twilight.infinite

About the Game

In this game, you try to guide a character through a dark, foreboding, maze-like dream.  The game is organized into levels, each of which are standalone, randomly generated mazes.  There is a time limit that counts down in the top-left corner - once that timer hits zero, your score starts to run down.  Once both your time remaining and your score hits zero, it's game over.

As you go deeper, the amount of time you gain for completing a level as well as the amount of light generated by the player will decrease.   The goal is to survive for as long as possible as you make your way ever-deeper into the labyrinth of twilight.

About the Project

A project built in an engine constructed for a mini game jam.  This was an opportunity for me to learn Visual Studio ('cause previous projects have all been Linux) and play with a new 2D graphics framework called Simple2D.  I'm reasonably happy with how things turned out given the 72-hour constraint.

Code is written in C++.  I use QueryPerformanceTimer, which means that there isn't a Linux version ... but otherwise there isn't really anything that would bind this application to Windows.  I may look into a port to other platforms eventually (just for fun).

The mazes are procedural - I used a really simple little recursive driller to make 'em.  All mazes are 36 tiles wide by 18 tiles tall.  The mazes are generated with one entrance and one exit - the exit is guaranteed to be a specific distance away from the entrance, but otherwise the placement is random.

The lighting effect is a combination of a few different things - a shader, a simple light calculation, and the way the assets are made.  The shader is a random dither with a time-based component - the time gives a little variation to the way the dither works (making things more visually interesting).  The shader is applied to all textures, and clamps colors to black, white, or a dark shade of red.

The light calculation is a little flood-fill algorithm that runs and applies an ever-decreasing illumination value to tiles within a specific distance from the player, with light permitted to take a turn.  Walls are easier to illuminate than floors, because the wall textures have a much higher white component.

The assets are built with quite a bit of gray - the dithering algorithm will apply differently to the large gray sections over time, giving them a little bit of a twinkle effect.

In any event, I hope you enjoy the game, and thanks for taking a look!