Nightside

• Arrow keys or WASD walk. A gamepad stick works, and on a phone you can touch anywhere and the figure walks toward your finger.
• The air readout is in seconds, not a percentage. What it says is how long you have.
• ACT ONE — THE BASE. Find a power node in the dark; its standby light pulses red. Stand at it and HOLD Enter until the bar above your head fills.
• A restarted node lights its whole section permanently, and standing in light refills your tank. Light all four and the floor hatch unseals.
• ACT TWO — THE DEEP. Nothing down here was ever wired. Press Esc (or B) to DROP A BEACON: a permanent pool of light that refills a little and that the dark will not cross.
• Beacons are finite. Where you spend them is the route, and you have to come back out along it.
• Salvage is worth the detour: canisters are air, charge packs are beacons, cores buy upgrades at the terminal, and recorders are somebody's last log.
• Stand at the terminal and press left/right to choose an upgrade, Enter to fit it. The world does not pause while you shop.
• Drifters will not cross lit ground. A Clutch is still until you pass close in the dark. A HOLLOW does not fear light — it eats your beacons.
• Nothing can be killed and nothing kills you outright. Being caught costs air, which is the only currency here.
• ACT THREE — THE SURFACE. Nothing refills, everything drains twice as fast, and the airlock behind you is the only refuge. Reach the relay array.
• Leaving the tab pauses the game, and the clock stops with it.

The far side of the Moon is not the dark side — it gets as much sun as the near side does. What it never gets is Earth. No Earthlight, no line of sight home, and during the fourteen-day lunar night nothing overhead but stars. Every real proposal for a far-side base has had to answer the same question this game is built on: what happens when the power fails and the nearest help is three days away. Nightside reduces that to its smallest honest form. You have a lamp, a tank, and four dead nodes. Light restores air; distance costs it. There is no combat, no enemy, and nothing chasing you. The pressure is entirely arithmetic, and the arithmetic is visible the whole time.

1. 2.0.0 2026-08-25
   • Act II: THE DEEP. The ice levels below the base, never wired for power, where the only light is what you carry.
   • BEACONS. Finite, portable, permanent where you drop them — the wager becomes a route you draw yourself.
   • Salvage: canisters, charge packs, cores, and recorders carrying the site's last logs.
   • Four upgrades at the terminal. None is a pure number increase except the Rebreather, and that one is on purpose.
   • Three things in the dark. Drifters refuse lit ground; a Clutch wakes when you pass close; a Hollow eats your beacons and never touches you.
   • There is still no combat and there never will be — light is the only answer to everything.
   • A full ending, and seven logs that buy nothing.
2. 1.1.0 2026-08-16
   • Act 2: the surface. An open plain outside the base, with the relay array at the far end.
   • The oxygen rule inverts outside — nothing refills, the drain doubles, and the airlock is the only refuge.
   • A scripted opening explains what happened. Always skippable, and it terminates on its own if no key is ever pressed.
   • New HUD: an edge waypoint with distance in metres, an objective line, and a low-air vignette that is motion-gated and under 3 Hz.
   • Backgrounds, terrain and props generated from a single style bible so one prompt change restyles the whole level.
3. 1.0.0 2026-08-16
   • First playable. Eight-direction walking character, Wang-tiled base, scrolling camera, suit lamp and a compositing darkness pass.
   • Animation phase advances with distance travelled rather than on a timer, so the feet match the ground at every speed.
   • Facing direction is sticky past the sector boundary, which removes the flicker an eight-way sprite gets on a held diagonal.
   • Tile art palette-locked to 48 colours shared across all eight facings: the generator's own palette stability measured 30-50% per cycle before locking.
   • Wang corner bit order measured from the tile pixels rather than assumed; the assumed order was the exact reverse and would have mirrored every map.