The Longest Night
Break four ciphers before sundown
Overall Prompt Winner · June Solstice Game Jam 2026
“Simple but elegantly executed, this one's writing quality carried it across the finish line, building a whole world with very few words.” — The DEV TeamOfficial announcement
Overview
The Longest Night is my winning entry for the June Solstice Game Jam 2026 on dev.to — named an Overall Prompt Winner by the DEV team. You play the night-shift cryptanalyst at a remote listening station on June 21: four encrypted transmissions must be broken before the sun goes down, and daylight drains in real time — wrong answers and hints cost precious seconds of sun.
The ciphers rise in difficulty from a Caesar shift through Atbash and Vigenère to a rotor cipher — an Enigma nod. Between levels you talk to C, a colleague on the teletype line who never says what it is; at dawn you answer Turing's question yourself: was C human, or machine?
C runs on the Gemini API behind an origin-locked, rate-limited Cloudflare Worker proxy, with a bring-your-own-key option and a fully scripted fallback so the game is always playable. A procedural soundtrack dims in tone as daylight fades. The whole game ships as a single static HTML file on GitHub Pages — no build, no dependencies.
Highlights
- Daylight as a real-time resource — mistakes literally cost sunlight
- Four ciphers of rising difficulty: Caesar, Atbash, Vigenère, rotor
- A playable Turing Test: an AI character you must judge at dawn
- Three-tier AI design: secured proxy, bring-your-own-key, scripted fallback
Role
Solo Developer & Designer
Year
2026
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