Runhunt
a road shooter about outrunning the people you used to drive for
A road that never stops trying to kill you. Free to play, right in the browser.
A Silverheaven Interactive production
Runhunt is a vertical shoot-em-up: you drive, the road scrolls under you, and everything on it either wants you dead or is a way past the thing that does. Keyboard or gamepad, steer with A/D, and your own speed is both your best weapon and your biggest liability.
▸ play runhunt now — free, no install
Story Mode
You used to haul freight for the Silverheaven syndicate — no questions asked, twice — until you saw what was actually riding on the "Centaur" run and stopped showing up for shifts. Nobody came after you. Nobody had to: the road you're on now belongs to them, and you're the only thing on it that isn't.
Silverheaven never called itself an army. It called itself a supply chain — guns, chemicals, people, moved wherever the highest bidder pointed, no questions asked twice.
— briefing, "THE JOB" · screen 1 of 3It's a three-act campaign, told the way the rest of the game talks: no cutscenes, just the car rolling into frame on a real stretch of road while the text types itself out. Three acts exist to drive right now — the open road out, the haul road through the desert, and the night skyway above — and there's a fourth boss already taking shape for whatever comes after that. Not going to spoil it. You'll know it when you see it.
Silverheaven isn't exclusive to this game, either — a few years after its collapse is roughly where Kirill Stoler's Full Effect picks up its own story. Different studios, same universe, no coordination beyond two friends comparing notes.
The Graphics
Every pixel on screen is drawn by code. There's no img/ folder the running game reaches into, no PNG, no sprite sheet — not one raster asset anywhere in its rendering path. Enemies, bosses, obstacles, the HUD, even the Silverheaven mark on the title screen: all of it comes out of a hand-authored pixel language that composes shapes cell by cell, unions them into a silhouette, and stamps one ink outline around the result. Same trick every time, which is why a delivery truck and a road cone read as the same kind of drawing despite being built months apart.
That buys a specific workflow: a new enemy is a new .js file dropped next to the ones it stands beside, not an export from an art tool that has to stay in sync with the code that reads it. Nothing to regenerate, nothing to re-encode, no spritesheet to repack because one frame changed. The trade-off is that everything — this devlog's own studio mark included — gets built by writing coordinates instead of drawing them. Slower on day one, considerably less annoying on day four hundred.
The Vibe
This is a 4:3 game, on purpose, even inside a widescreen browser tab — the HUD lives in the side gutters instead of sitting over the action. The same stretch of asphalt gets repainted for day, evening, and night without moving a single tile: same geometry, different light.
The difficulty is arcade, not roguelike. Your own speed is a gauge you're reading and fighting in real time — the bar at the bottom of the screen is the whole risk model in one glance. Bosses telegraph the hit before it lands, so getting caught almost always traces back to a call you made a second earlier rather than a surprise the game sprang on you. If even that's too much pressure, Practice Mode drops the scoring entirely and just lets you learn a level's shape.
None of it is trying to be moody about it. It's a getaway driver's idea of an arcade cabinet — sun-bleached asphalt, a convoy that never stops looking for you, and a HUD that reports exactly how bad your situation is at every single moment.
The Bosses
Boss design follows one rule here: the arena belongs to the boss, not the other way around, so for as long as the fight lasts, what driving even means changes underneath you. Three are up and fightable right now, and each does something the other two don't.
The first boss, and the one whose shape you'll recognize immediately: an armored hull shielding its own escorts, three phases deep. The hull tanks for the convoy as long as it can, the rocket rack stays full all the way into phase three, and both phase changes are their own cutscene beat — not just a health bar ticking past a line.
A tracked siege crawler that swaps the convoy's escorts for one railgun: a charge-then-burst weapon that locks onto a fixed point in the arena rather than tracking the car directly, so reading it is "get off that point," not "dodge the shot." It fights off the asphalt, on open ground, and leaves the front lane clear — the only real decision is how close to the barrels you're willing to sit.
The current top of the roster, and the one still taking rounds of tuning: an air gunship that trades ground combat for altitude, drifting-pocket volleys in its third phase, and projectiles that have to fold with the car through the sky-jump cylinder or they'd vanish at the seam. It's the hardest fight in the game right now — hard enough that a still frame undersells it, so here's the dev-build demo instead of a screenshot:
Mid-tuning as of this writing — the live build may already be a step ahead of what's in the clip.
Endless Mode
No script, no ending — just the road getting meaner the longer you last, and a boss showing up every so often to make sure you're paying attention. New enemies turn up here first, the leaderboard keeps a record of how far you actually got, and it's the mode that never runs out.
Level Editor
Bored of my roads? Build your own. It's the same editor I use for the campaign, shipped right alongside the game — lanes, hazards, enemies, your own boss at the end of it, and a small workshop to publish what you build and pull down levels other people made. Once you've got it open there's genuinely no ceiling on what you can put on that road.
▸ status — actively cooking
Runhunt now ships under a name: Silverheaven Interactive — mine, no publisher behind it — which is, cute coincidence or not, also the freight syndicate the whole campaign is about outrunning (and the one Kirill's Full Effect deals with the fallout of). Everything else about how the game gets made hasn't changed.
This is a moving target, not a finished box on a shelf. New enemies, bosses, and road tricks keep landing, and the story is being written act by act rather than dropped all at once.
If you break something, beat something, or just have a take on how it should feel — that's exactly the feedback I want. Find me on Telegram, or wherever you ran into this.