Fuse

About the game

A fuse is lit somewhere on the screen and creeps forward along its line, one pixel at a time. Your job is to keep it burning: you hold a small piece of line pattern, slide it into place in front of the spark and drop it, then do the same with the next piece, which is picked at random. When the spark reaches the end of the line, it goes out and the game is over.

There is one rule for placing a piece: it cannot overlap any line already on the screen. The longer the fuse burns, the higher your score, and the screen slowly fills up with your own tangled trail, which makes every new piece harder to fit.

Playing it here

Fuse 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 plain CHIP-8 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 and press any key to start. F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. A gamepad works too: the D-pad moves the piece and the A button lays it down.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Build ahead, not on top. A piece dropped on top of an existing line simply will not go down. Leave yourself open space in the direction the spark is heading.

The spark has preferences. Where the line branches, the fuse tries to go up first, then right, then down, then left. Pieces with junctions will send it the first of those ways that is open.

Mind the timing. The fuse keeps moving while you line up a piece, so place the piece close to the spark first and worry about the long-term layout second.

Credits and licence

Fuse 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.