#overviewIn progress

# story

Lantern is a small roguelike built around one idea: your light is your health bar and your clock at the same time. Every step burns oil, the circle of light shrinks, and the things in the dark get bolder.

Full tanklight reaches 8 tiles
Running lowthe circle closes in
Last dropsone tile, and the dark bites

The rules live in a deterministic Rust core. The same seed always gives the same dungeon, which makes the daily run possible and every bug reproducible. React only draws the game state onto a canvas and adds the flicker.

  1. 1You move or attack
  2. 2The lantern burns oil
  3. 3Monsters take their turn
  4. 4The light shrinks or holds

# screenshots

Lantern screenshot 1
Lantern screenshot 2
Lantern screenshot 3

# features

  • Light as a resource: oil burns every turn, the light radius shrinks from 8 tiles to 1, and the dark bites when it runs out.
  • Eight seeded floors of rooms and corridors, with fog of war and a remembered map.
  • Five monster types plus a boss. Wraiths keep to the edge of your light and close in as it fades.
  • Bump-to-attack combat, XP and levels, potions, oil flasks, blades and mail.
  • Autosaves every turn with permadeath, plus a local top-10 board of best runs.
  • A daily run: the same dungeon for everyone on the same UTC day.
  • Keyboard-first: arrows, WASD, vi keys or the numpad.
  • Tauri 2
  • Rust
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Canvas 2D
  • Vite

# changelog

  1. v0.1.0

    First playable release

    • Eight floors, five monsters and the Warden, items, levels and the Sunstone win.
    • Rust core with 13 unit tests, including connectivity checks across 200 seeds.
    • Autosave, permadeath, high scores and a daily seed.
    • Difficulty tuned with a bot that plays 200 seeds per run.

# roadmap

M1

More to fight

  • Ranged enemies
  • Throwable oil flask that sets an area alight
  • Status effects: poison and fear
M2

Deeper dungeons

  • Generated vaults and secret doors
  • Shops between floors
  • Seed sharing from the title screen
M3

Feel

  • Lantern hiss and ambient sound tied to oil level
  • Hit and death animations
  • Gamepad support
M4

Release

  • Signed and notarised builds with auto-update
  • CI builds for Windows and Linux
  • itch.io page

# requirements

Operating system

  • macOS 11+
  • Windows 10 / 11 (WebView2)
  • Ubuntu 22.04+ (WebKitGTK)

Hardware

  • Any machine from the last decade
  • Around 80 MB of RAM

Also needed

  • Nothing else: no runtime or account needed

# download

Lantern is still in progress. Signed builds for macOS, Windows, Linux arrive with milestone M4. Follow the repository for releases, or build it from source today.

macOS · soonWindows · soonLinux · soon Follow on GitHub →