BoxRun

Overview

BoxRun adds a route editor to Deadlock. Players place checkpoints anywhere on Midtown, mark boxes that must be broken, add notes, and split a route into legs. Each run is timed against the clock and an animated ghost of the best attempt, and the finish card shows the time, a tier, and the best possible time from the fastest splits. A route can be shared as a code like BR-882EMZ that anyone can import and race.

Version 2.2, released November 3, 2026, adds a weekly ghost-backed board, NEXT ROUTE and RUN AGAIN buttons, loop routes, and key hints. The community route list is opt-in.

It loads as a separate map, so normal matches are untouched. I built it alone, with AI coding agents (Claude Code) doing much of the implementation while I designed the mod, tested every release in the game, and decided what shipped. The GameBanana page discloses this.

Implementation

• Route editor, run timer, menus, and finish cards in Deadlock's Panorama UI scripts
• Recorded ghost replay, with a bot fallback for three heroes
• Short-code route sharing backed by a small AWS service
• Python packaging, release, and in-game check scripts

Technical challenges

A non-interacting puppet ghost replays recorded runs for 41 of 44 heroes without breaking boxes or affecting the route. The remaining three heroes use legacy bot replay.

Pre-release builds bundled a full copy of Midtown. Loading the map from the installed game instead brought the 2.1 download below 3 MB.

On a friend's slow PC, the player was moved to the start before Midtown finished loading and fell under the map. After that, every wait in the mod checks the game's actual state instead of assuming a load time, and anything that gives up tells the player.

Results

• Released on GameBanana on October 28, 2026.
• 10,058 GameBanana downloads as of November 4, 2026.
• Daily online menu callers: 1,798 on November 2 and 2,511 on November 3, 2026.
• My strongest YouTube Short had 241,600 views and 5,300 likes as read November 4, 2026, at 12:21 PT.