1. The agreement
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your and your child's use of When Light Fades — the game, the parent dashboard, the weekly progress emails, and every related feature we provide (together, the "Service"). The Service is operated by heta ("we", "us", "our").
By creating an account, signing in as a guest, or letting a child play, the parent or legal guardian responsible for the child agrees to these Terms on their own behalf and on behalf of the child. If you don't agree, please don't use the Service.
These Terms work alongside our Privacy Policy, which describes what personal data we collect and how we protect it. The two documents are intended to be read together.
2. Who can use the Service
When Light Fades is designed for primary-school children in Singapore — typically ages 7 to 13 — and for the parents and guardians who supervise them.
- A child under 13 may only use the Service with the verified consent of a parent or legal guardian (see section 3).
- An adult may create and use an account for themselves (for example, a teacher or older sibling helping with content). The Service is built for the primary-school curriculum; adults should expect content pitched at that level.
- The Service is offered worldwide, but the curriculum is aligned to Singapore's MOE syllabus. Some features (parent email verification, Singapore-specific pricing where applicable) assume a Singapore context.
3. Parental consent
If your child is under 13, the law in Singapore (and the spirit of the PDPA's children's-data provisions) requires that a parent or guardian consent to the collection and use of their personal data before they can use a service like ours.
We collect that consent in two layers:
- Soft consent during sign-up. When a child creates an account they enter a parent's email address. The Service begins in a restricted mode until the second layer is complete.
- Verified consent by email link. We send a one-click verification link to the parent's email. Clicking that link is your consent to (a) your child using the Service, (b) us processing the data described in the Privacy Policy, and (c) these Terms.
Until the email is verified, AI-powered features are disabled and weekly progress reports are not sent. You can withdraw consent at any time by unsubscribing from progress emails or contacting our DPO (see section 16); withdrawing consent results in the account being scheduled for deletion under section 11.
4. Accounts and security
To save progress and unlock the full game we ask the child to choose a username and password (or sign in with a parent's Google account).
- Usernames are filtered. We block obvious attempts to use offensive, identifying, or impersonating names. We may also rename or lock an account that we discover is using a name we missed.
- Passwords are private. We never see your child's password — Firebase Authentication stores it as an irreversible hash. Help your child pick a password they can remember, and please don't share it with anyone outside the household.
- One account per child, please. Multi-account farming undermines the adaptive-difficulty system that makes the curriculum work. See section 5.
- Account responsibility. The parent on the account is responsible for what happens inside it. If you suspect unauthorised access (a sibling, a classmate, a friend who watched the password go in), contact us and we'll help you reset it.
Guest play is available too, but guest progress is stored only on the device used to play and is lost when the device is reset or the browser data is cleared. We recommend creating an account for any serious play.
5. Acceptable use
We want When Light Fades to be a safe, fair learning space. While using the Service, you and your child agree not to:
- Reverse-engineer, decompile, scrape, or extract questions, sprites, audio, or any other content from the Service except for personal play.
- Use bots, scripts, automated tools, or any non-human method to play, generate questions, harvest Lumen / Gems, or accelerate progress.
- Create multiple accounts to circumvent rate limits, harvest in-game rewards, or evade a suspension on another account.
- Attempt to access another user's account, data, or progress — including a sibling's account on a shared device — without that user's permission and (for under-13s) the parent's permission.
- Attempt to identify, harass, contact, or solicit another user. There is no chat with strangers in the Service today; if any social feature is added in the future, this rule expands to cover it.
- Submit content (in a future name change, profile field, or similar) that is unlawful, threatening, harassing, sexually explicit, or otherwise inappropriate for a primary-school audience.
- Use the Service in a way that interferes with its operation — including but not limited to running denial-of-service style traffic, exploiting rate limits, or stress-testing the AI generation pipeline.
- Use the Service to violate any applicable Singapore law or any law of the jurisdiction where your child accesses it.
Cheating in a single-player learning game still hurts. When Light Fades adapts the difficulty of questions based on your child's accuracy. Any form of cheating — looking up answers, having an older sibling answer, using a bot — feeds the system bad data and makes the curriculum less effective for your child. We design with that in mind, but please don't.
6. Content in the game
Most of what you see in When Light Fades — story text, NPC dialogue, hand-authored question banks, zone art, music, sprites — is created by us or licensed for our use. Some of it is generated on demand by AI (see section 7).
We try hard to keep the content age-appropriate, factually accurate to the MOE syllabus, and free of stereotyping or other harm. If you spot something that doesn't meet that bar, please tell us at contact@whenlightfades.com — we will look at every report and act on the ones we agree with.
7. AI-generated content
The Service uses Google Vertex AI (specifically the Gemini family of models) to generate:
- Quiz questions tailored to your child's level, accuracy, and the topic they need to practise.
- Character portraits and sprites when your child uses the "regenerate hero" or "change style" features.
AI-generated content comes with important caveats you should be aware of:
- It can be wrong. Even the best language models occasionally generate factually incorrect questions, ambiguous wording, or off-syllabus content. We validate every generated question against a schema before serving it, but we cannot guarantee 100% accuracy. If a question looks wrong, please tell us (see section 16) and we'll investigate.
- It is not a substitute for a teacher. When Light Fades is supplementary practice, not a curriculum replacement. We recommend pairing it with regular school work.
- It is rate-limited. AI image generation uses real compute and is therefore capped per child per day (currently 5 portrait regenerations and 1 sprite-set regeneration per day, resetting at midnight UTC). The limits exist to keep the Service sustainable.
- It does not collect biometric data. AI portrait generation uses only the gender, class, and style the child selects — no photograph of the child is ever uploaded or analysed.
8. In-game economy
When Light Fades uses two in-game currencies:
- Lumen 🪙 — earned only by answering quiz questions correctly. Lumen buys equipment, potions, and other items that affect combat.
- Gems 💎 — earned by defeating monsters. Gems buy cosmetic items (outfits, decorations) that do not affect combat power.
Our Iron Rule: Lumen can never be bought with real money. Combat power in When Light Fades is earned by learning. We will never sell Lumen, equipment, XP boosts, level skips, quiz hints, or any other item that would let real money translate into combat strength. This is non-negotiable on our side, and it's a feature, not a limitation.
Cosmetic Gems may, in future, be available as an optional purchase. Cosmetics do not affect gameplay.
In-game currencies have no monetary value, cannot be exchanged for cash, cannot be transferred between accounts, and cannot be refunded once spent on items. If an account is terminated for any reason, any unspent in-game currency is forfeited without compensation.
9. Luminara Pass (paid subscription)
We are preparing an optional paid subscription called Luminara Pass. The Pass gives parents access to a richer weekly progress report and deeper dashboard analytics — it does not give the child any gameplay, combat, or learning-curve advantage (see the Iron Rule in section 8).
When Luminara Pass becomes available, additional terms specific to subscriptions will appear in this section, including:
- How the price is shown (including GST where applicable for Singapore residents).
- Billing cycle, auto-renewal behaviour, and how to cancel.
- Refund policy — including the statutory cooling-off period where one applies.
- Who the payment processor is and what data they handle (we use a third-party processor; we never store your card number).
Until that section is published, the Pass is not on sale and no payment can be taken from you.
10. Intellectual property
The Service, the name "When Light Fades", the heta brand, the story, the zone art, the music, the NPC writing, the question banks, and the source code that powers it are all owned by heta or licensed to us. You and your child receive a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the Service for personal, non-commercial play.
You do not receive the right to:
- Copy, reproduce, distribute, or publicly display any part of the Service outside the gameplay context (screenshots and short clips shared on social media for non-commercial purposes are fine).
- Create derivative works, fan fiction sold commercially, or competing services that use our content.
- Remove or alter any copyright, trademark, or other ownership notice in the Service.
Content your child creates inside the Service (their username, character name, choice of class, equipment loadout, gameplay record) belongs to your child. We hold it as a processor on your behalf, as described in the Privacy Policy. We use it to run the Service and to generate the parent progress reports; we don't use it to train AI models.
11. Suspension and account deletion
If you want to delete the account
A parent can request account deletion at any time from the in-game settings menu or by emailing contact@whenlightfades.com. Once requested:
- The account enters a 30-day grace period, during which the parent can change their mind and restore the account from the settings menu.
- During the grace period the child cannot sign in, but data is retained so the account can be recovered.
- After 30 days, a scheduled sweep hard-deletes the Firebase Authentication user, the profile document, all gameplay state, AI-generated assets, and the inverse parent-email index entry. Hard deletion is irreversible.
- We notify the parent's email at the start and at the end of the grace period.
If we need to suspend or terminate the account
We may suspend or terminate an account, with or without notice depending on severity, if we reasonably believe:
- The user has materially breached these Terms (especially section 5 acceptable-use violations).
- The account is being used in a way that endangers another user, our staff, or the integrity of the Service.
- We are required to do so by law, regulation, or a binding order.
- Continued operation would expose us to legal or financial risk that we cannot reasonably manage.
Where the breach is minor and fixable, we will normally contact the parent first and give a reasonable opportunity to address it. For serious safety or security issues, we may suspend immediately and contact you afterwards.
12. Disclaimers
We work hard on When Light Fades, but the Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the maximum extent allowed by law:
- We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of viruses or other harmful components.
- We do not warrant that AI-generated questions will always be factually correct or perfectly aligned to the MOE syllabus (see section 7).
- We do not warrant that gameplay progress or AI-generated assets cannot be lost in a service outage. Cloud saves are the canonical store and we work to keep them safe, but no system can promise 100% durability.
- We make no representation that the Service is appropriate or available outside Singapore. If you access the Service from elsewhere, you do so at your own risk and remain responsible for compliance with local law.
Nothing in this section limits any rights you may have under Singapore's Consumer Protection (Fair Trading) Act or other consumer-protection law that cannot be excluded.
13. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent allowed by law:
- We are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, special, exemplary, or punitive damages arising out of your use of the Service — including loss of profits, loss of data, loss of goodwill, or loss of educational opportunity.
- Our total cumulative liability to you in any 12-month period is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you actually paid us for the Service during that period, or (b) SGD 50.
Some jurisdictions don't allow these limits. Where that's the case, our liability is limited to the maximum extent permitted in that jurisdiction. Nothing in this section limits our liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or any other liability that cannot be excluded under Singapore law.
14. Governing law and disputes
These Terms are governed by the laws of Singapore. The courts of Singapore have exclusive jurisdiction to settle any dispute arising from or in connection with the Service or these Terms, except that we may bring proceedings against you in any other jurisdiction where you live, if necessary to enforce these Terms.
If you have a complaint about how we process your child's personal data, you may also approach Singapore's Personal Data Protection Commission at pdpc.gov.sg — but we'd always prefer the chance to resolve the issue directly with you first.
15. Changes to these terms
We may update these Terms as the Service evolves — for example, when we launch Luminara Pass (section 9), add a new feature, or comply with a new regulation. When we make a meaningful change we will:
- Update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page.
- Where the change materially affects a paying subscriber or restricts a previously available feature, email the parent address on the account before it takes effect.
- For changes that affect children's data specifically, coordinate the update with the Privacy Policy so the two stay in sync.
Continued use of the Service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms. If you don't accept them, the right action is to stop using the Service and (if you wish) request account deletion under section 11.