Portugues
Dark Light
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About the game
Your lover has been taken by evil creatures and locked in their lair, so you pick up a lamp and go down into the dark dungeon. The story is a sentence, and the game is simple to describe: you are a small figure in a maze made of squares, you see only what your lamp lights, and the creatures are waiting in the rest.
The light is the heart of it. Your lamp lights the squares around you, from none at all to five squares out, and you raise or lower it with Z and X. A wide light lets you read the maze and spot coins, gems and creatures from far away, but every step burns your lamp's fuel faster the wider it is. The narrowest light costs nothing and shows only the square you are standing on. So you are always trading how much you can see against how long your light will last. The game says it on the title screen: never run out of light.
There are four floors, and each is a new maze generated at random, with new kinds of enemies on the way down. Hidden shops are scattered through the dungeon, and the coins you collect buy upgrades there: more hearts, a stronger lamp and other help. Each floor also sends you looking for gems, and the floor screen lists the ones you are still missing. Shex made it for js13kGames 2020, where the whole game had to fit in 13 KB, and everything is drawn as vector shapes, so it stays sharp at any size.
Playing it here
Click Play, then click anywhere on the title screen to start. Move with the arrow keys, one square for each press, and use Z and X to change the lamp as you go. In a shop, press 1, 2 or 3 to buy, and Q to leave. The game keeps your sound setting in the browser. A tap on the map button shows or hides the map of the floor, and the note button mutes the sound.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | move one square |
| Z / X | raise / lower the lamp's light |
| 1, 2, 3 | buy the item with that number in a shop |
| Q | leave the shop |
| on-screen arrows, + and - | the same on a touchscreen |
| map button, note button | show or hide the map; mute or unmute |
A few things worth knowing
Keep the lamp low on the way. A narrow light burns little fuel, so open it wide only where you need to read the maze or look for coins.
Open it at crossroads. A wide light shows the paths and the creatures before you commit to a corridor, and you can turn it down again before the next step.
Spend the coins. The shops are hidden, and what you find in them is what lets you get further on the lower floors.
Credits and licence
Dark Light was created by Shex (shextheswift) for js13kGames 2020 and is released under the MIT licence. The licence text is linked from this page, and the source is on GitHub.