[OC] A shared 256x256 canvas, and the machine that erases it every night

This is a screenshot of a shared canvas, taken today. The drawings on it were painted by hand, one pixel at a time, by the handful of people who stopped by this week (a few of them by me). The small warm specks scattered over the grey ruins are embers the world relights on its own. Nothing in the image is AI generated art: the AI in this game only erases.

The dark areas are not empty space. They are what the adversary has already taken. The game is a 256x256 canvas anyone can paint on from a browser with no account, and an adversary called La Maquina who spends all day putting the lights out again. She runs sieges, she declares blackouts on a quadrant, and she says what she is doing in a panel while she does it.

She does not only erase. What she takes she builds with: when she knocks a storey off a tower someone raised, she raises one of her own in the dark cell next to it, always cold, never coloured. Colour is the one thing she cannot have. Reclaim that cell and her tower comes down in a single pixel.

The flame in the middle is what everyone defends. It is protected for the first days of each era, and if she ever puts it out, the era ends and the world is reborn from its ruins. What you are looking at is era 5.

Free, no account, no ads. The link opens on the yellow figure above the flame: https://ultimaluz.com/r/lemmy-pixelart?at=124%2C88

I made it. Happy to answer anything about how the canvas or the adversary work.