Drone Drop

Downwell is the game where you fall down a well and your boots are the gun. That one idea does more work than most games manage with a dozen: firing is how you kill things, how you dig through the floor, and — because the recoil cancels your fall — the only way to slow down. Every press is three decisions at once, and the boots only refill when you touch the ground, which means the safest thing you can do is also the thing that ends your chain.

This is that shape, one shaft and one sitting. It is an homage and it says so. Nothing is lifted — every block, every foe, every boon and every noise here was written from scratch — and it is not connected to Moppin or Devolver in any way.

The boot#

You have one button. On the ground it is a jump; in the air it is the boot, and the boot fires straight down and nowhere else.

• Firing does not push you up, it stops you falling. However fast you were going, the first pellet takes it to a gentle rise. A long drop is never a mistake you cannot take back — but every stinger spent on braking is one not spent on whatever is under you.
• The boot refills on the ground, and on a stomp. Those are the only two ways. Landing is free and ends your chain; landing on something's head is free and extends it, which is the argument the whole cabinet is built on.
• Everything breaks. Wax and spined ledges both come apart under a pellet, so there is no pocket you can fall into and not get out of. The chamber floor at the bottom of each gallery is the one exception, and it opens the moment you take a card.
• The pips under the bee are the stingers left. They are drawn down there rather than up in the status bar because that is the one number anyone reads while the ground is coming up.

The shaft is awake#

Nothing in the shaft is on a patrol it will still be running when you arrive. Everything except the hangsac is dormant until you come within a body's length or two of it, and then it picks its head up — so the route you take on the way down is the thing that decides how much of the gallery is moving.

• Every attack is telegraphed, and the telegraph is the whole fight. A grub crouches before it hops, a mite shudders before it runs at you, a wasp stops dead and shakes before it swoops, a sentry's eye brightens before it spits. Each of them is a fifth to half a second, each has a noise on it so you can hear the ones below you, and a pellet landing during a wind-up cancels it outright.
• A wasp dives at where you were, not where you are. It commits at the end of the shudder and flies a straight line. Moving beats it; standing and shooting also beats it; doing neither does not.
• Shoot the ledge, not the thing standing on it. Wax comes apart under whatever is perched on it, and a foe with nothing underfoot falls — slower than you do, which makes it a target you can drop on rather than one you have to line up.
• A pellet that does not kill still shoves. Anything with more than one hit point gets knocked back and up, and a stream of small pellets will hold a wasp off you for as long as the boot lasts.
• The thorn beetle is the exception and does not charge. It creeps, and it falls when its ledge goes, and that is all it does — because it is the one thing down there that landing on cannot answer.

The score is mostly depth#

Every metre under the hive pays 25, and it pays once — for the deepest point you reached, not for the distance you travelled, so climbing back up a shaft to sweep it is worth exactly nothing.

The rest is what you did on the way down: 12 a nectar, 30 a kill times your chain up to five, and clearing gallery N pays N × 200. A good run is not a careful one. The nectar is in the walls and the chain is in the air, and a drone that takes the middle of the shaft all the way down arrives at the chamber with nothing to spend and nothing to show for the fall.

The galleries#

A gallery is a hundred metres of shaft and then a chamber. The chamber is the only floor that does not break, and the only place the run stops moving: three cards on the table, one of them priced in nectar, and you take exactly one.

• A boon is permanent and lasts the descent. Wider comb, Hardened tip, Quick sting, Heavy recoil, Sticky feet — most of them are a number on the boot, and the numbers stack.
• A boot is a swap, not an upgrade. Burst comb throws three pellets and kicks hard enough to hold you up on its own. Swarm holds eighteen and barely kicks at all. Lance goes through four blocks and takes a third of a second between pulls. None of them is better than the stinger you started in; they are all different, which is what makes the card worth reading.
• The priced card is priced against the gallery, not against your pocket. It gets dearer as you go, so nectar you skipped in gallery one is a card you cannot afford in gallery four.

There is no ending. The fourth gallery is the first one again with more in it, and the eighth is that again. The run ends when the last honey drop goes, and where you were when it went is the score.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself the moment the last drop goes; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board ranks on score and shows the depth you reached beside it, which on this cabinet is very nearly the same number twice. The arcade page has the longer version of how the boards work, and the other cabinets.