LaserGuide

About the game

LaserGuide is a puzzle game written by Extner for Sprig, the open-source game console made by Hack Club that you program in JavaScript. The room is a nine-by-nine grid with a laser emitter on one side, a green target on the other, and a scatter of small mirrors in between. The beam travels in straight lines. When it hits a mirror it turns ninety degrees, and the mirrors light up while the beam touches them. Your job is to rotate the mirrors until the beam reaches the target.

The first room is a tutorial with a single mirror: turn it once and you are done, so you learn the controls in one key press. From there the puzzles grow. Some rooms are bare, with a few mirrors that have to hand the beam on from one to the next along a path you work out yourself. Others have walls that block the beam and a whole field of mirrors, many of which you do not need, so part of the puzzle is working out which ones matter. There are ten rooms in all, and after the last the game thanks you for playing.

You choose which mirror you are working on by stepping a selector through them, and a rotated mirror redraws the beam at once, so you see the result of every turn. Because the beam is redrawn live, the best way to solve a room is to follow the beam from the emitter, fix the first mirror it meets, then the next, and so on.

Playing it here

Click Play and the game starts in the page, on the Sprig's own 160×128 screen scaled up so the pixels stay sharp. Every selection, every mirror turn and the end of a level has its own short sound. The game keeps no save, so closing the page starts you from the beginning again.

On a phone or tablet, two groups of buttons appear under the screen, like the eight buttons of the console. On a computer, use the keyboard.

Controls

Tips

Work from the emitter. The beam only matters up to the first mirror that is wrong, so fix them in order along the path.

Walls are useful. A wall stops the beam, which means the beam has to go around, and that tells you where the mirrors need to point.

Not every mirror is part of the answer. If turning one changes nothing, leave it.

Four turns bring a mirror back. If you get lost, keep pressing K and the mirror cycles through all four directions.

FAQ

Is this an official Sprig game? It comes from the public Sprig game gallery, where anyone can send in a game. This one was sent in by its author, Extner, and it runs here with one small fix (see below).

What is a Sprig? A small console with a 160×128 screen and eight buttons, made by Hack Club to teach programming by making games. Its games are plain JavaScript programs, and the engine that runs them is open source.

Is it the same code as the gallery game? Almost. The original builds each room's map with a call to eval, which the page this game runs in does not allow, so one line was changed to build the map directly. The result is the same; the change is a patch published with the source.

Does it save my progress? No.