Underrun

About the game

Underrun opens on a green terminal screen. The year is 2718, a satellite link has failed and the automation of a remote facility has gone offline, taking the AI, the radiation shields and the power with it. Automated repairs have failed, so someone has to walk in and reboot the systems by hand. That someone is you.

Each level is a maze of corridors and rooms seen from above at a slight angle, almost completely dark. The light comes from the blinking computer terminals, from your own orange glow and above all from your shots, which light up the walls as they fly. Walking into an offline terminal reboots it; once every terminal on the level is back online, the game jumps to the next site. There are three levels, each one more crowded than the last.

The facility is not empty. Small spiders lurk in the dark and rush at you as soon as you come near, and sturdier sentry robots take a lot of hits, follow you around and fire back. Your health is the row of dots in the top left corner, five at most; health packs scattered on the floor restore one dot each. If you lose them all, the terminal reports a failed deployment and restarts the level from a backup.

Dominic Szablewski, who had sponsored js13kGames since the first edition in 2012, made Underrun as his first entry in the 2018 competition, where the whole game had to fit in a 13 kilobyte zip. It draws its 3D scene with WebGL at a deliberately low resolution, builds each level from a tiny image in which every pixel is a wall, a floor, a terminal or an enemy, and generates the soundtrack in the browser with a stripped-down version of the Sonant-X synthesizer.

Playing it here

This is the original competition version, unchanged. Click Play and wait a moment: the game first composes its music, which takes a few seconds, while the intro text scrolls by. Then click inside the game to begin your deployment. The picture fills the width of the frame in a wide format. There is no save: each game starts at the first level, and dying only restarts the level you are on.

Controls

A few things worth knowing

Shoot to see. Your shots light up whatever they pass, so firing into a dark room is the quickest way to find out what is waiting there.

Back off from the spiders. They are fast but weak, and they come straight at you. Walk backwards while shooting and most of them never reach you.

Do not trade shots with a sentry. Sentries take many hits. Keep them at the edge of the light, keep moving sideways, and their shots will miss more often.

Save the health packs. A pack does nothing if your bar is already full, so leave it on the floor until you have taken a hit or two.

Credits and licence

Underrun was created by Dominic Szablewski (phoboslab), who did the concept, graphics and programming. The music and sound effects were made by Andreas Lösch (no-fate.net). The game, including its music and sound, is released under the MIT licence in Dominic Szablewski's repository on GitHub, and the synthesizer that plays them, Sonant-X by Nicolas Vanhoren, Marcus Geelnard and Jake Taylor, is under the zlib licence. The licence texts are linked from this page.