Coldwater

The riser, and the sixteen lanes

The pipe is drawn as a ring of sixteen lanes, and everything that climbs does so inside one of them. You can only be in a lane at a time, so the whole game is which lane you are in and when. Some risers are closed loops you can keep turning around forever; others are open — a C, a trough, a wall — and you can be cornered against an end.

There are sixty-four sections of pipe and one descent walks every one of them: fifteen to a stage, with the stage’s boss bringing the sixteenth, so no two stages are the same pipe twice. They are ordered by depth rather than shuffled — bores, flanges and collars near the surface, then pitting and buckling and hydrate growing into the bore, and at the bottom pipe that has burst, sheared, been crushed flat or given up altogether. The open ones thicken as you go down, four in a stage near the top against eight in the last, which is the descent getting harder in a way you can see rather than one you can only feel.

Depth is a number that counts down from the far end of the pipe to the rim you are standing on. The far end is drawn as a smaller copy of the near one, shrunk towards a vanishing point, which makes the perspective a plain scale rather than true 3D and is why an enemy can sit convincingly between two lanes mid-step.

Eight depth bands, and the colour tells you where you are

A stage is sixteen levels, so the shape changes every level and the colour changes every sixteen. It walks a natural gradient down from daylight green through teal into the deep blue of Midnight, which is the anchor colour and the emptiest, best-looking part of the descent.

Then it breaks. The Plume is sodium orange, The Wall is pale hydrate ice and Coldwater itself is warning red, because that is where the site’s own heat starts and the water stops being ordinary. The background stays black throughout — every line is drawn three times with additive blending, which only works on black, and below about 650 feet there is no sunlight to render anyway.

Why there is no villain

A company sank a data centre on the floor of a trench, which is real engineering that people have really done: cold seawater cools the computers for free and the seabed costs nothing to rent. Then the company stopped being the kind of company that answers letters, and the site stayed switched on, because ending the power contract was never written down as anybody’s job.

The trench floor is a methane hydrate field, and hydrate only stays put while it stays cold. Shutting the site down is not hard — it is about four hours of work — but it needs a permit signed by an operator who no longer exists. Geiger is a refrigeration engineer whose ticket lapsed two years ago, and he went down anyway. There is no reward at the bottom; your initials go on a scoreboard that belongs to someone else.

Borrowed, and said so

This started as a deliberate, faithful clone of Atari’s Tempest, and that pass is finished. It owes the original its whole shape — lanes, depth, the spinner, the screen-clearing charge — and the list of places it knowingly diverges is kept in the repository as a contract rather than left to accumulate quietly.

It is called Coldwater rather than Tempest because every game here gives a borrowed design a name of its own. What is being built on top of the clone now is its own game: its own fiction, palette, creatures and controls.