Blinded by the Dark is a 2D horor-like platformer in the dark, originally made as a project in college. I decided to show it off (with permission from the other developers, of course) as a celebration of my first ever 'game'. I have made smaller projects in Luau  (a variant of Lua  made for ROBLOX  games) and in JavaScript , but this was the first one that I felt comfortable actually calling a game.

Blinded by the Dark is currently publicly not available.
Blinded by the Dark uses the GNU General Public License Version 3, marked by this insignia:

Blinded by the Dark was made with:
  • Language: C#  10
  • Engine/Framework: Monogame  3.8.1.303, a framework based off of XNA, which itself was a game development framework developed by Microsoft for the Xbox 360.
Blinded by the Dark is made up of:
  • ~2.1 thousand lines of code
  • ~29 man-hours of effort, of which I contributed ~12
  • 9 classes, of which, 6 are non-static

Design was thought up by:
  • Ariel / CalicoCatio
  • Jacob Cristo

I came up with the inital concept of a platformer in the dark, with stationary lamps, and Jacob added the idea that we use a flashlight instead. This was a great idea, as the player would be forced to check their surroundings, as you can't check to see if an enemy is coming up behind you unless you physically move the mouse.

Code was written up by:
  • Jacob Cristo
  • Ariel / CalicoCatio
  • George Erikson

The player controller, as well as the custom physics that comes along with it, enemy AI (and physics) as well as the flaslight were all products of Jacob's handywork. I handled the more boring tasks like the FSM  and the UI. I also made the level loader and high level frameworks for managing the UI and the game (while in the gameplay mode of the FSM). George refactored my level loader to work with square assets, as the loader was orignally made with rectangular ones in mind, and also implemented all of his artwork.

Art was drawn up by:
  • George Erikson

Since I didn't contribute to the art of Blinded by the Dark, I will not comment on it.

  • Internally, Blinded by the Dark is called Working-Title, as we didn't come up with the name until after starting development.
  • Blinded by the Dark's codebase is a clash of two different programing styles, since we had no time for pre-production; but VS 2022  still gave v0.3 a maintainability score of 81/100.
  • The flashlight is actually just a really large texture that covers most of the screen, no fancy lighting required!
  • Since the level loader was changed from rectangles to squares, the enemies no longer stop themselves from walking off the edge.
  • Blinded by the Dark features just four levels, but on my first try it still took me over 20 minutes to beat.

Post launch updates completed by:
  • Ariel / CalicoCatio

v0.3 | May 2nd, 2025 | Closed Beta Test (this is the version submited to my college)

v0.3a | May 5th, 2025
  • Made the flag glow so that the player always have a sense of direction.
  • Fixed a bug where settings wouldn't save if the player force closed the game.
  • Fixed a bug where the loading screen wouldn't show what level it is loading.