Mirage
The spring is real. Go and get it.
The creek has been dry for forty days
The spring on the mesa above the town of Dry Creek has gone quiet. Wren carries the town's water, and there is none left to carry. So she takes Elder Pina's walking staff and climbs: through Red Canyon, up the Cholla Caves for the key to the salt gate, across the Salt Flats and onto the mesa, where the Dust King sits on the spring.
Five rooms, one story, about ten minutes. Scorpions, bats, prickly pears and a king made of dust.
It runs on a computer we built
Mirage is a native app inside Joshua Tree, an operating system written from scratch for PCs and the Raspberry Pi. No engine, no libraries: a few hundred lines of C, its own pixel art and a fixed-point physics loop. The copy on this page is the same C, compiled for your browser.
Played to the end by Duke
Duke, our autopilot for games, reads the state the game prints and plays it by keys alone. Every build of Joshua Tree replays its run and has to finish in exactly the same spot.
All of it is ours
The town, the people, the story, every sprite and every colour. Nothing borrowed, nothing licensed.
Same game everywhere
The PC build, the Pi and this page run one source file. A change to a room shows up in all three.