Micro Quest!

About the game

In Micro Quest!, a knight has been sent to rid a tower of the slimes that have moved in, and, as the game puts it, he has also been missing the sunset a lot. The tower is a climb of seven rooms. Each one starts at a staircase on one side and ends at another staircase leading up, and in between stand slimes that hop towards you and spiked rollers that patrol back and forth.

The knight has three hearts, shown in the top corner. A slime that touches him knocks him back and takes a heart, and losing all three sends him back to the start of the room. Slimes only notice him once he gets close, and his sword beats one in three hits, knocking it back each time. The spiked rollers cannot be fought at all: touching one sends the knight straight back to the start of the room. Reach the last staircase and the knight finally gets his reward.

It is a small game, meant to be finished in a few minutes.

Playing it here

Micro Quest! was made for WASM-4, a fantasy console: an imaginary handheld with a 160 by 160 screen, four colours, a D-pad and two buttons, for which independent developers write new games. It was written in Nelua for the first WASM-4 game jam, in January 2022, and runs here in the official WASM-4 runtime. Click Play and the first room starts right away. The game has no sound.

There is nothing to save, but Enter opens the WASM-4 menu, where you can save and load the state while the page is open (2 and 4 do the same directly). A gamepad works too, and on touch screens an on-screen D-pad and buttons appear.

Controls

Space or V also works as X.

A few things worth knowing

Face the slime before you swing. The sword hits on the side the knight is facing, so turn towards a slime first and strike as it comes in.

Getting hit pushes you back. Every hit throws the knight a step away from the slime. Near a spiked roller, that push can be the more dangerous part.

Let the rollers help. They bounce back and forth between the walls and flatten any slime in their way, so a slime lured into a roller's path is one less to fight. Wait for a roller to pass, then cross behind it.

Credits and licence

Micro Quest! was created by André L. Alvares, who wrote the code in Nelua and drew the pixel art and the final picture. It is released under the Mozilla Public License 2.0, and the source code of version 1.0.1 is hosted alongside the game. The compiled game also contains code from the Nelua standard library (MIT licence) and the WASM-4 bindings (ISC licence). It runs here in the WASM-4 runtime (ISC licence). The licence texts and the source code are linked from this page.