The Wizard's Data

About the game

For three years a dragon has slept on the king's treasure, and for three years the wizard Otrux watched it, measuring how long it slept, how sharp its claws were and how hot its breath burned. He fed every number into a giant machine of gears and clocks, and then he died on the eve of the answer. His data is lost somewhere inside the machine. You are his apprentice, and it is your job to get it back.

The Wizard's Data is a platform game built around small rooms. Each room is a puzzle in how to get from the entrance to the exit door: ride a chain lift, step on a button that opens a gate, jump between hanging platforms, dodge the bats that fly at you, cross a lava pit or an electric floor at the right moment. Three of the rooms hold a coloured data scroll (blue, green and red). When you grab one, the game pauses for a moment to show it, and the quest moves on.

The game is short, with a dozen rooms and a story told in picture slides at the start and the end. Your progress is remembered in your browser.

Playing it here

The first time you click Play the page downloads the Python runtime and the pygame library (about 23 MB), which takes a few seconds; after that a "click to start" message appears, and one more click starts the game with sound. The download is kept by your browser, so every other pygame game on the site opens faster. Nothing is loaded from other sites.

Controls

Tips

Watch the bats before you jump. They move toward you when you are close and calm down when you are not. Wait for a safe moment instead of racing through.

Use the buttons. If a gate or door will not open, look for a button on the floor or wall. Some rooms need two.

Jumping is the whole game. You can steer a little in the air, so line up your jump on the edge and let it carry you.

Frequently asked questions

Does it save my progress? Yes. The game remembers the room you reached, in your browser. Clearing the site's data erases it.

Does it work on a phone? It needs a keyboard, so it is meant for a computer.

Why does the first start take a while? The page loads Python and the game libraries. Your browser keeps them, so the next visit starts much faster.

Is it free? Yes. The game's code and artwork are dedicated to the public domain (CC0).

Credits and licence

The Wizard's Data was made by Team Chimera (mit-mit and Lucid Design Art) for PyWeek 20 in 2015. Story and design by mit-mit and Lucid Design Art; programming by mit-mit; artwork by Lucid Design Art. The artwork and code are CC0. The music, "Pippin the Hunchback" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. Sounds: "Acid Burn Sounds" by Mikhog (Michael Baradari), "Electrocution" by Jameswrowles and "Button and Switches" by FreqMan are CC BY 3.0; "Squeaky Rat" by qubodup is CC0. The original game used the font "Celtic Bit" by Mirz123, which is CC BY-ND and cannot be modified or redistributed with changes, so the lettering of the title screen and the pause screen was redrawn for this site with fonts under the SIL Open Font License 1.1: Jacquard 24 and Jacquard 12 (the title and "Paused") and Jersey 10 (the controls list), all by The Soft Type Project Authors. The version served here is ported from Python 2 to Python 3 (integer division, xrange), its main loop is asynchronous (the browser needs it), progress is saved in your browser and the Quit buttons do nothing in a web page; the changes, the original zip and the redrawn images are linked from the Licenses page. The game runs on pygame-ce (LGPL-2.1) and CPython, whose licences and source are also linked from the Licenses page.