Gloaming

What you'll build

Dusk is falling on a small walled square, and the lamps are out. You're the lamplighter: move from lamp to lamp and light each one before the dark — a cold draught drifting through the square — snuffs them out. Light them all and the night is held back. Run out of lives and night falls.

A single screen, one character, drawn entirely in the Spectrum's attribute colour — in the lineage of Ultimate's 1983 single-screen classics (Jetpac, Pssst, Cookie): small, finished, and complete. It's the first game you finish in assembly, built on the foundations from Meet the Machine.

Why it's small on purpose

Gloaming earns its place by being complete, not ambitious. It introduces only the two load-bearing techniques a first game needs — a frame-locked game loop, and a cell-based moving sprite with collision — and nothing heavier. Everything later games add (smooth movement, masking, depth) is deliberately held back, so you can stand back at the end and say: I finished a game, in assembly.

It's also the root of the track's "build the simple version first" approach: the jerky cell-step movement, the single beeper blip, the coloured-pip score — each is the honest "before" that a later game revisits and upgrades.

Where it sits

After Meet the Machine, before Shadowkeep. All twenty units are complete — from the first attribute write to a finished game verified on real hardware.