A Day in the Life

What it's like to play

A Day in the Life is Mattia Fortunati's 2017 js13kGames entry, built to fit inside 13,312 bytes and still carries the title, house, run, death and ending screens. It draws to two stacked 999 by 999 canvases that the page scales to 99.5vmin, so the whole game sits as a single square in the middle of the screen.

Everything runs on one input. Click or tap to jump, click again in the air to double jump, click a third time to dash, and hold to glide. A jump applies 45 pixels per frame of lift that decays by 2 each frame against gravity of 15; a dash pushes the world past you at 30 pixels per frame for 200 milliseconds, and the base scroll is 8 pixels per frame. The point is what leaves: every 800 frames, roughly thirteen seconds, one ability is stripped away in random order from double jump, dash, glide, focus and coin attract, announced with a LOST card. When focus goes, the scroll doubles to 16. After the fifth loss, jumping itself is taken.

The structure has friction. Two clicks and a short house cutscene separate the title from control, there is no pause key, no viewport tag and no way to skip the intro. Sound is synthesized through TinyMusic rather than loaded from files. On a phone the 999 buffer resolves to a 373 pixel square, playable but small.

Verdict: It lasts three minutes and says so. The shrinking toolkit turns a simple jumper into a countdown, and the final stretch, with most of the toolkit gone, is the best part.

Controls

Click or tap to jump, click again in the air to double jump, a third click dashes, and holding glides.