Shiny

About the game

A line of ground blocks runs across a wide, short screen, with a yellow sun over the middle. Tiny red people enter from the left and stroll along it towards the right edge. In sunshine they walk slowly. Hold the button and clouds slide in from the sides: the people break into a run, but the rain brings occasional heavy dark drops, and where one of them lands the block shrinks away to nothing and leaves a hole. A person who runs into a hole falls out of the game.

Release the button and the sun returns, the clouds move off and the blocks grow back, so a hole can be closed again in about a second, if nobody has walked into it. The game is a matter of timing: rain when the way ahead is solid and you want people to hurry, sun when a hole has opened and has to be filled.

The last block at the right edge slowly crumbles as time goes by, and a little more with every press of the button. Each person who gets across it scores the size that block still has times the number of people still in that group, so rushing a big group over a healthy block is the way to score. The group gets one person bigger each time all of them make it, and shrinks for everyone who falls. When nobody is left, the game is over.

Shiny is one of the mini-games that Kenta Cho, who works as ABA Games, makes with his crisp-game-lib library. There are no image or sound files: the graphics are drawn by the code, and the sound effects and music are generated while you play.

Playing it here

Click Play, then click, tap or press Space inside the game to start. Nothing is installed or sent anywhere. The best score at the top right is only remembered while the page stays open. The window is wider than most of the other mini-games.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Listen for the big drops. A heavy drop makes a hole where it lands. Release before the people get there and the ground will have grown back.

Do not press without a reason. Each press also wears down the final block, which is what the points depend on.

Bigger groups score more. One person is worth little, so keeping everyone alive until the final block is the way to a high score.

Credits and licence

Shiny was made by Kenta Cho (ABA Games) and published under the MIT licence in the crisp-game-lib-11-games repository. The licence texts of the game, of crisp-game-lib and of the libraries that come with it are linked from this page. The game files are served as published, with only the starting page replaced so that nothing is loaded from other sites.