Last Light

Inspiration

Last Light was inspired by the tension of trying to save something precious with limited time and resources. We wanted to combine the satisfying collection-and-crafting loop of survival games with the immediate readability of a short mobile arcade session. The result is a story about one small salvage drone defending a colony’s final evacuation beacon against a deadly storm.

What it does

Last Light is a portrait-oriented survival and resource-management game. The player pilots a salvage drone, collects energy and scrap, avoids environmental threats, and crafts defenses while the storm grows increasingly dangerous.

A complete session lasts 75 seconds and contains five escalating waves. Players can build sentries and barriers, trigger an emergency discharge, and select powerful upgrades during two Stormbreak moments. The goal is simple: keep the drone and evacuation beacon alive until the final evacuation launches.

How we built it

We prompt-built the prototype with AI and iterated through repeated playtesting and focused improvement passes. The game was created as a Three.js and HTML5 web experience with mobile-friendly touch controls.

All gameplay, interface logic, visual effects, progression systems, and onboarding are assembled into a readable index.html. Three.js and every visual asset are bundled locally, allowing the finished build to run without external network access.

Challenges we ran into

The greatest challenge was communicating the game clearly on a small portrait screen. Early versions did not adequately explain the objective, and resources, hazards, and defenses were too difficult to distinguish during play.

We addressed this with a guided first-time experience, clearer silhouettes and colors, stronger danger indicators, improved game assets, contextual messages, and more visible feedback. Balancing a meaningful survival arc inside a 75-second session was another challenge: pressure needed to rise quickly without overwhelming a new player.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that Last Light became a complete game rather than a collection of disconnected mechanics. It has a clear beginning, an escalating middle, meaningful upgrade choices, and definite victory and defeat states.

We are especially proud of the first-time player experience, the cohesive storm-survival atmosphere, the readable visual language, and the amount of strategic choice contained in a short mobile session. The entire prototype is also self-contained, lightweight, and playable offline.

What we learned

We learned that clarity is more important than the number of features. A mechanic only becomes valuable when players understand what it does, why it matters, and how the game responds to it.

We also learned that AI-assisted development works best as an iterative conversation: define a clear experience, test the result, identify the weakest moment, and prompt targeted improvements. Frequent playtesting helped turn broad ideas into specific decisions about controls, pacing, feedback, and visual hierarchy.

What's next for Last Light

The next step is broader playtesting and balance refinement. Future versions could introduce additional storm regions, enemy behaviors, drone modules, defensive structures, upgrade combinations, and persistent colony progression.

We would also like to deepen the story by showing which evacuation ships and colonists the player saves. With expanded creation tools, Last Light could grow into a replayable survival campaign in which every successful run helps rebuild humanity’s final refuge.

Built With

• chat
• gpt