Vespera: The Somber

A darkly satirical top-down action-roguelite built for js13kGames 2026 (Theme: Unicorns and Rainbows).

Play the Game Live

🎮 Play Live on GitHub Pages

Premise

The Grand Concordat of Radiant Serenity has criminalized naps, rain, and minor melancholies. Play as Vespera, a grumpy obsidian unicorn with a 300-year migraine, dismantling the Solar Spire to claim 500 years of uninterrupted sleep.

Controls

Desktop

• WASD / Arrows — Move
• Mouse — Aim; Left Click — Umbral Lance
• Right Click — Somber Rainbow (bullet-absorbing Grump Arc; inflicts GRUMPY)
• Q — Void Scythe (AoE + knockback)
• Space / Shift — Phase Dash (i-frame dodge)
• Space / Enter — Advance dialogue & read Edict Shrines
• P — Pause / options · M — Mute · N — Reduced Motion

Mobile (touch)

• Left half — drag to move · Right half — drag to aim & auto-fire
• On-screen buttons — Rainbow (◗), Scythe (Q), Dash (⇢)

(Landscape orientation recommended.)

Features (v1.5)

• Procedurally generated runs — room order, count, enemy mix, and Edicts vary each run.
• Cynical Boons with a shard-funded reroll at altars.
• Full ability kit: buffed Somber Rainbow (fast, wide arc), and a Void Scythe forward slam.
• Juicy combat — enemy hit-flash, plus visible bullet-absorption on the Rainbow.
• Dramatic three-phase boss duel with a slow-motion finishing blow.
• Sim pauses during dialogue, so banter lands without unfair damage.
• 8 Edict shrines of dark satire, shown at random.
• Room-type visual tinting and a procedural victory lullaby ("The Eternal Nap").
• Pause / options overlay, mute, and a Reduced Motion toggle (auto-detects prefers-reduced-motion).
• Best clear-time & shard tracking saved to localStorage.
• Responsive canvas that scales to any viewport.

Technical Details

• Pure HTML5 Canvas 2D procedural rendering (zero external image assets).
• 100% procedural Web Audio API sound synthesizer.
• Ships ≤ 13,312 bytes zipped.

Build

The readable, playable source is the root index.html (served directly by GitHub Pages). The competition artifact is produced by minifying + Roadroller-packing it into dist/:

npm install
npm run build   # → dist/index.html + dist/game.zip, asserts the 13,312-byte budget

The build fails (non-zero exit) if the zip exceeds the limit.

License

MIT © sandgraal