A solstice codebreaking game for the June Solstice Game Jam.
You are the night-shift cryptanalyst at a remote listening station on June 21. Four encrypted transmissions must be broken before the sun goes down. Between ciphers, you talk to C — a colleague on the teletype line — and at dawn you must answer Turing's question: was C human, or machine?
Play it: newdawnera.github.io/solsticegame — or open index.html in any modern browser. No build, no dependencies, one file.
- Daylight is your resource. It drains in real time (~8 minutes of sun). Wrong transmissions cost 20s, hints cost 45s. If the sun sets, you finish by starlight — the ending remembers.
- Four ciphers, rising difficulty: Caesar shift → lens cipher (mirror, half-turn, or backwards) → Vigenère (find the keyword from narrative clues) → rotor cipher (progressive shift, an Enigma nod). The dial shift, lens, and rotor start are drawn fresh every watch, and the hints adapt to whatever was drawn.
- The Turing Test, playable. C chats with you between levels and never says what it is. At the end, you decide.
- A score that follows the sun. The procedural soundtrack (one of three tracks, picked per visit) dims in tone as daylight fades. Music volume is adjustable independently of the game's sound effects.
- Hosted proxy — a Cloudflare Worker (
proxy-worker/) holds the Gemini key server-side, locked to this game's origin and rate-limited per IP. Visitors get live AI with zero setup. - Bring your own key — click ⚙ KEY in-game and paste a free AI Studio key. It stays in your browser (localStorage) and is sent only to Google.
- Scripted fallback — no proxy, no key, no problem: C speaks from a script and the game stays fully playable.
The ending honestly discloses which C you talked to.
- Main theme — solstice, light vs. darkness as the core resource, the passage of time
- Best Ode to Alan Turing — codebreaking mechanics, the Imitation Game as the narrative climax, epilogue honoring Turing
- Best Google AI Usage — Gemini API embedded as the character C (the Turing Test, run on an actual AI), behind a security-gated proxy
