Solstice Cipher: a light-routing puzzle for the June Solstice Game Jam
This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam . What I Built Solstice Cipher is a small browser puzzle game about the longest day, code-breaking, and the turning point between signal and shadow. The player rotates mirrors to route a solstice beam through every cipher node before landing on the final beacon. Each level is a tiny circuit of light: if the beam misses a cipher gate, the beacon does not unlock. The game is inspired by a few June themes from the challenge prompt: the June solstice and the long arc of daylight light versus darkness turning points Alan Turing, code-breaking, and computational thinking Demo Demo video: watch in browser / direct MP4 Playable game: https://desciple88.github.io/solstice-cipher-devto-game-jam/ Source code: https://github.com/desciple88/solstice-cipher-devto-game-jam How It Works The game is a dependency-free HTML/CSS/JavaScript canvas app. The board is a 6x6 grid. A sunbeam enters from one side of the board, moves in one of four directions, and reflects when it hits a mirror: / turns east to north, south to west, and so on \ turns east to south, north to west, and so on Cipher nodes record whether the beam visited them. A level is solved only when the beam has touched all required cipher nodes and then reaches the beacon. Controls Click or tap a mirror to rotate it. Use Reset or press R to restart the level. Use Next or arrow keys to switch levels. Use Hint or press H if the path gets stuck. Why the Turing Angle I wanted the Alan Turing category to feel like part of the mechanics, not just a label. The player is effectively debugging a simple signal machine: change one reflector, trace the path, see which gates activated, and iterate until the message resolves. It is not an Enigma simulator, but it borrows the feeling of signal routing, symbolic gates, and systematic code-breaking. What I Used HTML CSS JavaScript Canvas 2D ffmpeg for the demo capture AI assistance was used while preparing the implementation and write-up. I