egofree had already built a full Godot 4 remake of Lady Bug, the 1981 arcade maze game. The plan was to publish a web version straight from Godot's web export. The problem was size: that export landed in the tens of megabytes for what is, at its core, a small arcade game meant to load instantly in a browser tab. So egofree rebuilt it again, from scratch, with Phaser 4.1, TypeScript and Vite. The result is dramatically lighter: the source directory is around 2MB, and the final web build is only a few megabytes.
What Is Lady Bug Web Remake?
The game preserves the arcade feel of the original: grid-based maze movement, rotating gates, collectible timing, enemy release through a border timer, scoring rules, bonus vegetables, and the SPECIAL and EXTRA word mechanics that award extra lives. It's playable directly in the browser, intended primarily for desktop with keyboard or gamepad controls.
- Rotating gates that the player interacts with to navigate the maze
- SPECIAL and EXTRA word progress, awarding +3 lives and +1 life respectively
- Score multipliers via blue-heart collectibles
- Central vegetable bonus that temporarily freezes enemies, who remain fatal to touch
- Animated enemy-release border timer with level-dependent speed
- Keyboard and gamepad support, with D-pad prioritised over analog stick for precise arcade turns
Reverse-Engineering Arcade-Accurate Enemy Movement
Most of the reverse engineering effort went into movement rather than visuals. Player movement needed careful tuning around corners, turn windows and assisted turns to feel right. Enemy movement was the hardest part of the entire project. To validate it properly, egofree built a separate simulator to test and compare enemy paths and movement decisions before integrating that behaviour into the Phaser version.
The Godot version remains the main reference implementation. This web version reuses the same gameplay intent and many of the same assets, with the runtime architecture adapted specifically for Phaser, TypeScript and browser deployment.
Built with Phaser 4, TypeScript and Vite
The codebase is intentionally split into small gameplay, rendering, layout and audio modules, so arcade-specific rules don't get buried inside the Phaser scene itself. The project is a personal, non-commercial fan project made for learning, preservation and technical exploration. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original Lady Bug rights holders.
egofree is specifically looking for feedback from other Phaser developers on the architecture, the timing approach, or anything that could be improved in the web version. The project was shared on the Phaser forum, where the full write-up and screenshots are also available.
Play Lady Bug Web Remake
Lady Bug Web Remake is free to play directly in your browser, no install needed. If you're curious about the architecture, the timing system, or the custom enemy movement simulator, the full source code is on GitHub.