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Black Rainbow
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About the game
Black Rainbow sends a tiny figure down a tunnel into a dreamlike underworld. The world is a grid of 25 rooms, five by five, rebuilt at random every time you play: rooms get different layouts, different doorways and different residents. Somewhere down there is the motherlode, a large watchful eye, and the game ends when you reach it.
A clock runs the whole time, and the number it shows at the end is your result, so lower is better. Each room may hold a gem, and picking it up takes a little time off the clock. The rooms are also home to things that slice across the floor, lunge, drift after you or explode. Touching one scrambles the screen and puts you back where you entered the room, while the clock keeps going.
Playing it here
Black Rainbow is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a simple virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers like the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it. This one targets SUPER-CHIP, the later extension with a sharper 128 by 64 screen, and was made for Octojam 3, a yearly CHIP-8 game jam. It runs here in the Octo emulator, with the speed and colours chosen for it in the archive.
Click Play, then hold D (or the right arrow) to walk your character off the title screen and into the depths. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: the D-pad moves.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| D or right arrow (title screen) | walk into the tunnel and start |
| W A S D or arrow keys | move |
| X | pause and show the clock; any key resumes |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
The edges wrap. Leaving the map on one side brings you in on the other, so a room that looks far away may be only a step or two in the other direction.
Gems only pay once. Each room's gem can be taken a single time per game, so there is no point farming a room. Grab what is on your way.
Watch before you move. Most creatures follow simple timed patterns. Waiting a moment in the doorway to see the rhythm is cheaper than being thrown back to the entrance.
Credits and licence
Black Rainbow was created by John Earnest, who also wrote Octo, the CHIP-8 development tool and emulator used to run it here (MIT licence). He placed the game in the public domain under CC0 1.0 through the Chip8 Community Archive. The licence text is linked from this page.