The first door
The tomb opens to the public. Act I, the first age by the river, and a valley still in red draft.
This is the tomb behind Play right now.
In the tomb
Wake
- A swallow flies into a lone desert gate and never comes out. Follow it into an unfinished, painted chamber.
- Pick up the painter's mallet, chip limestone and malachite, and mend the broken quern before it will grind.
- Fire green powder and sand in the old kiln. FIRST BLUE: the first cake of Egyptian blue.
- The frieze on the wall is your quest log: each panel goes from blank to red draft to ink to colour as you work.
- Paint the false door with thirty strokes of blue. Build querns and lay channels (THE PLAN), mend the smashed trough (WATER CARRIES), set a tip hammer and a sand chute (IT RUNS), and watch the door paint itself. THE DOOR OPENS.
Through the door
- The Hall of Doors: a long painted gallery of eight niches under a starred ceiling.
- Paint the first niche and step out onto the River Landing, on the other side of the wall.
- A sealed granary on the floodplain. Paint its door and walk inside: domed halls of grain behind one small door.
The Water Obeys
- Your satchel holds five kinds. When it fills, baskets appear, then labelled jars whose painted dockets read from across the quay.
- Silt traps, reed cutters, a repairable brick mould, a weir that splits one channel into three, a weaver's frame and the shaduf.
- Water carries items for sixteen stones, then lies still. Set a shaduf lift into it and it runs again. THE WATER OBEYS.
- Bricks dry in batches on the guild's drying yard. Choose a machine's recipe on the machine itself. Evaporate natron in pans.
- Raise the Nilometer staff to read any channel's flow. Offer bricks, baskets and blue at Stela I in the Hall.
The valley
- A five by six kilometre valley that streams in as you walk: the river, cliffs, pyramids and temple pylons on the skyline.
- Unrestored land is drawn in red ochre. Restore a region and it inks into colour from its landmark.
- A ten-minute day: dawn, noon, dusk, and lapis nights with gold stars and glowing kilns.
- Outside the gate: the strikers' camp, a dry well, ten seated figures with folded arms.
Voices without words
- A hand inks lines of hieroglyphs on the walls while you rest. Each glyph gains its meaning only once you have learned it.
- Every machine is an instrument on one slow beat. A hungry kiln is a missing note.
- Small secrets in the chamber for those who look closely.
Smoother
- Faster frames, fewer stutters on first sight, and more of the world warmed up behind the loading screen.
On the wall
- The changelog moves into the header. Credits rest at the foot of the wall, and the section links are gone: the page is meant to be walked, top to bottom.
- Lighter and quicker: the first screen arrives in about a third of the bytes, with smaller fonts, sharper-for-their-size images, and a soft preview of every picture while it loads.
- This changelog, its feed, and a version mark at the foot of every page.
- Each deploy now pins the exact game behind Play, so the site can change without changing the tomb.
- 0.0.1-c
08df1a6- New words throughout: fragments of the tomb's story instead of a feature list.
- Glyph lines that become readable as you explore the page, a bird that flies into the door, a door that paints itself blue under your cursor.
- A room that was never painted, for those who find the last star. And something for anyone who knows the old code.
- 0.0.1-b
305a9de- Repainted in the game's own hand: papyrus cards, ink outlines, the starred ceiling, a blue false door to play.
- The ages shown as a frieze, painted, inked or still in red draft. A lapis night for dark mode.
- ink.hona.dev goes up: screenshots, a short description, and the game at /play, free in the browser.