Heliograph — carry the light through the longest night, and finish a message a machine could never end

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam Link to Game Home Page - here Link to Game Docs - here What I Built Heliograph is a short 2D solar-noir platformer. You are a courier who wakes with no memory on the summer solstice , the longest day of the year — the one day the sun is supposed to never quite die. A cracked handheld computer flickers on in your hand and tells you the truth: tonight the sun will set, and a relay station full of light has one unfinished message left to send before the dark. Sunlight is your battery and your map — it refills your light cell and reveals the route. Shadow hides you from the station's machines, but it slowly drains you, so you can never simply wait. Every screen is a negotiation between expose, charge, traverse, hide, decode. The core puzzle is a light relay . Most of the station is dark. Standing in a live sunbeam, you trip a relay that throws the light forward — a beam snaps to the next aperture, that beam comes alive, its cipher glyph becomes readable, and the chain continues until the final relay powers the exit terminal. You are literally carrying the light deeper into the ruin one beam at a time. Skip a relay and the road ahead stays dark and unsolvable. The jam theme is the solstice — light and darkness, and the passage of time. Heliograph is built entirely out of that tension: Light vs. darkness is the core mechanic, not a backdrop. Light is power, information, and danger at once; shadow is safety that costs you. The passage of time is the antagonist. The whole game is one long solstice day bleeding into night, and the message has to leave the station before dark. The station is a heliograph — a real Victorian device that sent Morse code by flashing sunlight off mirrors. Light is the message. There are no cutscene dumps. ACE, your handheld guide, narrates the opening, and after you decode each level's keyword — SUN → ARC → LUX → RAY — ACE decrypts one more fragment of the truth: why you're here, that you may not