Sublevel

Brick-lit corridors, three things that want you dead, and a torch that only reaches so far.

Panel: 52x16 · Launch it from the menu — it is not in the rotation

A shooter on sixteen rows

A raycaster draws one vertical strip of wall per screen column, so a 52-pixel
panel wants exactly 52 rays. The letterbox that makes everything else on this
display cramped is the one shape this technique naturally produces.

What makes it a game rather than a walk is what is in the corridors with you.

The light is the point

Brightness falls off with distance and with how far a column sits from the
centre of your view, so the light reads as something you are carrying rather
than as the room being lit. The far end of a corridor is genuinely dark.

That is not decoration. It is why a thing stepping out of the dark lands.

The walls are brick — eight to a tile, mortar where the ray crosses a joint,
alternate courses offset by half a brick. The texture coordinate comes free
from the raycast, so it costs nothing and it is the difference between a
corridor and a slab of colour.

Three things want you dead

Not one creature in three colours — each has its own silhouette, because at
eight pixels tall a palette swap is not a different animal.

• Grunt — horned and hunched with claws out, two hits, middling speed, dark
  red.
• Runner — small head, long splayed legs, one hit and it drops. Quick, and
  sickly green. These are the ones that get behind you.
• Brute — huge shoulders with its head sunk between them, four hits, slow,
  and it swings for nearly twice what a grunt does. Violet, and visibly bigger
  before it reaches you.

They roam when they cannot see you and hunt when they can — and they hear you
from five cells away, so a wall is cover, not safety. Runners appear on the
second floor, brutes on the fourth.

When something hits you the edge of the screen flashes red on the side it
came from. On a 66-degree view most of what hurts you is behind you, and an
undirected flash tells you nothing.

Only one of them can land a hit at a time, with a moment before the next — so
being cornered is dangerous but never instant, and backing out of a room is
always worth trying.

Five guns, and the time it takes to reload them

• Pistol — one shot a third of a second, never runs out, no magazine. You
  always have it, so being out of ammo is a step down rather than a dead end.
• Shotgun — wide, hits up to three at once, two in the magazine.
• Rifle — nine shots a second, narrow, eight in the magazine.
• Minigun — eighteen a second with the barrels turning, thirty rounds, and
  the longest reload in the game. Hold it down and hope.
• Railgun — one round, four damage, and it goes through up to five of them
  in a line. Then you are standing there reloading.

Everything but the pistol has a magazine, and emptying it drops the gun out of
the bottom of the view while it reloads. For as long as it is down you cannot
shoot. That is the whole reason the railgun's one enormous shot is not simply
the best option in every situation — it is also why the pistol, which never
reloads, is worth going back to.

Ammo is a shared pool. The bottom right shows what is in the gun brightly over
what is left in the pool dimly, and during a reload it becomes a bar filling
up, so there is something to watch while you wait.

L1 and R1 cycle between the guns you are carrying. Lying about on each
floor: ammo, a medkit, and a gun you do not have yet. They pulse so
they catch the eye at the end of a dark corridor.

On the clock's three buttons there is no cycle — SELECT fires and holding it
quits — so there, walking over a gun simply equips it.

Floors

Clear every creature and the next floor builds itself — a fresh maze, seeded,
and one more thing in it than last time, up to nine. You get a little health
back on the way down. There is no final floor; the score is how far you got
and how many you took with you, and both are on the screen when you die.

Controls

• LEFT / RIGHT — turn
• SELECT — fire. Again to restart when you are dead.
• Gamepad — the D-pad walks and turns, A fires, B backs up, the
  shoulders change gun and the triggers strafe, which is the one thing
  three buttons cannot offer

There is no crosshair. It went in as two dots, then as a proper cross, and both
sat in the middle of a sixteen-row view competing with whatever you were trying
to look at. The bore of the gun is directly below centre and the tracer runs up
through it, which is as much aiming reference as this panel can afford.

While nobody is playing

It plays itself — hunts, shoots, and walks the maze. Any input takes it back
and starts you a fresh run, and once you are playing it never takes over again,
however long you stand still.

Settings

• Sound effects (on) — shots, hits, the growl of something out of sight
• Music (on) — a low drone, well under the effects