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Risky Nav
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About the game
Risky Nav is a short survival game set in a forest at night. Creatures roam between the trees, hunting by following the flow of networks, and you need to find the one safe place: a hidden bunker. You have a navigation system that can show you the way, but it needs to be online, and while it is online you shine like a beacon to everything that is looking for prey.
That one switch is the whole game. With the navigation off, you are almost invisible but you are lost in an enormous dark forest, with only the old arrows on the signs to guide you. With it on, you know where to go and the monsters know where you are. You have to decide when to risk it, for how long, and where you can afford to be seen. The forest is drawn as big blocky tiles and the darkness is part of the design, so what you cannot see matters as much as what you can.
Sebastian Dorn made Risky Nav for js13kGames 2018, where the theme was "offline" and the whole game had to fit in 13 KB. He wrote up the tricks he used to squeeze it in, and the little game shows how much atmosphere you can get from very little.
Playing it here
Click Play, then click inside the game so it receives the keyboard, and press S to start. A short story introduces the tunnel. Walk with the arrow keys, and press O to turn the navigation on and off; a blue line shows the way to the bunker while it is on. If the monsters wear you down, the game ends and R starts again. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Key | Action |
|---|---|
| Arrow keys | walk |
| S | start the game |
| O | navigation online / offline |
| R | try again |
A few things worth knowing
Short bursts. Switch the navigation on, look, and switch it off again. Do not leave it running.
Keep moving. A hit gives you a couple of seconds of safety before the next one can land, so a monster you cannot avoid is not the end if you keep walking.
Read the line. With the navigation on, a blue line shows the way to the bunker, so a few seconds online can be enough to pick a direction.
Credits and licence
Risky Nav was created by Sebastian Dorn. It includes a minimal build of Kontra (Steven Lambert, MIT licence) for the game loop. The game is released under the MIT licence, and the licence texts are linked from this page.