# Bloxorz - credits, sources and what differs ## The original **Bloxorz** was created by **Damien Clarke**, working under the label **DX Interactive** (dxinteractive.com), and first published on the web in **2007** as an Adobe Flash game (SWF version 8, ActionScript 2, a 550 x 300 stage at 36 fps). It was syndicated to Miniclip on 22-24 August 2007, but a Jay Is Games review dated 25 June 2007 predates that, and art inside the file is timestamped May 2007 - so mid-2007 is the honest date, with the August dates being syndication. The author's own description: "Bloxorz is a brain twisting puzzle game of rolling blocks and switching bridges. You'll be rolling round in circles over the course of the 33 levels. Yes, they are all possible to finish." It has been played a very large number of times on Coolmath Games, Miniclip, Albino Black Sheep, Free World Group and Mousebreaker, and survives today via Unity and Ruffle ports. This page (https://bloxorz.skillsafe.ai/) is an **independent reimplementation**. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Damien Clarke, DX Interactive, or any portal that hosts the original. No code, art, sound, level data or passcode from the original is reused here. ## What is reimplemented from the original, and how it was established Researched on 2026-09-06. The strongest sources were the author's own instruction text (preserved on Coolmath Games' 2009 page via the Internet Archive) and the original SWF archived at archive.org/details/flash_bloxorz, whose ActionScript and bitmaps were read to settle details that prose does not cover. Secondary sources: the Flash Gaming and MiniClip Fandom wikis, Jay Is Games, PrimaryGames, Newsweek's passcode article, TASVideos and speedrun.com. Replicated here: - A fixed **15 x 10** grid of tiles floating in a dark void - the board size the original uses for every one of its stages. - A **1 x 1 x 2** block, rolled with the arrow keys, tipping over its leading bottom edge. Standing it occupies one tile; lying it occupies two. - **The goal is a square hole** and the block only goes in **standing**. In the original the goal tile is deliberately excluded from the landing mask, so nothing rests on it: here too, a lying block or a lone cube over the hole falls through. - **Falling off restarts the stage.** There is no life counter, no game over and unlimited retries. A fall also rolls the run's move counter back to the value it had when the stage began, and adds one to the fall counter - the original does exactly this. - **Orange fragile tiles**: safe under a lying block or a single cube, they give way under a standing block. - **Two weight classes of switch**, in the author's own words: "Heavy x-shaped ones and soft octagon ones... Soft switches (octagons) are activated when any part of your block presses it. Hard switches (x's) require much more pressure, so your block must be standing on its end to activate them." You do not have to stay on a switch to hold a bridge. - **Three switch behaviours** - open, close and toggle - which the original's own level data names `on`, `off` and `onoff`. One press can open one bridge while closing another. The behaviours are **not** marked on the switch: only the flash tells you, green as a bridge opens and red as it closes, as in the original. - **Bridges that start open as well as closed.** The original has four bridge tile characters for exactly this reason; here a bridge group carries its own starting state. - **The split switch**, marked with a bracket relief on a plain grey slab - not, as is often claimed, an orange circle; orange is reserved for the fragile tile. Standing on it teleports the block to two pads as two 1 x 1 x 1 cubes. **Space** chooses which cube you steer. The cubes **rejoin by coming to rest orthogonally next to each other**, becoming a lying block. A cube can work soft switches but not hard ones, and no cube can finish a stage. - **A six-digit passcode per stage, shown in the top right corner** of the playfield, with a passcode entry that jumps to that stage. In the original that is the *only* thing on the playfield HUD: moves, falls and time are global counters shown at the end of the run. - **33 stages.** - The **palette and camera**: near-black ground with a warm rust bloom, sand-coloured stone (#e8d5b4), cool blue-grey bridge slabs (#b8c1c6), grey switch slabs (#a39a93), saturated orange fragile tiles (#ff8d4d), an olive-rimmed black hole, a rusty orange-brown block (#c96a2c / #a8501f), soft drop shadows under everything, and a camera that never moves, rotates or zooms while you play. ## The one deliberate difference: the stages **All 33 stage layouts on this page are original work, designed for it.** They are not the stage designs of the 2007 original, which are Damien Clarke's creative work; no level map was copied from the game or from any walkthrough. What was taken from the original is the *order in which it teaches* - read from the original's own level data, which shows plain boards at stages 1, 3 and 6, the whole switch-and-bridge system arriving at once at stage 2, orange tiles at 4, bridges that start open at 5, a lone hard switch at 7, the split switch alone at 8 and 9, everything combined at 10, and no new vocabulary at all after 15. This page follows that shape, and like the original it uses the plain stages as breathers rather than climbing monotonically. Every stage here is proved solvable, and every stage's **par is its true optimal move count**, established three ways: a solver written from the raw stage text with its own implementation of the rules and no access to the game engine; a replay of that solver's route through the engine itself; and a second breadth-first search over the engine's own state space. All three agree on all 33 numbers. Each stage is also checked to make sure it cannot be finished with any of its switches disabled - or, for a switch that exists to be routed around, that removing it makes the stage strictly shorter - and that every field of fragile tiles genuinely constrains the route. ## Other things this page adds, and labels - **Its own passcodes.** Because the stages are original, the original's codes would open the wrong levels. Each code is `100000 + (mix32(n) mod 900000)`, where `mix32` is the 32-bit xor-shift-multiply finalizer that `mulberry32` ends with. No two of the 33 collide. - **Real-time 3D.** The original is pre-rendered sprite art under a fixed hand-tuned axonometric skew. This page draws the same scene with a WebGL2 perspective camera, a 4 x 4 matrix stack, per-face lighting, real depth testing and animated 90-degree rolls about the correct bottom edge. Nothing is copied; all geometry is generated by code. - **The camera is re-framed once per stage.** Its angle is fixed and it is motionless during play, as in the original, but the distance and the point it looks at are solved from each stage's own extent. The original could keep a single framing for all 33 stages because its layouts fill the 15 x 10 grid; several of ours do not, and one fixed framing left those small in the corner. - **R to restart, WASD, an on-screen pad and swipes.** The 2007 game binds the four arrows and space and nothing else. - **A statistics panel, a saved game, `#stage-7` deep links** - the original had passcodes and no autosave at all. - **Optional undo, an optional par display and an optional hint** that plays one move of an optimal route computed live. All three are **off by default**, because the original offers restart and nothing else. - **Optional sound**, off by default: short WebAudio clicks and thuds standing in for the original's `clonk` and `clonk2`. There is no music. ## Uncertain, and marked as such - Whether the original's split switch fires under a *lying* block as well as a standing one is not documented anywhere reachable, and the archived build does not make it obvious. This page requires a standing block, which is the reading consistent with "stand on it to be teleported" in every walkthrough. Treat that one rule as reconstructed rather than sourced. - The original's typeface is Square721 BT, which is not redistributable; this page uses a system sans-serif stack of similar character. ## Licence The code, the artwork and the stage designs on this page are original work, released under the MIT licence - see LICENSE.txt. "Bloxorz" is used here only to name the game this page reimplements.