maxines_Quest_gameover.png|thumb|upright=0.9|alt=A green rounded speech bubble with the words Slightly less successful|An image of the losing message in the game's asset folder. The game does not load it and prints the words in its status bar instead.]]
The lower right corner holds an instrument panel modeled in pink clay: a blue clay voltage knob with three positions, negative, zero and positive, an LED readout of millivolts, and a red-handled lever, [[the zapper]], which in the company's instruments applies "a brief spike of maximum voltage", used to clear clogged pores and to etch new ones.<ref name="overview-post" /> In Live Signal mode a turn of the knob or a pull of the lever is sent to the server as a "control intent" for the amplifier on the bench; in Random mode the panel is hidden.<ref name="mq" />

In the upper right is the [[Clay TV]], a clay television frame meant to show the live current. In the standard version it is connected to the random signal ring, which keeps no record of the signal, and it displays a flat, dim line in both modes; the second version reconnects it. On the left is a parchment-framed chat window. A message typed there appears under the name "You" and is written to the browser's developer console, beside a comment that reads "Later: send to server / multiplayer / session log here."<ref name="mq" />

== Levels ==
[[File:mq-mushromancer-1.png|thumb|upright=0.6|alt=A clay mushroom wizard with a dark spotted cap, a skull face with orange eyes and outstretched arms|The Mushromancer, boss of three levels that are hidden from the menu]]
The level menu lists two levels: [[Spores and Pores]], numbered 1, and [[Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant]], numbered 7. Five more are present in the code and commented out of the menu: "Mostly SpinShrooms", "Introducing DoomShrooms", "Mushromancer and the Oysters", "Mushromancer and the DoomShrooms" and "Mushromancer's Spiralling Spores". On levels 4 to 6 the Mushromancer, a skull-faced clay mushroom wizard, stands on the pore and makes a spore every second, and touching him counts as touching the pore. Level 6 also has code for what a comment calls the "gurk cannon", which is to "make a ring of spores and throw them at Maxine".<ref name="mq" />

Level 7 is a prototype. Selecting it runs a function described as "Just a prototype to set up a wall with collision", which places one horizontal wall of grey bricks, 100 by 20 pixels, and writes "Added wall" to the browser console.<ref name="mq" /> The wall stands outside the arena, where Maxine cannot go. The spawning code covers levels 1 to 5 only, so in Random mode the labyrinth has no monsters, and the one thing that can happen in it is an explosion at the pore. Ten explosions fill the Kent row and end the level as "Slightly less successful". Every restart adds another wall in the same place, and none is ever removed: a player who returns to Spores and Pores finds the wall still standing outside the arena.{{efn|A separate maze game with two wandering minotaurs, [[The Labyrinth]], has a page of its own on the company's site.}}

[[File:mq-dragon-tyrant.png|thumb|upright=0.7|alt=A green scaly clay dragon head with orange eyes and a scowl|The Dragon Tyrant. The sprite is in the game's asset folder; no level draws it.]]
A sprite of the Dragon Tyrant, a green scaly clay head with orange eyes, sits in the asset folder with ghosts, a snake labeled "snalke", brains in jars, potions, a key and a syringe. The game loads none of them.

== Version 2 ==
On May 19, 2026, the company added a second copy of the game, "maxine-v2", described in its commit as an "experimental duplicate". It runs inside the header of the company's website and changes the instrument controls.<ref name="v2">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/play/maxine-v2/ |title=Maxine's Quest (experimental) |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=2026-05}}</ref><ref name="commit-v2">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=b202583 |date=2026-05-19 |message=Add maxine-v2 as experimental duplicate}}</ref> The toolbar takes any voltage from −2,000 to +2,000 millivolts and has buttons for −1 V, −500 mV, 0, +500 mV and +1 V. The knob becomes continuous: dragging it 200 pixels sweeps the whole 4,000-millivolt range. The up and down arrow keys step the voltage by 1 millivolt every 80 milliseconds, or 10 with the Shift key held. They are also the keys that steer Maxine up and down.<ref name="v2" />

Clicking the Clay TV switches Experimenter Mode on and off. The television's graph grows over 350 milliseconds to 1,780 by 1,040 pixels, covering most of the game, and the clay frame turns green. In Random mode the second version feeds the television a simulated current, produced by a class named NanoporeCurrentSim whose comment promises "the characteristic telegraph signal of single-molecule measurements". A random telegraph signal jumps between a few fixed levels at random moments, as the current through a single [[ion channel]] does when the channel opens and shuts. The simulation has three levels, the open pore and partial and deep blockades at 68 and 35 percent of the open current, with fixed odds of switching on each sample and Gaussian noise of 2.5 percent of full scale on top.{{efn|1=Per sample the open state persists with probability 0.965, the partial blockade 0.86 and the deep blockade 0.79, for mean dwell times of about 29, 7 and 5 samples. The game takes three samples per frame. In the long run the simulated pore is open 79 percent of the time.}} The code marks any sample above 95 percent or below 25 percent of the open current as a spike and draws spikes in pink. Because the open level sits at 100 percent, about 98 percent of open-pore samples count as spikes, and the trace is pink while the pore is open and green during the blockades.<ref name="v2" />

The chat window of the second version is connected to [[LabChat]], the chat that runs beside the company's live stream, for members who are signed in; visitors see the words "Sign in to chat".<ref name="v2" />

== Development ==
=== Origins ===
The game descends from [[Spyke Hunter]], which the founder calls the company's first molecular game, written for signals from knots in a nylon string pulled through a hole about 2 mm across. He named it, he has written, "because I was making a pun on 'Spy Hunter' (a 1980s arcade game)".<ref name="string">{{cite web |title=Sequencing a string |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref>

The company's December 2022 overview describes Maxine's Quest much as it now looks: "The central elliptical region is the arena in which different data-generated video games happen. In the very simplest case, the number of 'spikes' (brief changes in current caused by analytes transiting a pore) determine how many enemies appear."<ref name="overview-post" />{{efn|The document sets the parenthetical between dashes, replaced here by parentheses.}} Its control panel has a blue bias knob and a "zapper stick" with a red handle, as the 2026 panel does, and a "Data TV" for the live current in the place where the Clay TV now stands. It also has parts the 2026 game lacks: two switches that apply a sawtooth to the voltage and an oscillation to a syringe pump for [[ping-pong sensing]], a "potion platter" for telling the system which reagents have been added, and a chatbot, [[the brainbot]]. Games were to be "solo player, player vs. player, and battle-royale mode a la Fortnite", and results were to be written up for the preprint server bioRxiv "with author order corresponding to the leaderboard for top experimentalist-gamers".<ref name="overview-post" /> The console that the panel was drawn for, the [[demonpore 64]], had a plug for a [[joystick for science|custom joystick]].

The game was always meant to carry others. A memo of about 2022, ''[[Early Releases on Maxine's Quest]]'', announced eight titles, from ''Labyrinth of the Dragon Tyrant'' to ''[[Poop of the Gods]]'', each "the beginning of a franchise within the Molecular Reality [[Player Scientist]] universe".<ref name="early">{{cite web |title=Early Releases on Maxine's Quest |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |year=2022}}</ref> When the founder reposted the memo in March 2026, he wrote that the titles were "only intended aesthetically/ludologically as 'wrappers' for MQ".<ref name="platform">{{cite web |title=platform |author=Kemmishtree |website=EQBio-OS |date=2026-03-29}}</ref> The company's streaming plan of May 2026 spells the idea out: "Maxine is one wrapper", and the other titles would "all use the same ring + spike → spawn primitive but with different art and lore", defined in files that "non-technical contributors" could write. Among the hard-coded things the plan lists for conversion into wrapper fields is the phrase "Slightly less successful".<ref name="records">{{cite web |title=Company records |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=2026-05}}</ref>

=== From Python to JavaScript ===
The first full version was written in Python with the Pygame Zero library. According to the company's plan it was the fuller version, with the maze of the Labyrinth level, a "dataview" mode, playback of prerecorded data and a "challenge mode" in which the founder played against a challenger, the arrangement the two scoreboards still reflect.<ref name="records" /> The browser version uses the Phaser 3 game framework, and its function for making mushrooms still contains the comment "Translate the Python lines to JavaScript".<ref name="mq" />

=== 2026 ===
On May 7, 2026, the game was added to the company's website in four commits made within about an hour, among them "Attempt to add support for Maxine's Quest as a standalone page." and "Remember to add all the maxine files."<ref name="commit-standalone">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=c2ad114 |date=2026-05-07 |message=Attempt to add support for Maxine's Quest as a standalone page.}}</ref><ref name="commit-files">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=eb29986 |date=2026-05-07 |message=Remember to add all the maxine files.}}</ref> The other two were "Fix Maxine some more" and "Include imports for Maxine".

The experimental copy received nine commits in a little over two hours on May 19. They include "Fix maxine-v2: restore original clay TV and add stub methods for experimenter mode", "Fix: revert enhanced clay TV and fix toggle function" and "Fix: remove duplicate resetLevel function that was causing page reloads".<ref name="commit-restore">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=115e0a0 |date=2026-05-19 |message=Fix maxine-v2: restore original clay TV and add stub methods for experimenter mode}}</ref><ref name="commit-reset">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=9e18395 |date=2026-05-19 |message=Fix: remove duplicate resetLevel function that was causing page reloads}}</ref> On May 27 the simulated current was wired in, and the television's display was rewritten to draw a continuous trace. The commit explains that the old display, which drew each moment as a separate vertical bar, had let the simulator's discrete levels pile up into "horizontal 'tiers' creating a bar-chart appearance".<ref name="commit-trace">{{cite commit |repo=epicquest.bio web application |hash=99e3e62 |date=2026-05-27 |message=Rewrite clay TV draw() to render continuous connected trace instead of vertical bars}}</ref>

=== Comments in the code ===
The source carries the marginalia of its authors. Above a function that would draw spirals in the arena, and whose calls are commented out: "Somehow doesn't do anything. I'm mystified." Beside a distance calculation: "Calculate the 2 norm because it's what StackOverflow told me to do. It's just the distance." A constant named worldSpeed, used nowhere, is annotated "For speeding up or slowing down the whole game. Doesn't work yet." In the drawing code for the signal ring, a disabled loop is explained as "Oops don't remember what this bit does except slow it down".<ref name="mq" />

== Reception ==
''Ludicious'' reviewed the game on June 2, 2026, under the headline "Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes". The review described a Phaser game whose monsters are spawned from real nanopore signals, the clay-framed television for the live current and the two result banners, and it traced the game's descent from Spyke Hunter.<ref name="ludicious">{{cite news |title=Maxine's Quest Review: The Monsters Are Real Current Spikes |work=Ludicious |author=Pixel Marchetti |date=2026-06-02 |url=/press/ludicious/2026/06/02/maxines-quest-review}}</ref> It gave the game 7 out of 10 overall, 9 for science and 10 for its losing screen, and listed the levels as "2 of 7". Among the game's advantages it counted "The politest losing banner in browser gaming"; among its faults, that "The scoreboard credits the founder with every one of Maxine's mistakes".<ref name="ludicious" />

The fifth level of [[The Disclosure Crawl]], the company's quiz dungeon, is called the Arena of Maxine. Its first room, the "Maxine's Quest Hub", calls the game "The research interface that makes nanopore science addictive", and its boss is [[Maxine's Shadow]].<ref name="crawl5">{{cite web |url=https://molecularreality.com/static/dandd-game/level-05-arena-of-maxine.html |title=Dungeons & Diligence: The Disclosure Crawl, Level 5: Arena of Maxine |publisher=Molecular Reality Corporation |date=2026-04}}</ref>

== See also ==
* [[List of Molecular Reality Corporation games]]
* [[Experigaming]]
* [[Ludician]]
* [[Spy Hunter]]

== Notes ==
{{Notelist}}

== References ==
{{Reflist}}

{{EQBio games}}

[[Category:Molecular Reality Corporation games]]
[[Category:2026 video games]]
[[Category:Browser games]]
[[Category:Maxwell's demon]]