MANNA

In a dark field, shields, clothing and tools fall from somewhere out of sight. The words appear: Something above us is losing things.

Dawn lights the field. Two workers arrive with almost nothing. One picks up a bin lid; the other puts on a leather vest. Gather what you can wear. Wear what you gather.

The workers leave. At dusk, the abandoned equipment breaks into small pieces and drifts away. Nothing keeps.

The title appears: MANNA — a gleaning contract. Quiet music and wind accompany the film; there is no spoken dialogue.

• Marks. A stone somebody stacked, lit, and did not come back for. Four of them — a ring of fire thrown from the stone, a ward that swallows the first five points of anything, a whetstone, and a lamp. Worth one thing once, taken by asking rather than by walking into, and cold for the rest of the run afterwards.
• Caches. The only container in the game. Coin every time, and a roll for an item, a box of hot rounds and a flask on top; what it spills belongs to whoever opened it.
• One more line on the docket. Open the caches, wake a mark, thin them out, or come out of it untouched. Optional, and paid in coin — the only reward that survives the walk home.
• Light, and fog over the world rather than only the minimap. Four zones are dark now. Your lamp, your aim, an unspent stone and every bullet in flight all throw light; ground you have not walked past is not drawn at all.
• PITCH BLACK RPG (BONUS). A real zone, a real cave, the real drop table, and no light of its own. The lamp by the door is not a bonus. It is the equipment.
• Hot rounds. The gun is never empty — a twinstick that stops firing is a twinstick that stops. This is twelve shots that hit harder, spent on the trigger pull.
• Two of everything in the Yard. In co-op the quicker of you could take the lesson along with the gun; now there is a second one lying there for the other.
• A drop that is not yours says when it will be. The lock has always come off on its own after 45 seconds. Until it was drawn, a drop you would get eventually read exactly like one you would never get at all.
• The punch stops throwing you past things. Half the forward pull, at a cost of about five pixels of reach against something running away.
• Four trades. Nothing keeps — that is the item system and the fiction both — and it leaves a hole, because a run where nothing accumulates has no shape. A trade fills it without arguing with the rule, because a trade is not a thing you are carrying. The manna rots; what you learned doing the work does not. GLEANER is best at the job, DRAYMAN carries the heavy end, KNAPPER works the gun and LAMPLIGHTER goes first into the dark. Each is worth something before a point is spent, each has five skills of three ranks, and you get one point for every zone you walk out of. Dying and going again pays nothing and unlearns nothing. The last two skills of a trade stay shut until three points are in the first three, so a trade is a direction rather than a shelf, and there are no refunds. The self-test buys three ranks of all twenty skills and fails if any of them leaves every number a player can read exactly where it was.
• Two names on the stones. A mark is a stone somebody stacked, lit, and did not come back for, and almost all of them are anonymous, which is the point. Each one now carries one of three lines rolled with the zone, and two of those lines have a name. GEGLASH said what he was going to do, loudly, for years, and then one morning went and did it. MESHIF never gathered anything; he walked people home in the dark, every night, until the night the person who needed walking home was not him. Neither is met and neither is explained.
• A pack, and a counter that buys. There was nowhere to put a thing you were not wearing, so everything a pickup displaced landed on the floor of a zone you were walking out of, and the second line of the Day Rule — what you cannot wear, sell — was a promise the stall could not keep, because there was nothing to sell out of. All of that is one hole, and it is filled by one thing: eight places under the nine on your body. A swap stows the old piece instead of dropping it; Gully buys anything in the pack at half what she asks for it; and what the pack cannot hold still goes on the floor rather than ceasing to exist. Eight is meant to be small. This game has no stash, and nine slots with nowhere to put a tenth thing is most of what the item system is — the pack is the walk to the trader, not a wardrobe.
• The gear sheet is an inventory. It was a sheet you held TAB to read, and reading was all it could ever be: a panel you have to keep a finger on is a panel you cannot click, and there was no way to take anything off at all. Nine one-way doors. It toggles now, the mouse works in it, F moves the highlighted thing between you and the pack, G puts it on the floor, and the card beside the list says what wearing it would move — so the pistol in your pack can be compared with the shotgun on your back without putting either of them down. A thing you put down on purpose has to be asked for again, rather than climbing back on when you walk over it. The choosing happens inside the simulation rather than in the drawing, because taking a gun off is a change to the world and the other machine has to see it happen; the world keeps running while the panel is open, so standing still with your pack out is a decision that can cost you.
• The opening plays. Five cards of white text open the game, and they were being drawn at nothing: the clock that fades them up and moves them along was never being wound on, so a plain launch put up a black screen and stayed on it. Every other way into the game — a mission, a demo, a capture — puts you somewhere and skips the opening, which is how it lasted this long. The self-test plays all five of them now and fails if a card never becomes readable.
• The Yard stops laying two things on one tile. In co-op it puts one of everything down per person, and two drops in the same place read as one. They take a pace either way now, and nothing lands within thirteen pixels of anything already on the floor.
• The player says it is loading. There is most of a megabyte to fetch before the first frame, and until now the whole of that wait was a black page — which is indistinguishable from a page that is never going to do anything. It counts the bytes as they arrive and goes away when the game has actually drawn, not when the file merely finished.
• The partner stands about instead of standing still. With nothing to shoot it used to walk onto whatever was on the floor — including a drop with your name on it, which it cannot pick up — and stay there. Now it leaves your loot alone and shifts its weight every few seconds like a person waiting.
• Item names are drawn over the walls. They used to sort against the scenery as though the words were standing in the room, so the name of the gun on the floor was hidden by the wall you were stood beside.
• Eleven zones fit on the zone list. The list had quietly grown past the bottom of the screen.
• Zones can be rolled at up to sixteen times the floor without anything in the code minding. Not on by default: a number is not the same as having played an act at that size.
• Co-op in the browser. HOST ONLINE gives you an invite code; send it to your partner by any chat, they pick JOIN ONLINE and paste it, and their page gives them a reply code to send back. Paste that and the two browsers connect directly, with the same rollback netcode the desktop build runs over UDP. No server of ours and no account. There is no relay either, so some strict networks will not connect, and the page says so.

Also: the uncaught register_plugin error this page's player has been putting in the browser console is gone. It came from an unused plugin concatenated onto the end of macroquad's JS bundle, which assigns to an undeclared global inside a strict-mode file.

• A tutorial that cannot be failed. THE YARD, a hand-built walled map that never rolls, with CRUMB on a folding chair by the gate. Nine beats — move, fists, pick up, the two-handed swap, the belt, boots, the gear sheet, getting a partner up, and the gate. Each one opens when he asks for it and closes when you do it. Nothing is on a timer.
• People who talk. Crumb, GULLY at the stall, THE HORN calling the field open and closed, THE FULL MAN in the room before the Warden, and the one word the Warden has. One queue, one strip above the HUD, and all of the words in one file away from the code that fires them.
• Act I, renamed off its placeholders. The Muster, the Low Field, the Gullet, the Long Dawn, the Granary — same generators, same monster counts, and a story that explains the item system rather than sitting on top of it.
• Co-op over the wire. Rollback netplay: nothing about the world is sent, only six bytes of hands a frame, and a wrong guess is taken back and replayed inside one frame. Direct UDP, no server and no matchmaking. Desktop only at the time; V3 brings it to the browser.
• Five cards, once. An intro that says what the job is, and the Day Rule on the pause screen for when you have lost the thread.

Two bugs the new self-tests found that reading the code did not: a rollback left behind snapshots of a world it had just disproved, so the next one landed somewhere that never happened; and the checksum being exchanged was for the frame just simulated, which is still a guess, so each machine accused the other of a desync every thirty frames for nothing. Both fixed. The desync detector is now tested by corrupting a world on purpose and requiring both ends to notice.

• Nine slots. Weapon, off hand, armour, head, hands, feet, throat and two knuckles, plus the belt. No stash and no inventory: what you swap out lands at your feet, and both directions have to be asked for.
• Two hands. A shotgun, a cannon and the Scyther need both, so carrying a shield is a decision about which gun you will hold. The compare panel names everything a pickup would cost before you press the key.
• Three acts. Fifteen zones and a tutorial yard, with floorplans rolled fresh from a seed every time. Act I is the field. Act II is the building the field is administered from, and the machinery on the post there says logged where the field says yours. Act III goes up to find out why nothing keeps, and finds a very old machine with almost nothing left in it.
• Everything drawn from code. No asset files and no art pipeline. Twelve palettes, seven parallax planes, and the sound synthesised at startup rather than loaded — six weapons, six voices, each of them baked several times over so the same gunshot is never played twice running.
• A partner. The bot picks its own fights, revives you, drinks on the same rules you do, and will not swap a better gun away.
• A stall. Gold is a shared purse rather than per-player loot, which stops co-op becoming a race for the coins.
• Rollback groundwork. Fixed 1/60 timestep, the RNG seeded inside the world, and snapshots with a checksum — the three things real multiplayer needs before it can be written.