Meters Below the Ground

About the game

Meters Below the Ground is a roguelike with a single idea: everything in the game is a progress meter. Your health is a bar, and so are your armour and your stamina. Your abilities are bars too, numbered so that you can call them with a key. Enemies are bars: an egg is a "Hatching" meter counting down to the moment something comes out of it. Even the depth is a bar: a long white strip at the bottom of the screen, labelled "Metres Below the Ground", counts the distance as you go.

You are a lone fighter in an infested underground complex, with a short goal for each mission, such as "Kill the eggs before they hatch!" or "Activate the emergency beacon!". The map shows walls, doors, items such as armour shards and ammunition for a quad gun or a railgun, eggs and the larvae that come out of them. Fights are decided by managing meters: how much health you can afford to lose, whether you have the stamina to push an enemy away, and which of your numbered abilities you can afford to use now.

Because the rules are so visible, there is very little hidden from you. Every turn is a small decision about which meter to spend and which to save, and a missed beat can mean an egg hatching in your face.

Playing it here

Click Play. The game is drawn in a monochrome-and-colour text display that scales to the frame, with the controls listed along the bottom. It is played with the keyboard (the mouse shows descriptions when you hover), keeps your progress in this browser only and makes no requests outside this site.

Controls

Tips

Read the legend. The line above the controls explains each symbol on the map, including the items.

Do not ignore the eggs. A hatching meter always ends; deal with an egg before it gets there.

Spend stamina on purpose. Abilities that push or move enemies are worth more than they cost when they save you from a bad fight.

FAQ

Why "Meters" and "Metres"? The title uses the American spelling and the in-game depth bar uses the British one; both are the author's.

Is there a goal? Each run gives you a mission shown at the top of the screen.

Does it save? Yes: the title screen has Continue, Save, New Game and Clear Data, and the game keeps your run in this browser.

Credits and licence

Meters Below the Ground was made by Stephen Sherratt (gridbugs) for the 7DRL Challenge 2018 and is released under the MIT licence. It is written in Rust and compiled to WebAssembly by us from the author's source at a fixed commit; the page code comes from the author's prototty library (MIT, from npm), and the Rust crates it uses are listed in the licence file. The pixel font is PxPlus IBM CGA (and its thin variant) by VileR, from the Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack at int10h.org, under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-SA 4.0). The files are the ones in the game's repository, served unchanged. The repository has no lock file for its Rust dependencies, so we generated one with the versions available on the day of the author's last commit and publish it with the build. We replaced the author's web page with our own (it blocks connections outside this site and scales the display to the frame) and keep the saved game in the browser's local storage, under a key of its own, instead of IndexedDB. The licence texts, the source, the patch and the build script are linked from this page.