Inspiration
Every survival game asks you to hide from something. I wanted one where the thing you hide from is the dark, and the sun is the only shelter there is.
ANTUMBRIS is set on a moon that keeps one face to its star. There is a permanent day side, a permanent night side, and a line between them you can walk across. The ore is richer past that line. That is the whole tension: everything worth having is somewhere the light is not.
What it does
You are alone on the lit face of that moon, in a suit that is losing heat. Sunlight is the only thing holding the cold off. Ore is heavy, and carrying it makes the cold bite harder, so every trip is a bet about how much you can take and how far you can get from the light before the suit stops keeping up.
Bank twelve loads at the shelter before the sky closes. Four eclipses cross during a run and the last one is the deepest. Get caught out in that and the suit freezes up.
Drag anywhere to look. Walk with the on-screen stick or WASD, jump, and use the act button or E to take ore and to bank it inside the shelter. The dial at the top of the screen points home, shows how far out you are, and picks the camera.
How we built it
On an engine written for it. ANTUMBRIS runs on AEON3D, a WebGL2 renderer built in-house for this project, with no libraries, no frameworks and no third-party code of any kind. The whole game ships as one readable HTML file with its assets beside it, and it runs with the network switched off.
It is a phone build first. Fixed portrait, thumb-driven, laid out so the two things you need constantly, the suit and the compass, sit in the corners as squares, and everything else lives in a drawer you open when you want it.
The art is deliberately low-poly and faceted. Colour carries information rather than decoration: gold is warmth and the sun, cyan is the light ore and the visor, violet is the far side and what grows there.
Challenges we ran into
Making cold legible. A number ticking down is not a feeling, and a screen covered in text is not a game. The interface went through several passes before it stopped explaining itself and started just showing the two things that matter.
Keeping portrait honest. The build locks to portrait, and a phone turned on its side very nearly broke that in a way nothing on a desktop would ever reveal.
Trusting the wrong instruments. More than once the thing that was wrong was not the game but the check I was using to test it, which quietly reported success about something it was not actually looking at.
What we learned
A check that cannot fail is not a check. The bugs that cost the most time were never the ones the tests caught. They were the ones the tests said were fine. The fix that stuck was never another patch, it was an invariant that made the whole class of mistake impossible.
And the interface lesson: cut a line of text and the game usually gets clearer.
What's next for ANTUMBRIS
More reason to cross the line. The far side currently pays better and asks more, and that trade is the seed of the real game: routes, caches, and a suit you choose how to spend along with missions and other characters.
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