WICK

You are the last flame of a candle, dropped down a haunted well.

Your wax is your light, and your light is your life. It burns down as you

fall, and every bump against the rock or a creature burns more. Catch the

drifting embers to grow your light again, and reach the Heart of the Well,

666 metres down, before you go out.

The dark hides everything except the embers. Flare to see the path ahead,

but a flare costs wax.

**Controls**

- Arrow keys or A / D: steer

- Up: brake. Down: dive, for double points

- Space: flare

- P: pause

- Gamepads work too.

**Four zones:** the Shaft, the Roost (bats), the Mill (saw blades) and

the Gloom (eyes in the dark).

**Made for the Picocomputer 6502**, a real computer with a 65C02 at 8 MHz.

The same ROM runs on an RP6502-PICO. Under the hood:

- Real-time lighting: a 1-bit tile mask on its own plane follows the

flame, with ten pre-built radii. It costs the 6502 a few bytes a frame.

- Saw blades and eyes are mode 4 affine sprites, rotated and scaled by

the 6502 every frame.

- Parallax tiles, a procedural cave, and a PSG soundtrack.

- All the art is drawn by a Python script at build time.

Written in C with llvm-mos, for the Picocomputer 6502 Game Jam,

October 2026.