Difficulty, Floors and the Clock
The three buttons on the start screen change more than the timer. Easy gives you 60 seconds per floor, one sentinel and a three-floor run. Normal drops the clock to 45 seconds, puts two sentinels on the board and adds a fourth floor. Hard leaves you 35 seconds, three sentinels and a five-floor descent. Nothing else moves between the settings — rooms, keys and doors are generated exactly the same way at all three — so difficulty here is purely a question of how much clock you get and how many patrols share the dungeon with you.
The timer is per floor rather than per run. It refills to the full 60, 45 or 35 seconds every time you step through an exit portal, and whatever is left on it at that instant is what the floor bonus is calculated from. If it reaches zero the run ends immediately, with no partial credit for the floor you were halfway through. Your three hearts work the opposite way: they are one pool for the entire run, they carry from floor to floor, and they never refill, so a heart spent on floor one is still missing on floor five.
Every floor fits on a single screen. The dungeon is a 20-by-15 grid of 32-pixel tiles drawn at 640 by 480 with no camera scrolling, so nothing is ever off the edge of the canvas. Each floor starts as solid rock; the generator tries to place six rooms, four to eight tiles wide and three to six tall, rejecting any that would land within two tiles of one already placed, so a floor occasionally ends up with fewer than six. It joins them in sequence with L-shaped corridors, spawns you in the centre of the first room and puts the exit portal in the centre of the last. The exit is always at the far end of that chain, which is why a floor reads as a traverse rather than a search.
How Scoring Actually Works
Every exit portal pays remaining seconds × floor number × 10, and nothing else on the floor is worth points. Clearing floor one with 40 seconds left is 400; the same 40 seconds on floor five is 2,000. Because the multiplier grows and the clock does not, the deep floors are where a run is actually won or lost.
The combo bonus is the one exception to the exit-only rule. When the second key of a floor lands inside the three-second window, the amount flashes in yellow above the arena as COMBO and an orange spark burst comes off the key. The window resets when you descend, so it is one opportunity per floor rather than a chain you can build.
Your best total is stored in your browser and shown on both the start screen and the results screen, and each finished run is offered to the leaderboard — if it lands in the current top ten, a name box appears so you can post it. Casual and Daily runs sit on separate boards, so a seeded daily result never competes with a random one.
Reading the Sentinels
Sentinels are hexagons with a pulsing white core, and they grow with depth — roughly two-thirds of a tile wide on floor one and nearly a full tile by floor five. Their colour is a property of the floor rather than of the individual enemy: red on floor one, then orange, yellow, pink and teal, one for each floor a Hard run can reach.
They never hunt you. A sentinel starts in the middle of a room and walks in a straight line for two fewer steps than that room is wide, then turns to the next direction in a fixed order and starts counting again; a wall turns it early and resets the count. Nothing in that loop reads the player's position, which makes every patrol deterministic and, after one cycle of observation, entirely predictable. They are also slower than you are, so an inconvenient patrol is something to walk around rather than wait out.
Contact costs a heart in two situations. The obvious one is sharing a tile. The other is the swap: walking into the square a sentinel is leaving in the same beat it walks into yours. In a one-tile corridor the swap is the collision that catches people out, because on screen the two of you appear to pass straight through each other. On Hard, two of the three sentinels start in the same rooms as the two keys, so the fastest key route is also the most contested one.
Light, Themes and Feedback
The torch overlay is what turns a fully drawn grid into a dungeon. Each frame a radial gradient is painted over the whole canvas anchored on the explorer: clear at your feet, gently warm-dimmed around halfway out, and near-black by its edge, with a warm additive glow right on the character. The lit radius is about 130 pixels, roughly four tiles, and it flickers a few percent on two overlapping sine waves so the boundary of your light never quite settles. Walls, keys and the portal are all being drawn out there — you simply cannot see them until you are close enough.
Floors are themed on a three-step cycle. Floor one is VOID, a blue-violet chamber; floor two is CIRCUIT in deep green; floor three is REACTOR in burnt amber; a fourth or fifth floor starts the cycle over. When you descend, the new floor's name flashes across the arena — FLOOR 2 — CIRCUIT — and fades after about a second and a half. Individual tiles carry a small deterministic shade jitter with chiselled highlight and shadow edges, so walls read as stacked blocks rather than a flat grid, and keys spin slowly as faceted gems while the portal turns a spiral inside a pulsing ring.
Feedback is layered on top of all that. A key pickup plays a two-note chime and throws fourteen yellow sparks; opening a door drops a sawtooth tone from 280 Hz down to 140; a hit plays a falling buzz with a red burst; and the exit plays a four-note rising arpeggio with a green one. On a phone that supports vibration you also get a short pulse for a key, a longer one for a hit and a double pulse at the portal. If you would rather play silent, the speaker button in the HUD and the M key both toggle sound, and the choice is remembered between sessions.
