While the Lantern Burns

You woke up in a cave. Somewhere up there is daylight. Down here, things are moving in the dark.

Find your way through winding passages and monster-filled chambers with an old lantern and a musket. Keep the light alive, listen for approaching footsteps, and try to have your gun ready before something gets too close. Both tools are hand-operated and a little finicky. Preparing a shot takes time, especially when something is preparing to eat you.


*While the Lantern Burns* is a short, atmospheric cave escape game with hand-drawn art, flickering light and plenty of noises you probably don't want to investigate.

HEADPHONES HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Sound is a big part of the atmosphere.

Controls

- WASD / Arrow keys: Move
- E / Enter: Pick up or put down an item
- Left click: Interact with the item UI, or fire while aiming
- Left click + drag: Move the ramrod
- R / Shift / Space: Light the musket's fuse
- Hold right mouse: Aim
- Escape: Pause

How to play

I wanted the game to teach you how to use the lantern and musket through gameplay and interactive hints, but I ran out of time to get that right. Some steps are easy to miss, especially with the musket.

If you're stuck, here's a short guide to using the lantern and musket.

Developer notes

I made my usual terrible mistake of leaving the actual level design and gameplay until the last hour. As usual, I bit off more than I could chew and spent pretty much the whole weekend drawing, experimenting and polishing the mechanics and interactions. I spent way too much time with the player character, the design of the interactions with the lantern and the musket, the sounds and atmosphere, 3D effects, normal maps for the rocks, random texture for the ground...

At the end I barely scrambled to make the main level, and it shows. I don't like it. It did not get the amount of attention I wanted. The game, as a result of that, is clunky, hard to understand, it does not explain itself properly to players, and fighting monsters is either too easy or too hard.

Still, I learned a ton and had so much fun making this. I tried many new things in Godot, for example, this was my first ever 2D-sprites-in-3D-world game, and my second ever 3D game. It is also my first ever atmospheric game (or horror? is it horror? I don't know). But I don't think the game is that good for anyone else than me.

Screenshots

Tools used

(See the GitHub page)

- Godot - My trusty game engine I love.
- Procreate - Drawing 2D art for the game.
- Notion - Writing notes, planning.
- VS Code - My code editor of choice.
- Codex - Coding agent writing the code (I make the choices).
- ElevenLabs - Used their audio samples for sound effects and ambience in the game.
- Ableton - Editing audio, composing sounds, layering.
- LosslessCut - Quick cropping of audio samples.

AI disclosure

Inspired by this post I found in the Ludum Dare newsfeed, for transparency, here's how this game was made.

AI agent (Codex) was used to help me make this game. I'm not gonna pretend I could have achieved this much all on my own. Codex did the coding and setting up things in Godot. Just so you know, I could have done that myself (see my past entries). I instead focused on other parts, mainly the art and the atmosphere. All art you see in the game is mine and was drawn by me in Procreate.

I also used audio samples from ElevenLabs. Some sounds come from their library, some I generated on my own. Each of them I had to then process, cut, slice, edit, layer... In my view, this is the same as downloading audio samples from anywhere else. But sharing this so you can make up your own mind.

I hope you'll give my game a fair chance and not instantly close or give it all 0s, just because I mentioned "AI". Read the linked post above for context. Thanks. That being said, as I wrote above, I don't think it's that good.