How to Play

Your GitHub history is your character. Push code, and your hero grows.

The core loop

Code on GitHub. Your commits, pull requests, and reviews feed your character's stats. Your character auto-battles through dungeons while you keep working — you do not click through fights yourself. Wins drop loot and levels. Spend loot and resources on gear and abilities, then code more to push further.

GitHub activity becomes stats

Every stat traces back to something you actually did on GitHub. Caps exist so grinding commits or reviews cannot substitute for real, varied work.

GitHub activity	Game stat	Anti-abuse cap
Commits per day	Mana (your energy for battle)	10 commits count in full. 11–20 count at half rate. Past 20, almost nothing — grinding commits does not grind mana.
Total commits (all time)	Experience, the base of your level	Weighted by account age, so a brand-new account cannot outlevel years of real history overnight.
Stars received	Prestige, a social stat	Passive. You cannot farm it — it only grows when other people star your work.
Pull requests merged	Skill power multiplier	Only merged PRs count. An open or closed-unmerged PR is worth ten times less.
Code reviews	Healing and support power	Only reviews on PRs that were later merged count.
Active-day streak	A global buff multiplier	Caps at 7 days. Miss a day and it resets to zero.
Primary language	Your character class	Pick from your top 3 languages on GitHub.

Classes

Your class comes from your primary language on GitHub. Each one plays differently in battle.

Python Sage

Area spells. Slow but powerful.

JavaScript Rogue

Speed and high variance.

TypeScript Paladin

Balanced and reliable.

Rust Guardian

Tank. Defensive.

Go Scout

Multi-hit, concurrent strikes.

Ruby Bard

Support and buffs.

Java Architect

Builds structures in battle.

C++ Berserker

Max damage. Risky.

PHP Necromancer

Summons and drain. Wins long fights.

Dungeons

Dungeons are grouped into three biomes, each harder than the last:

Feature Forest (levels 1-15) — Where new branches grow and features take root.
Bug Swamp (levels 16-35) — NullPointers and Infinite Loops lurk in the murky depths.
Deprecated Archive (levels 36-60) — Abandoned codebases where legacy monsters roam.

Each run climbs up to 10 floors. Along the way you will hit combat rooms, rest rooms that recover you, treasure rooms with free loot, and a boss room at the top of the run. Battles resolve on their own in the background — no need to keep the tab open — and your character keeps fighting for as long as it has mana.

Abilities

You start with a primary attack and a passive. A secondary ability unlocks at level 10, and your ultimate at level 20. Upgrade any ability by spending Lines — earned from your commits — to make it hit harder.

Set a priority order for which ability fires first in a normal fight (your Default strategy), and a separate order just for boss rooms (your Boss strategy) — handy when a boss calls for burst damage instead of your usual opener. If you never set a Boss strategy, boss fights fall back to your Default order.

Gear, rarity, and shards

Loot drops in five rarities, from common to legendary. Outgrown gear does not have to sit in your bag — salvage it at Vera's forge in Pull Request Plaza for shards, sorted by the rarity you salvaged.

Shards refine upward: fold 25 shards of one tier into 1 shard of the tier above it. Vera also handles refinement — spend shards to push a piece of gear beyond its starting power.

Rex's shop

Rex runs the NPC shop in Pull Request Plaza. His stock rotates daily, so check back for new gear to buy — or sell him items you no longer need for gold.

Quests and contracts

Quests are one-time story beats that walk you through the GitVerse and its NPCs, each with its own reward. Contracts are repeatable side jobs you can claim again once their cooldown clears — a steady trickle of gold and XP alongside your main runs.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard ranks every player by level and progress for the current season. Anyone can look, signed in or not — find it in the nav bar above.

Public profile

Every hero has a public page at gitquest.dev/profile/your-github-login. Your own link, with a copy button, sits on your profile page.

It shows your class, level, equipped title, badges, streak, kills, progress in each biome and where you placed in past seasons. It never shows your email.

The page is public: anyone with the link can open it, signed in or not. Leaderboard rows link to it, which is how other players find you.