Harborlight

Harborlight plays right here on this page — no download, nothing to install.

You keep the last lamp on a murderous shore. Ships that can see your light bank trust and hold the heading you gave them; ships left dark spend it and go adrift. One narrow beam is the only tool you have — you cannot tow anyone, or hail them, or move the rocks. You can only decide, second by second, who gets to see the light. And out on the flanks, wreckers are showing false lights of their own.

The Daily Watch — one night a day, the same night for every keeper, one attempt. Same reef, same weather, same traffic, everyone starting from the identical lamp, resetting at midnight UTC. Come back tomorrow and it's a different coast.

The rest of the coast

Nine nights. A hand-authored charter in three acts, each night fought over a different reef, each one either teaching an idea or testing two. It escalates every single night rather than repeating itself.

The endless watch. Unlocked when you finish the charter. It keeps turning the screws until it beats you, and it's what the main ledger ranks.

Controls

Point with the mouse. F or H focuses the beam into a narrow, brighter cone that burns oil twice as fast and puts a wrecker's lantern out. R or E pumps a fresh charge of oil — the lamp is dark while it fills. Esc or P pauses.

On a phone, turn it landscape and touch to aim.

Difficulty and comfort

Three difficulties — Keeper, Standard and Gale — which only bend numbers you can already see on screen: how fast trust decays, how fast the lamp burns, how many hulls the board will forgive. Nothing hidden.

There's a high-contrast mode that adds shape and letter cues on top of ship colour, and screen shake respects your system's reduced-motion setting. The Daily Watch always plays at Standard, whatever your settings say, so that everyone's score means the same thing.

The leaderboard

This build plays every night the game has. What it cannot carry in a browser sandbox is an account, so it keeps no ledger.

Sign in and post a watch at https://harborlight-xi.vercel.app — same game, same nights, plus the keepers' ledger and today's Daily Watch board.

This is an early public build

The nine-night charter is complete and the Daily Watch has only just opened, so the boards are empty and waiting for somebody to be first on them.

If a night beats you in a way that felt unfair rather than hard, please say which night and what got you in the comments. Which nights people lose on is something I can measure; whether losing felt like your mistake or the game's is the part I can't. 

General feedback and recommendations on further development and game mechanics are appreciated!

How it was made

No AI-generated art or audio — every visual is drawn in code on an HTML canvas and the score is synthesised as you play, so the game ships no image or sound files at all. The code was written with substantial AI assistance: Harborlight was produced in xAI's Grok Build sandbox, with later development using Anthropic's Claude.