Lanternfall Rogue Survivor
Live
Every 10-minute run is a fight to reach dawn. Your keeper attacks on its own while you move, dodge and pick upgrades, building weapons and spells that evolve into bigger ones. The whole map is dark except the circle around your lantern, and some monsters can only be hurt inside that light. Play it in the browser or on Android.
- Status
- Live
- Category
- Game
- Started
- Nov 2026
- Launched
- Nov 2026
- Stack
- Phaser 3, TypeScript, Vite
- AI
- Claude Code, Flux 1.1 Pro (Replicate)
Lanternfall Rogue Survivor
A dark fantasy survival game where monster hordes wait just beyond your lantern's glow. Keep the light alive until dawn.
Story
Problem
Horde survival games are fun, but most of them look and play the same: a bright field, a swarm of enemies and a build that plays itself.
Idea
Turn off the lights. Make the lantern the heart of the game, so where your light reaches decides what you can see and what you can hurt.
Solution
A night-time survival game where the dark deepens as the run goes on, some monsters can only be hurt inside your light, and on the marsh map your lantern oil burns down unless you light beacons.
Key features
- Lantern darkness: only the light around your keeper shows the map, and Shades can only be hurt inside it
- Nine weapons and spells, each with an evolution, from chain lightning to sweeping sunbeams and gloom wells
- Two maps: Dusk Meadow and Hollow Marsh, where lantern oil burns down and beacons refill it
- Four keepers, two art styles (Classic and Blocky) and three difficulties
- Bosses, stampedes and a horde of up to 420 monsters at once
- A Daily Run with a shared seed, plus permanent upgrades, boosts and lantern flames bought with embers
- All sounds and music made in code, with monsters calling from the dark and a heartbeat at low health
Screenshots
How it was built
The game logic is a plain TypeScript simulation that runs at a fixed 60 steps a second with a seeded random generator, kept apart from the Phaser renderer. That makes runs repeatable, so a playtest bot can play dozens of runs to check the balance, and the tests can check the rules without a browser.
All content lives in data: heroes, enemies, weapons, waves, maps and even the two art styles are theme files. The in-game sprites are drawn as small character grids and turned into one texture when the game starts, and every sound and the music are synthesised with Web Audio.
The web version runs on Cloudflare Pages, and Capacitor wraps the same build as an Android app. Claude Code wrote most of the code; the key art and store screenshots are my own designs, and a few backgrounds and the first app icon were made with Flux.
Devlog
Lanternfall is out on Google Play
After a week of building, Lanternfall: Rogue Survivor went live on Google Play with a store listing in 87 languages, new designed screenshots and a feature graphic. The same day brought four redesigned keepers, two new charms and a back-button exit prompt, and the web version is still free to play in the browser.
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