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Mini Lights Out
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About the game
Mini Lights Out is a puzzle on a grid of sixteen lights, four by four, that starts in a random pattern of on and off. The goal is to switch them all off. Pressing a light switches it off, but it also flips the four lights around it, above, below, left and right: the ones that were on go off and the ones that were off come on.
The grid wraps around its edges, as if the left side were glued to the right and the top to the bottom, so every press always affects five lights. Thanks to that wrap, every starting pattern can be solved, and the game can draw a new one at random each time. There is one more rule: you may only press lights that are on. A counter on the right counts your moves, and if it reaches 100 the puzzle is lost and you go back to the title.
Playing it here
This is a CHIP-8 program. CHIP-8 is a small virtual machine from 1977, created for hobby computers such as the COSMAC VIP, and people still write new games for it today. Mini Lights Out targets the original CHIP-8 and was made for Octojam 6, a CHIP-8 game jam held in October 2019. It runs here in the Octo emulator. Click Play and press any key to get a puzzle.
F2 saves the state of the emulator at any moment and F4 brings it back. On a touch screen, Octo shows the sixteen keys on screen.
Controls
The left side of the keyboard is laid out like the grid:
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| 1 2 3 4 | press a light in the top row |
| Q W E R | press a light in the second row |
| A S D F | press a light in the third row |
| Z X C V | press a light in the bottom row |
| any key on the title screen | start a new puzzle |
| F2 / F4 | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Unlit lights do not count. Pressing a light that is already off only gives a short buzz; it does not change the board or use up a move.
Work light by light. A useful habit is to pick one lit light, switch it off, then deal with the neighbours it flipped before moving on. The author's notes describe this approach as the key to solving the game.
The arrow keys are grid keys too. Here the arrows stand in for W, A, S and D, so they press lights in the middle rows. Stick to the letter keys to avoid surprises.
Credits and licence
Mini Lights Out was created by Tobias V. Langhoff and written in Octo, the CHIP-8 assembler and emulator by John Earnest (MIT licence). Its author placed it in the public domain under CC0 1.0 through the Chip8 Community Archive. The licence text is linked from this page.