Last Stand is a top-down arena survival game built on Storm! Engine v2. Kite the horde, shoot what closes in, and trade retreat for time while the spawn ramp keeps climbing until you die.
- Core loop: move with WASD → aim with the mouse → click to fire → get hit → retreat to regen while the arena fills behind you
- Continuous spawn ramp: the rate climbs the whole run (
SpawnsPerSecond), enemies spawn outside the camera but inside the arena, robots join after two minutes, old men later still - Regen with a price: health climbs back after 3 untouched seconds, but every second spent waiting is a second the ramp spends spawning
- Melee-only enemies: zombie, robot and old man chase, face their target, and push apart so a crowd reads as a crowd instead of a stack
- Pooled bullets that park honestly: 128 bullets claimed from a free-list, inactive ones parked one per broadphase cell so they never pair with each other
- Weapon pickups change the gun and the look: gun, machine (fast, spread) and silencer (slow, 2 damage) swap fire rate and the survivor sprite
- Minimap and HUD after lighting: health bar, arena outline, player/enemy/pickup dots — drawn after the vignette so the UI stays bright
- Pure-function unit tests cover aim, regen, the spawn curve, wall resolution, the pool free-list and the world→minimap transform (
specs/, run withmake -f Makefile.specs test)
Clean C++17, no frameworks beyond SDL2 + the engine. Build: make && make run.
Built on Storm! Engine v2 2.3.0.
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
W / A / S / D |
Move |
| Mouse | Aim (the survivor turns to face the cursor) |
| Click | Fire |
R |
Restart after death |
Esc |
Quit |
Gamepad (Xbox-style layout): left stick moves, right stick aims, right
trigger or A fires, Start / A restarts after death, d-pad moves when the
left stick is dead.
As an example for Storm! Engine. Arena survival is the load-bearing test for four engine pieces used as designed: ContactSystem::SetPairFilter rejecting bullet-vs-bullet pairs before the manifold, the uniform-grid broadphase under sustained entity churn with id recycling, a camera-clamped view drawn through RenderSystem, and one LightingOverlay key light on the player at screen centre. Everything else — aim, regen, the spawn curve, wall resolution, the pool, the minimap transform — is pure, testable code with no engine dependency, which is what keeps a horde game honest.
No sound, no ranged enemies, no boss, no second arena. Enemies are melee-only by design, so only the player fires and the pool stays single-team. Walls are grid-snapped, never collider entities — one collider per tile catches on seams.
The engine must be installed first (sudo make -f Makefile.debian install in the engine tree). Then:
make # build
make run # run from this directory - asset paths are CWD-relativeBDD specs via igloo, one binary per area. The pure logic (aim, regen, spawn curve, walls, the bullet pool, the minimap transform) links without the renderer.
make -f Makefile.specs test # every spec
make -f Makefile.specs test-ramp # one areaDownload the SDK zip from the Storm! Engine releases, unpack it, and point SDK at the unpacked directory:
sudo apt install mingw-w64
make -f Makefile.win SDK=~/sdk/stormengine2-2.3.0-win64MinGW-w64 only. MSVC cannot link this, the import library and C++ ABI are GCC's.
The engine is portable, so this project is portable. You will need a platform Makefile and a platform main() that calls Game::Run(); see the engine's examples/.
SCAFFOLD.md documents the layout and the traps that come with it.
Totally free, do what you want, but don't blame me if it breaks. LICENSE.md is the full text.